A great article over at First Things by Mary Eberstadt. I'll give you a few excerpts, but really, you should read the whole thing. The premise of her argument is that Humanae Vitae was not only correct, but it was prescient, and the evidence of both its correctness and prescience is all around us, if we would but have eyes to see it. I think she is correct.
To many people, both today and when the encyclical was promulgated on July 25, 1968, the notion simply defies understanding. Consenting adults, told not to use birth control? Preposterous. Third World parents deprived access to contraception and abortion? Positively criminal. A ban on condoms when there’s a risk of contracting AIDS? Beneath contempt.“The execration of the world,” in philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe’s phrase, was what Paul VI incurred with that document—to which the years since 1968 have added plenty of just plain ridicule. Hasn’t everyone heard Monty Python’s send-up song “Every Sperm Is Sacred”? Or heard the jokes? “You no play-a the game, you no make-a the rules.” And “What do you call the rhythm method? Vatican roulette.” And “What do you call a woman who uses the rhythm method? Mommy.”
As everyone also knows, it’s not only the Church’s self-declared adversaries who go in for this sort of sport. So, too, do many American and European Catholics—specifically, the ones often called dissenting or cafeteria Catholics, and who more accurately might be dubbed the “Catholic Otherwise Faithful.” I may be Catholic, but I’m not a maniac about it, runs their unofficial subtext—meaning: I’m happy to take credit for enlightened Catholic positions on the death penalty/social justice/civil rights, but of course I don’t believe in those archaic teachings about divorce/homosexuality/and above all birth control.
One cannot pick and choose in the faith; it is preposterous to try to do so. It is analagous to saying "I will keep seven of the commandments, but not the other three." The older I get, the more I see that the faith is something to which one must be molded; it makes Christians in the same way that the Army makes soldiers -- by retraining them to do things that are, at some level, not innate. Christianity is the blueprint for the perfect man, a religion which attempts to remake one in the image of Christ. But to do so, one has to give up certain things. We are all selfish creatures, at our core fundamentally interested only in ourselves. But Christ was not that way -- he emptied himself for us with no regard to his own well-being. He was unselfish; he renounced the things of this world, and was willing to pay the price for our salvation at Calvary. Our happiness and well-being does not depend upon our selfishness; it depends upon our unselfishness. To the extent we are successful in modeling ourselves on Christ, we will be happy. Modern sexual ethics, which seems to consist of the adage "If it feels good, do it" is profoundly selfish. It refuses to recognize the value of the other, except as an object which we can use to gain pleasure for ourselves. It also refuses to recognize the role of the sacred in sex, the fact that the sexual act is a means by which new souls are created. This is a remarkable thing; we are participating in an act which has profound consequences. Sex is, at some level, sacred -- we are participating in the life of the God of life each time we have sex. Because of the profound consequences of sex, it ought to be done within the context of a life that can sustain that potential new life -- since it can create children, it ought only be done by spouses in a marriage.
This is fundamentally true, which Humnanae Vitae recognizes. It also means that our current culture is lying to us. Sex, divorced from its consequences, also becomes divorced from its sacred character -- we are taking a profound gift from God; the ability to create new life, and making a mockery of it. We are reducing a participation in the divine to something utterly selfish.
Yet we cannot utterly rid ourselves of the consequences. Contraception fails from time to time, which means that a child is produced who is unwanted. Faced with owning up to the consequences or murdering the child, our culture promotes abortion. You're pregnant? Go to the moral equivalent of Lenscrafters and have it fixed. Thus contraception, instead of facilitating human happiness, facilitates murder. Is it so difficult to recognize the author of this concept?
They say that the story of Adam and Eve arose in Jewish culture as a story to explain the origin of sex. To me, I think the Fall is innately tied in with sex, in a way we do not often consider -- our moral sense was damaged by the Fall (that there was a Fall is obvious, even if the story itself seems unlikely), not only in regard to general questions of ethics, but in particular, in questions of human sexuality. It is with regard to judgment about sex that our moral nature was most damaged, which is why the story seems to be a parable about the origin of sexuality. The profound truth of the story of the Garden is a mythic truth -- man and woman have become estranged; men and women do not value the same things, men and women view life differently. Men seek pleasure, women pay the cost in that they are left to raise the child. Modern society's answer? Then kill the child.
Do we not see the author of this? Do we not see the author of all sin in this -- the murderer from the beginning, as He is called in John 8:44?
Contraception distorts our understanding of what sex is. It is the precursor of abortion.
And so we have a microcosm of the current fate of Humanae Vitae and all it represents in the American Church—and, for that matter, in what is left of the advanced Western one, too. With each passing year, it seems safe to assume, fewer priests can be found to explain the teaching, fewer parishioners to obey it, and fewer educated people to avoid rolling their eyes at the idea that anyone in 2008 could possibly be so antiquarian as to hold any opinion about contraceptive sex—any, that is, other than its full-throttle celebration as the chief liberation of our time.And in just that apparent consensus about the ridiculousness of it all, amid all those ashes scattered over a Christian teaching stretching back two millennia, arises a fascinating and in fact exceedingly amusing modern morality tale—amusing, at least, to those who take their humor dark.
“He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh,” the Psalmist promises, specifically in a passage about enjoying vindication over one’s adversaries. If that is so, then the racket on this fortieth anniversary must be prodigious. Four decades later, not only have the document’s signature predictions been ratified in empirical force, but they have been ratified as few predictions ever are: in ways its authors could not possibly have foreseen, including by information that did not exist when the document was written, by scholars and others with no interest whatever in its teaching, and indeed even inadvertently, and in more ways than one, by many proud public adversaries of the Church.
Forty years later, there are more than enough ironies, both secular and religious, to make one swear there’s a humorist in heaven.
Read the whole thing. Then go and read Humanae Vitae, and then tell me -- what parts of it are untrue?