‘Humanae Vitae’ is about $2.50 at a catholic bookstore, (my catholic bookstore.com, for instance) and it is free on line through the easiest google search ever http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html
It’s 31 paragraphs long and can be read in.a shorter amount of time it takes to watch one quarter, maybe a half, of a football game or an episode of downton abbey.
It is logical and is written for the laity, so it is readable, and by anyone, it is classic logic. The references take up two pages, it’s not from Pope Paul’s daydreams. It cites scripture heavily, medical associations, St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, and theological councils.
It was published in 1968.
All of what this country is going through can be easily explained, predicted, dealt with, coped with and properly put into erspective on reading it
I can’t imagine understanding ways going on without having read it
It’s applied biblical study
On July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae re-affirmed the Catholic teaching on life, love and human sexuality. In that document, he listed the consequences of life lived outside Catholic teaching.
He predicted that:
1. Contraception would lead to conjugal infidelity.
2. Contraceptive practice would lead to a “general lowering of morality.”
3. Contraception would lead men to cease respecting woman in their totality and would cause them to treat women as “mere instruments of selfish enjoyment” rather than as cherished partners.
4. And finally, widespread acceptance of contraception by couples would lead to a massive imposition of contraception by unscrupulous governments.
In other words, Pope Paul VI predicted that contraception would evolve from “a lifestyle choice” into a weapon of mass destruction. How dreadfully his prophecy has been vindicated by population control and coercive sterilization programs, fertility reduction quotas and the promotion of abortion literally everywhere in the world.
Contraception’s destruction of the integrity of the marital act—as unitive and procreative—has dire consequences for society and for our souls. Contraception, in other words, is a rejection of God’s view of reality. It is a wedge driven into the most intimate sphere of communion known to man outside of the Holy Sacrament of the Mass. It is a degrading poison that withers life and love both in marriage and in society.
By breaking the natural and divinely ordained connection between sex and procreation, women and men—but especially men—would focus on the hedonistic possibilities of sex. People would cease seeing sex as something that was intrinsically linked to new life and to the sacrament of marriage.
Does anyone doubt that this is where we find ourselves today?