Dear brothers and sisters in the Lord,
1. Thirty years ago this week, Pope Paul
VI issued his encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), which reaffirmed
the Church's constant teaching on the regulation of births. It is
certainly the most misunderstood papal intervention of this century. It
was the spark which led to three decades of doubt and dissent among many Catholics,
especially in the developed countries. With the passage of time, however,
it has also proven prophetic. It teaches the truth. My purpose in
this pastoral letter, therefore, is simple. I believe the message of
Humanae Vitae is not a burden but a joy. I believe this encyclical offers
a key to deeper, richer marriages. And so what I seek from the family of
our local Church is not just a respectful nod toward a document which critics
dismiss as irrelevant, but an active and sustained effort to study Humanae
Vitae; to teach it faithfully in our parishes; and to encourage our married
couples to live it.
I. THE WORLD SINCE 1968
2. Sooner or later, every pastor counsels
someone struggling with an addiction. Usually the problem is alcohol or
drugs. And usually the scenario is the same. The addict will
acknowledge the problem but claim to be powerless against it. Or,
alternately, the addict will deny having any problem at all, even if the
addiction is destroying his or her health and wrecking job and family. No
matter how much sense the pastor makes; no matter how true and persuasive his
arguments; and no matter how life-threatening the situation, the addict simply
cannot understand -- or cannot act on -- the counsel. The addiction, like
a thick pane of glass, divides the addict from anything or anyone that might
help.
3. One way to understand the history of
Humanae Vitae is to examine the past three decades through this metaphor of
addiction. I believe the developed world finds this encyclical so hard to
accept not because of any defect in Paul VI's reasoning, but because of the
addictions and contradictions it has inflicted upon itself, exactly as the Holy
Father warned.
4. In presenting his encyclical, Paul VI
cautioned against four main problems (HV 17) that would arise if Church
teaching on the regulation of births was ignored. First, he warned that
the widespread use of contraception would lead to "conjugal infidelity and
the general lowering of morality." Exactly this has happened.
Few would deny that the rates of abortion, divorce, family breakdown, wife and
child abuse, venereal disease and out of wedlock births have all massively
increased since the mid-1960s.
Obviously, the birth control pill has not been the only factor in this
unraveling. But it has played a major role. In fact, the cultural
revolution since 1968, driven at least in part by transformed attitudes toward
sex, would not have been possible or sustainable without easy access to
reliable contraception. In this, Paul VI was right.
5. Second, he also warned that man would
lose respect for woman and "no longer [care] for her physical and
psychological equilibrium," to the point that he would consider her
"as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected
and beloved companion." In other words, according to the Pope,
contraception might be marketed as liberating for women, but the real
"beneficiaries" of birth control pills and devices would be
men. Three decades later, exactly as Paul VI suggested, contraception has
released males -- to a historically unprecedented degree -- from responsibility
for their sexual aggression. In the process, one of the stranger ironies
of the contraception debate of the past generation has been this: Many feminists
have attacked the Catholic Church for her alleged disregard of women, but the
Church in Humanae Vitae identified and rejected sexual exploitation of women
years before that message entered the cultural mainstream. Again, Paul VI was right.
6. Third, the Holy Father also warned that
widespread use of contraception would place a "dangerous weapon . . . in
the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral
exigencies." As we have since discovered, eugenics didn't disappear
with Nazi racial theories in 1945. Population control policies are now an
accepted part of nearly every foreign aid discussion. The massive export
of contraceptives, abortion and sterilization by the developed world to
developing countries -- frequently as a prerequisite for aid dollars and often
in direct contradiction to local moral traditions -- is a thinly disguised form
of population warfare and cultural re-engineering. Again, Paul VI was
right.
7. Fourth, Pope Paul warned that
contraception would mislead human beings into thinking they had unlimited
dominion over their own bodies, relentlessly turning the human person into the
object of his or her own intrusive power. Herein lies another irony: In
fleeing into the false freedom provided by contraception and abortion, an
exaggerated feminism has actively colluded in women's dehumanization. A
man and a woman participate uniquely in the glory of God by their ability to
co-create new life with Him. At the heart of contraception, however, is
the assumption that fertility is an infection which must be attacked and
controlled, exactly as antibiotics attack bacteria. In this attitude, one
can also see the organic link between contraception and abortion. If
fertility can be misrepresented as an infection to be attacked, so too can new
life. In either case, a defining element of woman's identity -- her potential
for bearing new life -- is recast as a weakness requiring vigilant distrust and
"treatment." Woman becomes the object of the tools she relies on
to ensure her own liberation and defense, while man takes no share of the
burden. Once again, Paul VI was right.
8. From the Holy Father's final point,
much more has flowed: In vitro fertilization, cloning, genetic
manipulation and embryo experimentation are all descendants of contraceptive
technology. In fact, we have drastically and naively underestimated the
effects of technology not only on external society, but on our own interior
human identity. As author Neil Postman has observed, technological change
is not additive but ecological. A significant new technology does not
"add" something to a society; it changes everything -- just as a drop
of red dye does not remain discrete in a glass of water, but colors and changes
every single molecule of the liquid.
Contraceptive technology, precisely because of
its impact on sexual intimacy, has subverted our understanding of the purpose
of sexuality, fertility and marriage itself. It has detached them from the
natural, organic identity of the human person and disrupted the ecology of
human relationships. It has scrambled our vocabulary of love, just as
pride scrambled the vocabulary of Babel.
9. Now we deal daily with the
consequences. I am writing these thoughts during a July week when, within
days of each other, news media have informed us that nearly 14 percent of
Coloradans are or have been involved in drug or alcohol dependency; a
governor's commission has praised marriage while simultaneously recommending
steps that would subvert it in Colorado by extending parallel rights and
responsibilities to persons in "committed relationships,"
including same-sex relationships; and a young east coast couple have been
sentenced for brutally slaying their newborn baby. According to news
reports, one or both of the young unmarried parents "bashed in [the
baby's] skull while he was still alive, and then left his battered body in a dumpster
to die." These are the headlines of a culture in serious
distress. U.S. society is wracked with sexual identity and behavior
dysfunctions, family collapse and a general coarsening of attitudes toward the
sanctity of human life. It's obvious to everyone but an addict: We have a
problem.
It's killing us as a people. So what are
we going to do about it? What I want to suggest is that if Paul VI was
right about so many of the consequences deriving from contraception, it is
because he was right about contraception itself. In seeking to become
whole again as persons and as a people of faith, we need to begin by revisiting
Humanae Vitae with open hearts. Jesus said the truth would make us
free. Humanae Vitae is filled with truth. It is therefore a key to
our freedom.
II. WHAT HUMANAE VITAE REALLY SAYS
10. Perhaps one of the flaws in
communicating the message of Humanae Vitae over the last 30 years has been the
language used in teaching it. The duties and responsibilities of married
life are numerous. They're also serious. They need to be considered
carefully, and prayerfully, in advance. But few couples understand their
love in terms of academic theology. Rather, they fall in
love. That's the vocabulary they use. It's that simple and
revealing. They surrender to each other. They give themselves to
each other. They fall into each other in order to fully possess, and be
possessed by, each other. And rightly so. In married love, God intends
that spouses should find joy and delight, hope and abundant life, in and
through each other -- all ordered in a way which draws husband and wife, their
children, and all who know them, deeper into God's embrace.
11. As a result, in presenting the nature
of Christian marriage to a new generation, we need to articulate its fulfilling
satisfactions at least as well as its duties. The Catholic attitude toward
sexuality is anything but puritanical, repressive or anti-carnal. God
created the world and fashioned the human person in His own image.
Therefore the body is good. In fact, it's often been a source of great
humor for me to listen incognito as people simultaneously complain about the
alleged "bottled-up sexuality" of Catholic moral doctrine, and the
size of many good Catholic families. (From where, one might ask, do they
think the babies come?) Catholic marriage -- exactly like Jesus Himself
-- is not about scarcity but abundance. It's not about sterility, but
rather the fruitfulness which flows from unitive, procreative love.
Catholic married love always implies the possibility of new life; and
because it does, it drives out loneliness and affirms the future. And
because it affirms the future, it becomes a furnace of hope in a world prone to
despair. In effect, Catholic marriage is attractive because it is true.
It's designed for the creatures we are: persons meant for communion.
Spouses complete each other. When God joins a woman and man together in
marriage, they create with Him a new wholeness; a "belonging" which
is so real, so concrete, that a new life, a child, is its natural expression
and seal. This is what the Church means when she teaches that Catholic
married love is by its nature both unitive and procreative -- not either/or.
12. But why can't a married couple simply
choose the unitive aspect of marriage and temporarily block or even permanently
prevent its procreative nature? The answer is as simple and radical as
the Gospel itself. When spouses give themselves honestly and entirely to
each other, as the nature of married love implies and even demands, that must
include their whole selves -- and the most intimate, powerful part of each
person is his or her fertility. Contraception not only denies this
fertility and attacks procreation; in doing so, it necessarily damages unity as
well. It is the equivalent of spouses saying: "I'll give you all I
am -- except my fertility; I'll accept all you are -- except your fertility."
This withholding of self inevitably works to isolate and divide the spouses,
and unravel the holy friendship between them . . . maybe not immediately and
overtly, but deeply, and in the long run often fatally for the marriage.
13. This is why the Church is not against
"artificial" contraception. She is against all
contraception. The notion of "artificial" has nothing to do
with the issue. In fact, it tends to confuse discussion by implying that
the debate is about a mechanical intrusion into the body's organic system. It
is not. The Church has no problem with science appropriately intervening
to heal or enhance bodily health. Rather, the Church teaches that all
contraception is morally wrong; and not only wrong, but seriously wrong.
The covenant which husband and wife enter at marriage requires that all
intercourse remain open to the transmission of new life. This is what
becoming "one flesh" implies: complete self-giving, without
reservation or exception, just as Christ withheld nothing of Himself from His
bride, the Church, by dying for her on the cross. Any intentional
interference with the procreative nature of intercourse necessarily involves
spouses' withholding themselves from each other and from God, who is their
partner in sacramental love. In effect, they steal something infinitely
precious -- themselves -- from each other and from their Creator.
14. And this is why natural family
planning (NFP) differs not merely in style but in moral substance from
contraception as a means of regulating family size. NFP is not
contraception. Rather, it is a method of fertility awareness and
appreciation. It is an entirely different approach to regulating
birth. NFP does nothing to attack fertility, withhold the gift of oneself
from one's spouse, or block the procreative nature of intercourse.
The marriage covenant requires that each act of intercourse be fully an act of
self-giving, and therefore open to the possibility of new life. But when, for
good reasons, a husband and wife limit their intercourse to the wife's natural
periods of infertility during a month, they are simply observing a cycle which
God Himself created in the woman. They are not subverting it. And so they
are living within the law of God's love.
15. There are, of course, many wonderful
benefits to the practice of NFP. The wife preserves herself from
intrusive chemicals or devices and remains true to her natural cycle. The
husband shares in the planning and responsibility for NFP. Both learn a
greater degree of self-mastery and a deeper respect for each other. It's
true that NFP involves sacrifices and periodic abstinence from
intercourse. It can, at times, be a difficult road. But so can any
serious Christian life, whether ordained, consecrated, single or married.
Moreover, the experience of tens of thousands of couples has shown that, when
lived prayerfully and unselfishly, NFP deepens and enriches marriage and
results in greater intimacy -- and greater joy. In the Old Testament, God
told our first parents to be fruitful and multiply (Gn 1:28). He told us
to choose life (Dt 30:19). He sent His son, Jesus, to bring us life
abundantly (Jn 10:10) and to remind us that His yoke is light (Mt 11:30).
I suspect, therefore, that at the heart of Catholic ambivalence toward
Humanae Vitae is not a crisis of sexuality, Church authority or moral
relevance, but rather a question of faith: Do we really believe in God's
goodness? The Church speaks for her Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, and
believers naturally, eagerly listen. She shows married couples the path
to enduring love and a culture of life. Thirty years of history record
the consequences of choosing otherwise.
III. WHAT WE NEED TO DO
16. I want to express my gratitude to the
many couples who already live the message of Humanae Vitae in their married
lives. Their fidelity to the truth sanctifies their own families and our
entire community of faith. I thank in a special way those couples who
teach NFP and counsel others in responsible parenthood inspired by Church teaching.
Their work too often goes unnoticed or underappreciated -- but they are
powerful advocates for life in an age of confusion. I also want to offer
my prayers and encouragement to those couples who bear the cross of
infertility. In a society often bent on avoiding children, they carry the
burden of yearning for children but having none. No prayers go
unanswered, and all suffering given over to the Lord bears fruit in some form
of new life. I encourage them to consider adoption, and I appeal to them
to remember that a good end can never justify a wrong means. Whether to
prevent a pregnancy or achieve one, all techniques which separate the unitive
and procreative dimensions of marriage are always wrong. Procreative
techniques which turn embryos into objects and mechanically substitute for the
loving embrace of husband and wife violate human dignity and treat life as a
product. No matter how positive their intentions, these techniques
advance the dangerous tendency to reduce human life to material which can be manipulated.
17. It's never too late to turn our hearts
back toward God. We are not powerless. We can make a difference by
witnessing the truth about married love and fidelity to the culture around
us. In December last year, in a pastoral letter entitled Good News
of Great Joy, I spoke of the important vocation every Catholic has as an
evangelizer. We are all missionaries. America in the 1990s, with its
culture of disordered sexuality, broken marriages and fragmented families,
urgently needs the Gospel. As Pope John Paul II writes in his apostolic
exhortation On the Family (Familiaris Consortio), married couples and families
have a critical role in witnessing Jesus Christ to each other and to the
surrounding culture (49, 50).
18. In that light, I ask married couples
of the archdiocese to read, discuss and pray over Humanae Vitae, Familiaris
Consortio and other documents of the Church which outline Catholic teaching on
marriage and sexuality. Many married couples, unaware of the valuable
wisdom found in these materials, have deprived themselves of a beautiful source
of support for their mutual love. I especially encourage couples to
examine their own consciences regarding contraception, and I ask them to
remember that "conscience" is much more than a matter of personal
preference. It requires us to search out and understand Church teaching,
and to honestly strive to conform our hearts to it. I urge them to seek
sacramental Reconciliation for the times they may have fallen into contraception.
Disordered sexuality is the dominant addiction of American society in these
closing years of the century. It directly or indirectly impacts us
all. As a result, for many, this teaching may be a hard message to
accept. But do not lose heart. Each of us is a sinner. Each
of us is loved by God. No matter how often we fail, God will deliver us if we
repent and ask for the grace to do His will.
19. I ask my brother priests to examine
their own pastoral practices, to ensure that they faithfully and persuasively
present the Church's teaching on these issues in all their parish work. Our
people deserve the truth about human sexuality and the dignity of
marriage. To accomplish this, I ask pastors to read and implement the
Vademecum for Confessors Concerning Some Aspects of the Morality of Conjugal
Life, and to study the Church's teaching on marriage and family planning.
I urge them to appoint parish coordinators to facilitate the presentation of
Catholic teaching on married love and family planning -- especially NFP.
Contraception is a grave matter. Married couples need the good counsel of
the Church to make right decisions. Most married Catholics welcome the
guidance of their priests, and priests should never feel intimidated by
their personal commitment to celibacy, or embarrassed by the teaching of the
Church. To be embarrassed by Church teaching is to be embarrassed by
Christ's teaching. The pastoral experience and counsel of a priest are valuable on issues like contraception
precisely because he brings new perspective to a couple and speaks for the whole Church. Moreover,
the fidelity a priest shows to his own vocation strengthens married people to
live their vocation more faithfully.
20. As archbishop, I commit myself and my
offices to supporting my brother priests, deacons and their lay collaborators
in presenting the whole of the Church's teaching on married love and family
planning. I owe both the clergy of our local Church and their staffs --
especially the many dedicated parish catechists -- much gratitude for the good
work they have already accomplished in this area. It is my intention to
ensure that courses on married love and family planning are available on a
regular basis to more and more people of the archdiocese, and that our priests
and deacons receive more extensive education in the theological and pastoral
aspects of these issues. I direct, in a particular way, our Offices of
Evangelization and Catechetics; Marriage and Family Life; Catholic Schools;
Youth, Young Adult and Campus Ministries; and the Rite of Christian Initiation
for Adults to develop concrete ways to better present Church teaching on
married love to our people, and to require adequate instruction in NFP as part
of all marriage preparation programs in the archdiocese.
21. Two final points. First, the
issue of contraception is not peripheral, but central and serious in a
Catholic's walk with God. If knowingly and freely engaged in,
contraception is a grave sin, because it distorts the essence of marriage: the
self-giving love which, by its very nature, is life-giving. It breaks
apart what God created to be whole: the person-uniting meaning of sex (love)
and the life-giving meaning of sex (procreation). Quite apart from its
cost to individual marriages, contraception has also inflicted massive damage
on society at large: initially by driving a wedge between love and the
procreation of children; and then between sex (i.e., recreational sex without
permanent commitment) and love. Nonetheless -- and this is my second
point -- teaching the truth should always be done with patience and compassion,
as well as firmness. American society seems to swing peculiarly between
puritanism and license. The two generations -- my own and my teachers' --
which once led the dissent from Paul VI's encyclical in this country, are
generations still reacting against the American Catholic rigorism of the 1950s.
That rigorism, much of it a product of culture and not doctrine, has long since
been demolished. But the habit of skepticism remains. In reaching
these people, our task is to turn their distrust to where it belongs: toward
the lies the world tells about the meaning of human sexuality, and the
pathologies those lies conceal.
22. In closing, we face an opportunity
which comes only once in many decades. Thirty years ago this week, Paul
VI told the truth about married love. In doing it, he triggered a
struggle within the Church which continues to mark American Catholic life even
today. Selective dissent from Humanae Vitae soon fueled broad dissent
from Church authority and attacks on the credibility of the Church
herself. The irony is that the people who dismissed Church teaching in
the 1960s soon discovered that they had subverted their own ability to pass
anything along to their children.
The result is that the Church now must
evangelize a world of their children's children -- adolescents and young adults
raised in moral confusion, often unaware of their own moral heritage, who
hunger for meaning, community, and love with real substance. For all its
challenges, this a is tremendous new moment of possibility for the Church, and
the good news is that the Church today, as in every age, has the answers to
fill the God-shaped empty places in their hearts. My prayer is therefore
simple: May the Lord grant us the wisdom to recognize the great treasure which
resides in our teaching about married love and human sexuality, the faith, joy
and perseverance to live it in our own families -- and the
courage which Paul VI possessed to preach it anew.
+
Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
Archbishop
of Denver
July
22, 1998
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