Humanae Vitae turns 50 on Wednesday
Humanae Vitae, the controversial letter on men and women and ethics, was issued by Blessed Pope Paul VI a half-century ago on July 25, 1968, and it has much to offer our “MeToo” culture, which is inundated with so much confusion about relationships and identity and power.
We are still living in the moment of Humanae Vitae and of the challenge it presents to the world. Humanae Vitae identifies the key problem of our day, which is the myth that we can be God. Pope Paul writes at the beginning of the document, "But the most remarkable development of all is to be seen in man's stupendous progress in the domination and rational organization of the forces of nature to the point that he is endeavoring to extend this control over every aspect of his own life -- over his body, over his mind and emotions, over his social life, and even over the laws that regulate the transmission of life” (n.2).
In this document, the Pope paints a wider vision of the problem. We think everything belongs to us, but the reality is that we belong to God. "Humanae Vitae" means "Of human life." Human life came from God, belongs to God, and goes back to God. "You are not your own," St. Paul declares. "You have been bought, and at a price" (1 Cor. 6:19-20). Sex and having children are aspects of a whole cluster of realities that make up our lives and activities. We suffer from the illusion that all of these activities belong to us. “This is my life, my body, my choice. This is a reality that is bigger than all of us. It is the self-giving which starts in the Trinity and is revealed in a startling way on the Cross, and then challenges each of us in our daily interaction with others, with God, and with our own eternal destiny. It is so real and so big that it is scary. That's why so many people today are afraid of the full reality and meaning of sex. That's why Pope Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae.
After 50 years, one can so easily see what not being honest about science and sociology in the wake of the sexual revolution has wreaked on lives and about the dangers it continues to invite. It is clear that having a contraceptive technology, as Paul VI foresaw, opens a Pandora’s box in which the stronger have the advantage. This is, to repeat, a fundamental question of social justice. Imagine you live in a world where the powerful believe it would be a better place without more people like you in it. One doesn’t have to imagine if you’re, say, in Iceland, where the government has recently bragged about its near-elimination of people with Down syndrome. It is no secret that Planned Parenthood has had its roots in eugenics and that abortion rates in poorer black and Hispanic communities should be a cause for alarm and reflection, especially when questioning whether women are feeling supported in the choices they want to make about their health and their children’s lives.
Concerning the significance of the Humanae Vitae message today, consider the prophetic nature of Humanae. While it may well be one of the most reviled documents of modern times, it is also the most explanatory, which is a fantastic, ongoing irony not only in the United States but around the world. Everybody knows that the Church’s teaching on sex is flouted, mocked, and ignored — including by many Catholics. So what does that tell us, then, if not that Humanae Vitae, the most famous reiteration of that teaching, explains the depredations of today’s post-revolutionary order better than any other single source? For starters, it means that the faithful can take solace in knowing that the Catholic Church, with all its human faults, has nevertheless gotten one very big thing right. It also suggests that dissenters within the Church, and detractors outside it, should themselves abjure ideology and instead grapple with that same record of reality.
The fact that abortion and contraception are joined at the root is one of the under-stated realities of the post-revolutionary world. For all its predictive power, Humanae Vitae did not assert that mass contraception would increase abortion. Fifty years later, though, it’s become impossible to ignore the fact that these social phenomena are twinned. Widespread contraception leads to more abortion, for reasons that scholars far removed from St. Peter’s Square have been analyzing for decades now. As economists and others have shown, contraception acts as a game-changer in the sexual marketplace. The facts of history also confirm that the practices are connected. The liberalization of abortion laws around the world didn’t begin until contraceptive devices entered wider circulation in the 20th century. Roe v. Wade came after the approval of the Pill, not before, for a reason.
What do those facts tell us? In part, that yesterday’s well-intentioned efforts to draw a clear line between the two have failed. Remember that we are talking here not of individual intentions but of historical fact. The desire to have sex without babies calls forth demand for a backstop, and that backstop is abortion. Again, it isn’t theologians who’ve produced proofs to that effect, but economists and other social scientists.
Humanae Vitae is not just counter-cultural. It’s profoundly so — perhaps the most counter-cultural document of modern times. It subverts every standard that a consumerist, secular culture holds dearest: convenience, personal license, instant gratification, me-first. For that reason alone, the encyclical would seem to be of interest to anyone seeking an account of life outside those parameters. There’s hunger, notably though not only among the Millennial generation, for an authenticity that many find lacking today. The teachings embodied in the document are a radical challenge — an invitation to consider what a real alternative to the dominant culture looks like. On the wider plane, Humanae Vitae also makes a point to everyone. A lot of the revolution’s workings are inimical to our very well-being, including our flourishing as humanity. Many people know in their hearts that there’s something unnatural and industrial about life after the sexual revolution. The teaching of Humanae Vitae and related documents is in part a call to be truer to ourselves and to live in harmony with our nature as human beings.
Fifty years later, the world sees a dramatic rise in disrespect for women, in coercive population control, and there are too many people in romantic trouble and in communal and family breakup — all of which the document predicted. But, there is one reality the document did not address - the elderly end. Who knew that by 2018 one of the hottest subjects in sociology would be “loneliness studies?” And this is true not only in the United States but in Japan, Portugal, Germany, France, and other advanced nations: in short, everywhere that the Pill has been emptying cradles for five-plus decades now. That’s an affecting reality, and it’s traceable directly to the sexual revolution, which has privileged short-term pleasure over long-term happiness and companionship. The stories now emerging about what life without family looks like in old age are in a haunting class all their own, something which would probably not have become reality had the principles of the document been followed.