When this is posted on the internet, there will be exactly two months until the 40th anniversary of the landmark encyclical, Humanae Vitae. There is lots of buzz in the orthodox Catholic community about this, and that may result in its being mentioned from the pulpit.
While the need for preaching about chastity—both marital and non-marital—should be evident to everyone who looks seriously at both the culture and the contemporaneous Church in the United States and the rest of the West, it is not without its difficulties.
1. The subject of marital chastity, especially natural family planning vs. contraception, is delicate. It deals with sex, birth control, fertility awareness, and the willingness or unwillingness to accept sexual self-control.
2. The congregation is mixed in every way: those in their fertile years, the young and the old; those who believe in the Church as God’s instrument of salvation, grace and truth; and those whose Catholicism has become a folk religion, a family custom without influence on their lives beyond ceremonies on special events and Sundays.
3. Too often few in the congregation have been prepared by prior education and/or preaching to listen to the Church and the Pope as its visible head with that “religious submission of mind and will” taught by Vatican II.
4. In many parishes it can be presumed that the majority of couples in their fertile years are using unnatural methods of birth control. Under 30, many women will be using the Pill. Over 30 many couples will be sterilized.
On the other hand it can also be presumed that a number of couples using unnatural methods of birth control may be doing so in good faith. Years ago a couple told me that had used a number of unnatural methods (but not the Pill out of health reasons) and did not know they were acting against the teaching of the Church. That changed only when their parish priest preached on it one Sunday. They took it to heart, changed their ways, and even became NFP teachers to help others avoid the mistakes they had made.
5. Finally, there’s the problem of credibility. Who’s going to believe Father when it comes to matters of sex and birth control? The answer is easy to say but difficult to communicate. The preaching of the Gospel is not based on the personal experience or personal holiness of the priest of deacon. It is based on the person and teaching of Christ through his Church.
Something must be done
I am fairly sure that it is a combination of factors such as these that has led to the great silence about the practical consequences of Humanae Vitae, and the temptation to remain silent must be tremendous. In the almost 40 years since Humanae Vitae, it seems as if there has been a boycott of preaching on the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. To be sure, I have heard a few negative allusions to contraception in an occasional pro-life homily, but I can’t recall a homily in the last 40 years in which the priest talked about the importance of pre-marital chastity, the permanence of marriage, and the importance of marital chastity including non-contraception, all in a well prepared presentation. For whatever reasons, the practices of American Catholics have become barely indistinguishable from that of the secular, materialist and unchaste culture in which they live.
The appeal to respecting the good faith of those living this way doesn’t meet the needs of the Church or the people. Good faith doesn’t change the abortifacient properties of the Pill and other hormonal forms of birth control and the IUD. Good faith doesn’t remove the health hazards of the Pill, the IUD, and sterilization. Good faith doesn’t prevent the deleterious social and marital consequences of unnatural birth control any more than good faith will prevent the consequences of building a house upon sand.
Each and every couple who use an unnatural form of birth control contribute to the cultural milieu in which sex is seen as having no essential relationship either to procreation or to marriage. After all, if a modicum of sexual self-control is viewed by the general public as harmful to the marriage relationship (which it is not), how can that same general public view a much greater amount of sexual self-control as beneficial or at least not harmful to unmarried persons? Recent history has demonstrated that a double standard will not stand, and the general public, Catholics included, have bought the “happiness formula” of Margaret Sanger: unlimited sex regardless of marital status, and small, planned families, all of this achieved through efficient contraception and backstop abortion. The 500 percent increase in the divorce rate from Sanger’s first push in 1913 to the present serves well to demonstrate that good faith cannot prevent the consequences of living out of step with human nature. Nature bats last, so it is extremely important to know and to live the divine truth about human love, including sexual love.
Something has to be done, and the pulpit is the primary vehicle for doing it. But how? I suggest a series of homilies based on themes of the Last Supper. More on this in next week’s blog.
Next week: Preaching Humanae Vitae, Part 2
John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality