Humanae Vitae - A Witness to Christ's Faithfulness
by Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted
As the 39th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae approaches, a new study by the Pew Research Center informs us that a significant sampling of Americans considers children to be eighth in importance on a list of nine “Components of Marital Success.”
According to the study, “Sharing household chores” (3rd), “Good housing” (5th) and “Shared tastes and interests” (7th) all rank higher in importance to a marriage than having children. This is a fairly radical shift. As recently as 1990, a similar study had shown that children were much higher up on the priority list for couples in America.
The missing link between marriage and children
What is happening here? It should be natural to link a successful marriage and children. The Catechism of the Catholic Church simply points out what was once obvious when it teaches (#2366), “Fecundity is a gift, an end of marriage, for conjugal love naturally tends to be fruitful. A child does not come from outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfillment.” Sadly, the average person, less and less, assumes this natural link between marriage and children.
Humanae Vitae did not explicitly predict that the logical link between marriage and children would unravel in the late 20th century. But Paul VI gave grounds for understanding this unraveling with his four remarkable predictions. In section 17, he claimed that widespread acceptance of contraception would:
1. Cause an increase in marital infidelity;
2. Result in a general lowering of morality, especially affecting the young;
3. Reduce men’s respect for women, who would be treated more commonly as objects; and
4. Risk giving power to government officials who would impose contraceptive methods on entire groups of their citizens.
Can these predictions now be disputed? Have we not seen precisely these foreshadowed disasters come to pass? Have not our young people inherited a culture immersed in the contraceptive mentality and the unnatural disconnect between sexual behavior and children? Have not China, the United Nations, and even our own government in the 1990s used contraception to manipulate nations and peoples? The argument for Humanae Vitae’s prophetic accuracy has become self-evident.
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