July 25, 1968

What a time of upheaval that was. We were in a crisis of authority on both sides of the Atlantic. I’m reading two books right now, one of them George Weigel’s new Against the Grain. Early in the introduction, he says the “abandonment of a great intellectual heritage was deeply problematic for the Church in the United States” at that “same time that ‘1968’ and its afterburn were creating a vast rupture in European intellectual and cultural life, rendering the old continent increasingly nicapable of linking its contemporary democratic commitments to its deepest cultural roots (because, according to the children of 1968, those roots were contemptible.)”

Contempt for tradition and authority was getting rampant among power brokers. In What Went Wrong With Vatican II (a book I read years ago) Dr. Ralph McInerny calls the crisis of authority “the single most important force stirring up the choppy seas through which the Barque of peter has been navigating since the close of Vatican II.”

What really blew up a torrent was “the bombshell” that hit on July 25, 1968 in the form of the encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life). In it, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed and explained the Catholic Church’s ban on artificial contraception.

Msgr. Ferdinando Lambruschini, professor of theology at the Lateran University in Rome, presented the encyclical to the press. He explained, McInerny recounts that: “Humanae Vitae maintained that artificial contraception is against God’s law because it was contrary to the nature of marriage and conjugal love. In a word, it claimed that contraception is a violation of the natural law.”

The Pope, Lambruschini said, had acted with great courage. Despite tremendous pressure, despite the possibility of open defiance, of disaffection, even of schism, he had maintained the Church’s traditional position on the nature of marriage, the position reiterated by the recent ecumenical council. The Pope had taken his stand; he could do no other.

How to summarize what happened afterward, these 40 years later? Besides McInerny’s book, there are many good pieces out there this week by journalists and commentaries by clergy and prelates.

First Things has this. Whatever one thinks of how it was written…

Paul VI issued four general prophecies in Humanae Vitae, and on about all four of them, he seems to have been right.

He said, for instance, that universal acceptance of contraception would have the social consequence of creating men who had lost all respect for women. No longer caring for “her physical and psychological equilibrium,” men will come to “the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.” In any great social movement, what’s cause and what’s effect is always hard to figure out, but, at the very least, all you have to do is sign on to the Internet to see that this much is true: Widespread access to birth control certainly didn’t bring us the end of pornography and the objectification of women’s bodies.

And then…

Paul VI predicted, as well, that the institution of marriage would have trouble surviving “the conjugal infidelity” that contraception makes easy…If many more people use contraception today than they used to—and do so certainly with less shame—then why have divorce, abortion, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and venereal disease done nothing but increase since 1968?

Furthermore…

Humanae Vitae added that the general acceptance of contraception would put a “dangerous weapon” in the hands of “those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies.” And, from forced abortions in China to involuntary sterilizations in Peru, non-democratic governments have seen that there aren’t many steps between allowing people to limit birth and forcing them to.

The logical conclusion of the idea of controlling life. So is this:

Finally, the pope warned that contraception would lead people to picture their bodies as somehow possessions, rather than as their actual being.

And that has led into the dark and dense bioethical jungle.

Speaking of which, this July 26, 2008, on ‘America’s Lifeline’, we’ll be talking to Notre Dame Professor O. Carter Snead about the burden of proof that falls on people like the family of Terri Schiavo, that the life they want to save is one worthy of a court’s approval…..when constitutionally, the burden is on the court.

That was another prediction that has come true. “If this woman is allowed to die” warned a Dutch journalist in March 2005, “there will be many more like her and euthanasia will become acceptable in America.” Both are increasingly true.