Humanae Vitae at 45: Paul VI was right (Opinion)

When one rereads Humanae Vitae today, 45 years on, it seems that Paul VI anticipated the cultural impacts of the contraceptive society with a clarity of foresight, writes George Weigel.

A few weeks ago, while pondering the upcoming sapphire anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) and the continuing controversy over the 'birth control encyclical' throughout both Church and society, I came across the following, in an essay the Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz wrote shortly before his death in 2004: 'Increasingly the institution of marriage is being replaced by simply living together, which has followed upon the sundering of the link between sex and fertility.

'This is not just a revolution in the area of moral norms; it reaches much deeper, into the very definition of man. If the drive which is innate in man as a physiological being conflicts with the optimum condition that we call a human way of life (sufficient food, good living conditions, women’s rights), and therefore has to be cheated with the help of science, then the rest of our firmly held convictions about what is natural behavior and what is unnatural fall by the wayside.'

Miłosz had a complicated relationship with the Catholic Church; he was not a man who automatically accepted ecclesiastical dicta on the basis of religious authority. Thus his insight into the cultural consequences of cheap, effective, and readily available contraception is all the more striking, in that it runs in close parallel to what Paul VI wrote in Humanae Vitae: an encyclical that was not so much rejected (pace the utterly predictable 45th-anniversary commentary) as it was unread, untaught, ill-considered — and thus unappreciated.

Contrary to the myth-making (and, in some instances, prevarication) that has characterized a lot of commentary on Humanae Vitae since its publication on July 25, 1968, Paul VI’s letter to the Church and to 'all men of good will' is, at bottom, a paean to responsible parenthood — a theme that recurs throughout the document. Humanae Vitae does not teach an ideology of procreation at all costs; quite the contrary. 

Pope Paul taught that married couples have a moral obligation to plan their families; further, he wrote, family planning is an exercise of vocational discernment that engages the mind, the heart, and the will, and each of those faculties should be informed by mutual respect and charity between spouses.

The question Paul VI tried to put on the table of global discussion was not whether family planning was morally legitimate; the question he posed was: How can fertility be regulated in a truly humanistic and life-affirming way?