Beginning on July 25, 2007, Priests for Life launched a year-long 40th anniversary celebration of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, promulgated in 1968 just a few years after the Second Vatican Council. Many people around the world believed that Paul VI’s encyclical would drastically alter the teachings of the Catholic Church on contraception. Their assumption was that as Vatican II had “modernized” the Church, Paul’s encyclical would also “modernize” the Church’s teaching on contraception by allowing it. Paul’s letter, however, was unswerving in its insistence that contraception is not a good. The world was — and continues to be — astonished.
The fundamental thrust of Humanae Vitae is that if Christ came to redeem humanity, then every human being, every person, is unique and unrepeatable. With this in mind, John Paul II formulated the personalistic norm, which states that every person is worthy of dignity and love and, therefore, is never to be used as a means to an end. Indeed, John Paul argued that the opposite of love is not hatred; it is utilitarianism, in which we make the other an object to be used. Unfortunately, our world seems to run on utilitarian thought. Many of us see others simply as means to our own advancement or pleasure. Still, I have to hope that the personalistic norm remains at least as an echo within us: if I use others, though I may be aware that they may use me, does it not still seem wrong when they do? Do I not still hurt when I am abused?
Who would argue with St. Therese of Lisieux that “to love is to give everything and to give oneself”? Is marital love not agape, that love which is total and willed toward the good of the other? Are spouses not called to love each other with all their heart, mind, soul, and body, in short, with themselves? If couples routinely loved this way, if we raised our children to go out of themselves to love others, would we not see a drastic drop in the divorce rate? John Paul II called this the total gift of self, and it finds its greatest sign in the marital embrace. Indeed, John Paul asserted that the marital embrace, as the renewal of the wedding vows, is a sacrament. That means that when properly approached, sexuality is a vehicle of grace and every part of it — including the “dynamism of tension and enjoyment” — is a foreshadowing of heaven. It should come as no surprise that this incarnational sign of spousal love is under attack today. As Christopher West has said, if you want to know what is most holy, you have only to look to what is most often profaned in this world.
Until 1930, all Christians recognized the evils of contraception because it not only frustrates the design of God’s plan, but it also causes utilitarianism to grow in our hearts. How can this be? While I may say I love my wife, if I demand contraception, I am using her because I am both denying an integral part of her — her fertility — and I am not offering my full self to her. Marriage, in the utilitarian view, ceases to be a covenant, a promise between two people to work for each other’s betterment, and it becomes a contract, an agreement by which we each get what we want. Therein lies a fundamental difference. Therein lies the destruction of the personalistic norm. Ultimately, a husband’s requiring his wife to use contraception is no different from requiring her to have plastic surgery if she desires his “love.” How, then, can we call a contracepted union a symbol of our love when it actually places conditions on that love?
This is, in short, the message of Paul VI. True love places no conditions on the other because true love is an expression of our joy in the other’s very existence. True love is open to the love of God, and I know of no Christian who will tell me that God’s love is not gift, is not creation. Indeed, our very existence is the gift of God because He loves us. And so, as Scott Hahn says, when a man and woman truly love each other, that love becomes so real that nine months later, they must give it a name.
Sadly, contraception deceives the heart into thinking that it loves, which is giving, affirming, and blessing, when it truly only lusts, which is taking, objectifying, dominating. As men and women, we know the difference between these feelings, and we know, too, that we can be deceived into thinking that the momentary pleasure of a contracepted sexual act is a great expression of love, but a contracepted union can never be anything but lust because it can never be anything but a selfish use of the other for personal gain. And if it is a mere use of each other, if the pleasure is the only end or purpose of the embrace, eventually the feeling fades and emptiness remains. Momentary pleasure, when experienced merely for itself, is empty of truth if it is not directed toward something greater.
Today many people discover the “truth” of their love when it conceives within them new life. Sadly, they discover that they do not want to give of themselves at all. True love is always sacrificial. It is never easy, but then, very little that is worthwhile is. The contraceptive mentality that life is not good — it is inconvenient, especially if it interferes with my pleasures — leads to the abortion clinic. When we consider that the great majority of abortions are not medically necessary — meaning that the mother’s life is not in peril — we must admit that we are a society that is willing to kill for its lusts.
