Every trick I tried to dispel it.  I swallowed doctors’ capsules and barmen’s draughts with equal enthusiasm, and with equal despair I found them wanting.  I remained, season in and season out, trapped in the Sadness: now as the heaving storm of depression, now as the cold drizzle of disappointment.  Oh, I could be happy.  Yes, happiness came as warmth in deep winter, strange and fleeting.

When I stumbled into Christ’s love, I expected all this to change.  I expected a cure.  There was reason to be optimistic.  His grace had ended with remarkable — miraculous — swiftness a long-haunting nightmare.  The experience was incredible, and I eagerly awaited His next big move, which I matter-of-factly informed Him was to be the dismissal of the Sadness.

He greeted this demand as He greets all demands: with silence, as well He should.  I confess I was indignant.  Then wounded.  Then angry.  Then humiliated. Finally, I prayed.

How did I pray? I prayed ferociously.  Having an extremely monotonous and menial job, there was plenty of space for spiritual exertion.  One day, as I plucked rocks from the earth, as I lifted heart and mind to the Virgin, it struck me!  (I should say, He struck me, through her.)

That evening, I dashed home, reached for the Good Book. Would you believe it, the Scripture was positively alive.  I turned to Luke, to Christ’s great sermon, and — with such force I nearly fell over — the answer to my poor beggaring leapt from the page.

“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”

It had not occurred to me, stupid man that I was (am), that the curse was no curse at all, but a gift, a small but necessary splinter from the true Cross. I had always figured that my thorny crown lay somewhere in the future, to be donned as a veteran disciple of tempered faith.  More importantly, I had always figured that my thorny crown would be, well, more gory than glory.

It confounded, this notion that the terrible old saying — no cross, no crown — applied not just to Christ, but to me as well, and that further I had been climbing Calvary all along without knowing it, enduring splinters of the rough-cut wood without understanding that their pain . . . purified.
Reflecting later, Mary’s intercession did not surprise. She is, of course, Our Lady of Agony. She who was free of sin was besieged by sorrow. Surely, full-filled with the Lord, she understood that sorrow and grace are — bafflingly, horrifyingly, awesomely — intimately wed. Those for Whom He cares, those who care for Him, He disciplines. It is true that Christ liberates, that He can cure our spiritual and even our physical maladies. Yet just as often He bestows the fearsome gift of suffering, that we may know Him better. Even many pious believers can not accept this: that Christ brings not the balm of happiness, but rather the fire and sword of love.

It was Aeschylus, the wise old pagan, who wrought these towering lines, which come as from the trumpet of an angel:

Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Today, I embrace best I can (which is not well enough) the awful grace. I try to count my curse a blessing. I affirm that the Lord has, from the start, lavished His punishing love upon me; that it is here to stay, for His love never ends.

The so-called sexual revolution, now well into its 40s, has given us a lousy hangover from the past four decades of recklessness and immorality. Birth control always has been a thorny issue, and the advent of “the pill” in the early 1960s heightened the intensity of the discussion. Not only did it offer families an easier means to regulate births but it also aided the countercultural revolution by providing a means for sex on demand and seemingly did away without the consequences. Forty years after the publication of Humanae Vitae we see that there are in fact grave moral, spiritual, and physical costs to a life devoted to the cult of the body.

In his letter the Pope Paul VI reiterated traditional Church teaching, “a teaching which is based on the natural law as illuminated and enriched by Divine Revelation:”

Each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life,” the Holy Father wrote. “[It] is the most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator. It has always been a source of great joy to them, even though it sometimes entails many difficulties and hardships.

What is interesting about Humanae Vitae is that a majority of the theologians consulted on this encyclical before it was published disagreed with the pope. As a whole they could come to no clear consensus on artificial means to prevent pregnancies. They felt that the Church’s position on birth control must be categorized as “evolutionary,” like the Church’s view on intercourse itself.

Early Christian writers believed sex in marriage was justifiable only for procreative purposes. Eventually, of course, the stricture was loosed; hence the assertion by theologians that the stricture against birth control could be similarly loosed. What was the difference?

It is a development for the Church to come to the understanding that the unitive nature of the sexual act along with its procreative nature, as the Catechism says, “achieves the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life.” This development is based on the recognition that God himself established the “connection… between the unitive significance and the procreative significance” and that they “are both inherent to the marriage act.” Once this recognition has been made, the conclusion that “man on his own initiative may not break” this connection follows logically (see CCC 2366). We see in that development of doctrine exactly the kind of organic wholeness of thought that John Henry Cardinal Newman identified as a feature of genuine development of doctrine.

But the claims of the moral theologians of the majority report did not meet that test of organic development; instead their claims really were a capitulation to what was happening in the world at the time: moral and social deterioration. Advances in the science of artificial birth control had man heady with his power to control the beginning of life. As Pope Paul recognized man was “playing God,” with men and women deciding when life should start — soon they would progress logically to deciding when it would end, for both the culture of death and the civilization of life have their own internal and inexorable logic. Part and parcel of the logic of birth control was abortion and though it may be harder to see the connection, euthanasia — all are “intrinsic evils.” All are born of the desire to control life.

In retrospect, what made Paul’s encyclical so brilliant is that, despite opposition, he published Humanae Vitae, not simply because it affirmed the Church’s view on the sanctity of life, but also because it was an exercise of papal authority. To have caved into the liberal mindset sweeping the world — and some blocks of the Magisterium — would have meant that the Successor to Peter was second-guessing the Divine inspiration afforded his office.

Since its publication, reflection by the faithful has even more strongly confirmed that society is rightly ordered only when we understand that God is in control, and when we understand and support the privileged vocation of married life. When a couple receives the sacrament of matrimony they vow to “accept children lovingly from God.” That doesn’t mean when they decide it’s convenient. It means trusting that when and if God deigns to bless them with children they will be ready and able — financially or otherwise. It means the loving maintenance of marital chastity. “Married love, therefore, requires of husband and wife the full awareness of their obligations in the matter of responsible parenthood,” Pope Paul wrote. In matrimony the spouses accept responsibility for the results of each and every marriage act — so that they bring to it a sense of sacred responsibility and self-sacrificial participation in the work of God that no contracepting couple can imagine.

God remains the author of life and through his servant Paul He made clear that life alone is his to give — and to take. But the forces that opposed Humanae Vitae forty years ago have not dried up and blown away, withered though they may be by now. That is why as a seminarian, I write frankly about my love for this teaching — but anonymously. God willing, I shall continue my formation and sometime in the not-too-distant future be free to stand before a congregation of God’s people and teach them the beauty of Humanae Vitae.

You faithful people of God who have wondered where the priests are who will speak these things, please know that the John Paul II priests, the Theology of the Body priests, who are also the Pope Paul VI and Humanae Vitae priests are here and increasing. Pray for me that I shall join their ranks.