Humane vitae - 30 years: and now for the good news.

EDITORIAL

Being perennially out of the loop, I haven't had the pleasure of reading Candace Bushnell's eye-opening book, Sex and the City, but one woman who did, reported that it literally gave her nightmares. "The landscape" she trembled, "was so bleak."

Quite frankly, I'm not tempted to track down a copy of this sordid saga, reportedly a compilation of Bushnell's columns in the New York Observer which chronicle men and women on the sexual prowl. Only they, I gather, mistake it for love.

But while there's ample evidence at hand of the utterly devastating consequences of the so-called sexual revolution (read "bad news"), to find good news takes a little more effort. In fact, if it is to be more than just a fatuous "accentuate the positive" attitude, it is really an exercise of faith. Our existence is much more than a cosmic "good news /bad news" scenario, but one can still see a definite pattern. Good news: God created earth and heaven. Bad news: angels take a fall. Good news: God created man, male and female he created them. Bad news: they fall into original sin.

And then the indescribably good news: A redeemer who is God himself, who bridges the unbridgeable gap between creature and Creator by becoming Man.

The proclamation of Humanae vitae was undeniably good news. In this landmark encyclical on marriage, Pope Paul VI affirmed the beauty and joy of married love. This is a love which is fully human--that is, principally an act of the free will--which is total, which is a "reciprocal personal gift of self," and which is faithful and exclusive until death.

Paul VI also reaffirmed the traditional teaching of the Church which proscribes contraception: he stated that each and every marriage act must be open to the transmission of new life. He described the inseparable connection, "willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative" of the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act. The love between a man and woman, lived out in the married vocation, is by its nature life-giving; to deliberately render it infertile is to destroy the integrity of marital intimacy.

Falling in love

In a magnificent pastoral letter released this July, 1998, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, Colorado, emphasizes that the message of Humanae vitae is not a burden but a joy. It teaches the truth, and the truth will set us free.

While not denying cultural influences, Archbishop Chaput also maintains that flaws in the language used in teaching Humanae vitae has made it difficult for people to accept the encylical. The obligations of married life are indisputably many and serious and must be considered carefully, but "few couples," he writes, "understand their love in terms of academic theology.

"Rather, they fall in love. That's the vocabulary they use. It's that simple and revealing. They surrender to each other. They give themselves to each other. They fall into each other in order to fully possess, and be possessed by, each other. And rightly so. In married love, God intends that spouses should find joy and delight, hope and abundant life, in and through each other--all ordered in a way which draws husband and wife, their children, and all who know them, deeper into God's embrace."

Where could the bad news be in that? "Oh rats," one could say, "I'm called to be fully human. I have to fall in love. I have to follow a law that is reasonable and conforms to my dignity as a human person. A law which liberates and protects me. What a bummer." Mind you, Pope Paul VI does not minimize the effort required. Sacrifice, even heroic sacrifice, self-mastery, absolute need of God's grace and recourse to the Sacraments are all listed as essentials to living out our human vocation as God intends.

And what's the alternative? The rapacious horror of sex in the city, or such cultural reality as aptly described by Archbishop Chaput: "Contraceptive technology, precisely because of its impact on sexual intimacy, has subverted our understanding of the purpose of sexuality, fertility and marriage itself. It has detached them from the natural, organic identity of the human person and disrupted the ecology of human relationships. It has scrambled our vocabulary of love, just as pride scrambled the vocabulary of Babel."

Winnipeg Statement

Obviously, good news notwithstanding, we have stumbled badly: not only in articulating the Catholic view of love and life to the secular culture, but also within our own Church. In Canada we face the particular pastoral difficulties caused by the Winnipeg Statement (see July/Aug. 1998 issue).

Cardinal Gerald Emmett Carter, who as Bishop of London was one of the architects of the Statement, is aware that paragraph 26 has caused confusion, admitting so in private correspondence:

"I am not prepared to defend paragraph 26 totally. I think we might have found a more lucid way of expressing our ideas. In a sense, the phraseology was misleading and could give the impression that the bishops were saying that one was free to dissent at will from the Pope's teaching. This was certainly not our intention." (Letter to L. Sullivan, June 15, 1995; for text of #26, see C.I., July /Aug., 1998)

Perhaps, as Archbishop Chaput observed, the crisis over Humanae vitae is not a crisis of sexuality but an issue of faith, of the ultimate choice back to which, in fact, all moral questions point. "Do we really believe in God's goodness?" he asks. Do we believe, as a Church, in the faithfulness and steadfastness of her bridegroom, Jesus Christ? Do we really believe the Good News, that it is good news? That is the point of Humanae vitae, then as now. And that is why we need desperately to revisit the teaching.