A Pope's Prophetic Warning

This summer marks the fortieth anniversary of Pope Paul VI's prophetic encyclical, Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), in which he describes what the future would look like if the world were to accept the contraceptive lifestyle. It is the Church teaching around which all the Church's enemies (with the exception of Muslims), including many dissident clergy and lay Catholics, are most united.

Following a reflection on what the natural law teaches about the nature of man and the purpose of the marriage act, the 1968 document reflects upon the consequences of artificial birth control -- including a loss of respect for women, a breakdown of the family, greater infidelity, sexual license among the young, and the threat, since realized in China and other nations, that governments would impose family planning on their people.

The document, a mere dozen pages, even predicted the worldwide, massive ridicule and opposition to the teaching. Pope Paul writes:

"To tell the truth, the Church is not surprised to be made, like her divine founder, a 'sign of contradiction,' yet she does not because of this cease to proclaim with humble firmness the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical. Of such laws the Church was not the author, nor consequently can she be their arbiter; she is only their depository and their interpreter, without ever being able to declare licit that which is not so by reason of its intimate and unchangeable opposition to the true good of man."

One consequence of the contraceptive lifestyle that the Pope does not directly discuss is its profound efffect on western demographics. Mark Steyn has written: "The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it."

According to Steyn:

"Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives, is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West."

Pope Paul was not the first to condemn artificial contraception. In an article published in First Things, Mary Eberstadt writes:

... the Lambeth Conference of 1908 affirmed its opposition to artificial contraception in words harsher than anything appearing in Humanae Vitae: “demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare.” In another historical twist that must have someone laughing somewhere, pronouncements of the founding fathers of Protestantism make the Catholic traditionalists of 1968 look positively diffident. Martin Luther in a commentary on Genesis declared contraception to be worse than incest or adultery. John Calvin called it an “unforgivable crime.” This unanimity was not abandoned until the year 1930, when the Anglicans voted to allow married couples to use birth control in extreme cases, and one denomination after another over the years came to follow suit.

I have often wondered if there is a simple, understandable way to convey the theme to which this blog is dedicated. It has been my intention to focus on Christian civilization, the Truth upon which it is founded, the beliefs that under-gird it, the freedoms that flow from it, the beauty and fullness of its life, and all that threatens it. Clearly, the greatest threat to most nations of the West is the collapse of their own populations, the vacuum that has been created, and the advance of Muslim hordes as they fill that vacuum and destroy what has been built over two millenia.

At the very root of the impending calamity is the rejection of Pope Paul's reiteration of sublime truths about the dignity of man, the sanctity of marriage and conjugal love, respect for nature, and the necessity of faithfulness to God's design, if "the true good of man" is to be realized.

It's not too late to heed his warning.