The power of 'Humanae vitae': take another look.

Last July marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Pope Paul VI's Humanae vitae. The anniversary was marked by a flurry of correspondence which broke--should I say, interrupted?--the sullen stalemate into which many Catholics seem to have been frozen on the issue of church teaching concerning birth control. While twenty-sixth anniversaries don't usually lend themselves to commemoration, this one might provide the occasion to raise a useful question: What are we Catholics to do now? Ring out the old year, ring in the new, and be done with fruitless discussions of Humanae vitae?

As a church, we call to mind an estranged couple who carry on their individual business and fulfill their separate responsibilities without advertence to the differences which divide them. The silence is distrubed only by occasional outbursts of mutual recrimination. This is how I interpret much of the repartee in the pages of Commonweal and other journals last year.

And I suppose it's good that we speak to each other. As long as we do, the chance exists that we might agree on something. Yet the argument seems directionless, more a repetitive litany of the other's faults than a serious attempt at reconciliation. As with many old marital feuds, we act as if we have forgotten whatever it was we originally argued about. Who can remember one thing that was said about the encyclical itself during 1993?

As a veteran of all too many extended periods of marital silence, I have some suggestions to make. First, the way to resolution of this impasse lies through Humanae vitae itself. That so few have read the encyclical precludes any meaningful public discussion of its merits. Those who have studied it can redress this limitation--and encourage a wider reading of the document--by engaging in an open dialogue about the encyclical's substance.

Second, I think that the process of resolution can begin only when partners speak positively for themselves, rather than merely react to the other. What do we want from our sexual relationships? What value do we seek to develop in them? How do the principles enunciated in Humanae vitae help or hinder us in that search?

I would like to speak for myself in considering these questions. Rather than run the risk of distorting the views of Catholics who disagree with me, I will as much as possible refrain from attempting to present them from my point of view. I will leave it to others to explicate the positive value in their own position, and I hope they do so.

I should also identify the perspective I bring to the issue. My wife and I have practiced Natural Family Planning (NFP) for all fifteen years of our marriage, having taken instruction during our engagement, in part to better understand the church's view of sexuality. We are now NFP instructors ourselves.

Yet the harmony that we enjoy with the church's position does not render us immune to the sense of dissonance that many Catholics feel about the question of contraception. Our personal experience is one of profound alienation from our popular culture on anything to do with sexuality and family planning. I am also uncomfortable with the way in which Humanae vitae is often--though not always--presented and defended. Little attention is given the holistic approach to sexuality to which the encyclical calls us.

So, without presuming to have composed a comprehensive discussion of it, I will examine some salient points presented by the map of Humanae vitae, to borrow Bishop Kenneth Untener's analogy ["Humanae vitae: What Has It Done to Us?" Commonweal, June 18, 1993], and compare them with the sexual and cultural terrain I have been walking in my own marriage.

1. Humanae vitae transcends conventional wisdom regarding sexual abstinence:

"... this discipline [the observance of periodic continence], far from harming conjugal love itself, rather confers upon it a higher human value. It requires continual effort, but thanks to its beneficent influence husband and wife fully develop their personalities and are enriched with spiritual values."

In a culture that sneers at chastity, it is sometimes difficult to speak of abstinence as good. Yet it can be. We know that children often grow out of their egocentricity by coming up against the fact that they can't necessarily have what they want. We recognize the growth of maturity in children when they deal constructively and creatively with such deprivation. Conversely, we sense a lack of maturity when children go to great lengths to avoid it. The process of maturation does not end with childhood, and we don't foster it by contriving to have our way in this aspect of our lives.

On the contrary, we can avail ourselves of genital inactivity to construct a more varied sexual relationship. As we were all acutely aware before becoming sexually active with our spouses, periods of abstinence can be very sexually intense. Our conventional cultural wisdom cannot account for the sense of abandonment of self, the creative use of sexual energy in other aspects of the relationship, and the exhilaration experienced in a mutual decision to forgo sexual intercourse, when the desire to have intercourse is also mutual. If intercourse is intimate sharing, then a conscious decision to abstain under such circumstances is intercourse in all but the physical sense of the word, and is utterly sexual in its nature.

2. The encyclical reminds us that we are not God:

"... those who enjoy the gift of conjugal love while respecting the laws of the generative process show that they acknowledge themselves to be not the masters of the sources of human life, but rather the ministers of the design established by the Creator."

In the hallway of the building where our children attend religious education classes there is a poster depicting the Earth wrapped up and beribboned, with a note attached reading, "Dear Mankind: Please take care of my gift. Love, God." In its way, this message conveys a truism that is readily acknowledged when stated in an environmental context: that we are stewards, not the owners, of the Earth. It also implies a basic relationship to God in which we, for our own good, must both refer and defer to his wisdom in making our choices.

In view of the harm we have done and continue to do to our environment, little of it directly intended and much of it serving some apparently compelling reason, are we wise in trusting entirely to our own judgment the safeguarding of the Earth? I sense that in matters sexual as well as environmental, we are better off trying to live in accordance with nature, rather than trying to re-create it as we would have it.

3. Humanae vitae challenges us to evolve personally as well as technologically:

"By safeguarding both these essential aspects, the unitive and the procreative, the conjugal act preserves in its fullness the sense of true mutual love and its ordination to man's most high vocation to parenthood. We think that men of our day are particularly capable of confirming the deeply reasonable and human character of this fundamental principle."

We of Western culture stand at a defining moment in human development. Through the application of sophisticated technologies, we have liberated ourselves from many of the material and time-space constraints imposed on people of the past (and in much of the world at present). We can now choose to do things which literally were not possible until recently, and can choose not to do things which have always been considered unavoidable. Our technological proficiency enables us to rule nature as we once were ruled by it. We now have the ability to exercise true responsibility in our sexual decision making.

The expectation of genuine, long-term sexual fulfillment is a relatively recent phenomenon. It has been greatly facilitated by the fact that we have time which need not be spent in the struggle to survive. We now have the power to pursue fulfillment of certain aspects of our sexuality independently of others, or to integrate them using natural methods of birth regulation that rival artificial means in their effectiveness. The way in which we choose to use this power will say much about how we define ourselves as human and sexual beings.

Is our capacity to make sexual decisions going to evolve as have our technological capacities? Will our understanding of our sexual nature grow as has our understanding of the world's nature? Are our sexual desires and motivations going to develop and become more comprehensive, or remain physically, sensually, and emotionally self-centered? Can we Americans ever transcend our "forbidden fruit" attitude toward sex, wherein we continually try to evade someone else's prohibitions? At a time in history when we have become able to accomplish it, Humanae vitae challenges us to a responsible integration of the unitive and procreative aspects of sexuality and so to a personal evolution that will undoubtedly be as painstaking, yet at least as consequential, as our technical development.

4. Humanae vitae challenges us to practice what we preach to our children:

"... parents become capable of a deeper and more efficacious influence in the education of their offspring; children and young people grow up with a correct appreciation of human values, and enjoy a serene and harmonious development of their spiritual and sense faculties."

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the practice of NFP has been that my wife and I feel comfortable in demonstrations of affection and expressions of our sexuality without inevitably associating such displays with intercourse. That is what I hope for my children: that they be secure and comfortable in their sexuality without needing to affirm it in bed. They will, after all, be physically mature long before they are ready to enter constructively into a sexual relationship.

I have to wonder how I would preach to my children about the value of chastity were my wife and I practicing contraception. Marriage has long been held to be the only appropriate context for sexual activity, because it affords the only suitable context for the upbringing of children. When we separate the unitive and procreative aspects of sexuality, when we engage in sex only for its unitive (or perhaps its sensual) value, what possible grounds have we for insisting to our children that sex be reserved for marriage? Why shouldn't they experience the same intimacy (or sensual pleasure) that we do, if this is what sex is all about?

In short, I would be extremely uncomfortable explaining to my children why they should wait for years to make love, when I can't wait two weeks. Governing my own sexual desire allows me to expect them to do likewise.

5. The encyclical confronts the sixty-four-dollar question, and calls us to seek the ideal in practice:

"... the church, calling men back to the observance of the norms of the natural law... teaches that each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.

"Similarly excluded [as a lawful means of birth regulation] is every action that, either in anticipation of the conjugal act or in its accomplishment or in the development of its natural consequences, would have as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible."

This exclusion is often denounced as a harsh, intractable prohibition. I don't see any alternative but to agree, if we premise that the church should validate the attitude that conception is a complication of sex, rather than an immanent reality. It's that very attitude, however, that Humanae vitae sees as ultimately dehumanizing. Given the document's statement of the goods to be pursued in integrating the whole person in one's sexuality, and the evils following from the use of contraception, what other conclusion can be drawn?

Why is contraception to be evaluated differently from other moral shortcomings? I have to think there are exceptions to this enjoyment just as there are exceptions to, say, the Sunday obligation, or the Fifth Commandment. Yet somehow, when it comes to contraception, we seek to make the exception the rule, as if to justify a priori our failure to attain an ideal which we have deemed impossibly (or inconveniently) high. We seem to forget that the Commandments do not contain the words "if," "unless," or "try to."

It also seems to my layman's sense that most exceptions have to do with the imposition of circumstances beyond one's foresight or control. That isn't the case with contraception. We all know where babies come from. No one is forced to marry and make love. The difficulty involved in what the church defines as legitimate methods of birth regulation is something we ought to consider as we freely prepare to marry.

6. Pope Paul VI was prescient about the consequences of contraception:

"Let [responsible persons] consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened to conjugal infidelity and to a general lowering of morality.... It can also be feared that the man who becomes used to contraceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman, and no longer caring about her physical and psychological equilibrium, come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion."

Enough said? We could perhaps contend that the frightening disrespect and hostility evidenced toward females in our time merely coincides with, and is not an effect of, the widespread use of contraception. That may be true, but I won't believe it until I see American society ridding itself of the one while maintaining the other. In the meantime, I think we are vainly trying to cling to both ends of a contradiction.

Humanae vitae calls us to a love that "is total...in which husband and wife generously share everything, without undue reservations or selfish calculations." In contrast, use of contraception implies that we have justified for ourselves the sundering of nature, the selection of certain aspects for our enjoyment, and the synthetic suppression or elimination of others as undesirable. This is ironic in a society which purports to be committed to sexual equality and dignity. We undercut our alleged commitment with our actions. On the one hand, we collaborate in surgically, hormonally, and chemically altering each other's natures; on the other hand, we denounce it when someone is denied the opportunity to fully develop his or her nature physically, professionally, educationally, or economically. Perhaps these two responses are variations on the same theme. They are behaviors by which we seek to manipulate and control the terms of our involvement with other persons. It is from this pattern of limiting the scope of our most intimate relationships that Humanae vitae calls us to free ourselves.

7. Humanae vitae asks that we keep our eyes on the real prize:

"One must look beyond partial perspectives... and make one's consideration in the light of an integral vision of man and of his vocation, not only his natural and earthly vocation, but also his supernatural and eternal one.... By means of the reciprocal personal gift which is proper and exclusive to them, husband and wife tend toward that communion of their beings whereby they help each other toward personal perfection in order to collaborate with God in the begetting and rearing of new lives."

Much of what is said in the debate over this encyclical seems to constitute a clash of "partial perspectives." We must bear in mind the end which is placed in front of us: the "integral vision of man and his vocation," the mutual commitment to "personal perfection" and collaboration with God. We then evaluate our actions in light of whether they further this end: "By this particular act, do I work for, or against, my true vocation?...In doing thus and such, am I conscious of working in collaboration with God, or am I disregarding or opposing him?" Clearly I think that the practice of contraception, when all its ramifications are considered, leads us away from the perfection, communion, and collaboration of which Pope Paul speaks.

Yet it doesn't follow that the practice of NFP inevitably leads us toward these ends. Humanae vitae acknowledges the permissibility of "recourse to the infertile times," and so in utilizing NFP a couple at least fulfills certain minimum requirements. Still, the encyclical asks of us much more than that. The question is often put, "What is the difference between NFP and artificial contraception, since they both are used to avoid pregnancy?" I think it is possible for the difference to amount to no more than that which exists between the letter and the spirit of the law, and indeed that is not saying much.

Part of the problem is that, while we are called to live in eternity, we can only heed the call and pursue the vocation in the here and now. The actions and practices through which we activate our vocation are limited by the fact that it is limited, imperfect human beings who practice them. An example might be almsgiving. The practice of almsgiving disposes us to charity. But the practice is not synonymous with the virtue, nor can it force that virtue on us. We probably all know of people who seem to give only out of a sense of obligation or guilt, or whose generosity is reduced to writing checks, and maybe disproportionately small checks at that. But if almsgiving does not serve to perfect the giver or to further the vocation, the error lies not in the practice itself, but in the way it is undertaken. If donations haven't improved one's spiritual poverty, perhaps it's because of a nonreceptivity to that collaboration with God and communion with others which Humanae vitae holds out as the ideal for us to seek.

So it is with NFP. Natural Family Planning is a practice. It disposes us to marital chastity--whether or not we choose to actively cultivate that virtue--but by itself cannot effect it. For my wife and me, the practice of NFP is one expression of our commitment to love and accept each other as fully and unreservedly as we can, and a means of extending our sexual communion beyond the genital. But there have been times when this was not the case, when we defined our sexuality primarily by its genital expression, which in turn would occur only within certain predictable parameters. Our fertility did not find very dynamic expression, sexual or otherwise, at those times. We were adhering to the letter of the law. But we were hardly fulfilling our potential as construed by Humanae vitae.

Humanae vitae is not primarily about Natural Family Planning. In trying to live out the encyclical's standards, spouses must focus their sights beyond the practice of one particular mode of birth regulation, and continually ask themselves how in that practice they are intentionally fostering the "communion of their beings...in order to collaborate with God."

8. Pope Paul VI apprehended the connection between fertility and the power of sexuality:

"Those who make use of this divine gift while destroying, even if only partially, its significance and finality, act contrary to the nature of both man and woman and of their most intimate relationship...."

Is there any doubt that the power of sexuality is inherently connected to the power to conceive? To the fact that sexual intercourse implies a union not just for one discrete moment, but forever, through our capacity to co-create another human being? Would we be held in such thrall by an act that did not contain within itself the same permanent ramifications?

I am afraid that we run the risk of trivializing sexuality when we first willfully isolate it from our procreative capacity, and then disable that capacity. In fact, we seem to have succeeded in doing so: witness our culture's banal and superficial preoccupation with sex as reflected in the media, and the rising number of sexual partners with whom Americans have dallied as contraceptives have become more effective and available over the course of the last three decades.

It is an ever-growing sense of the deeply pervasive power of sexuality that convinces me of the basic truth of Humanae vitae. We are called to be in touch with that power at all times. I experience it in the unselfconscious beauty and desirability of my wife at her fertile time, the cyclical engagement in mutual courtship and consummation, and, yes, the frustration over sometimes long periods of abstinence and the apprehension felt when contemplating an unintended pregnancy. This life is, as Paul VI said, sometimes difficult but always possible, and it is never, ever, boring.

Isn't our ideal of sexuality something like that: something that has the power to transport us beyond ourselves? Something continually dynamic, through which we change and are changed, and not altogether under our control? My wife and I have found that our submission to the rhythm of fertility has made our way of birth regulation itself a medium of sexual interaction between us. It is a means of extending, deepening, and intensifying our relationship. Among the supposed benefits of contraception, this possibility seems conspicuously absent. Contracepting couples can seek to develop their sexuality aside from their particular contraceptive practice, but I don't see how they can do so within it. I perceive the contraceptive ethic, if one can be said to exist, as essentially negative. It seeks to justify a behavior which we will for ourselves. It does not define a value which encourages and allows us to transcend ourselves.

Humanae vitae calls us to transcendence, not by repressing or avoiding sexuality, but by entering more fully into it. Humanae vitae specifies how we can sanctify our sexual conduct within the context of our basic Christian call to sanctify the world. Ultimately, we must recognize that this call originates with God, and not with any individual pope. The call of God is often jarring, and the implications of following it sometimes seem incredible when considered through the eyes of the world.

Through the promulgation of Humanae vitae, the church challenges Catholics to grow simultaneously in both "sense and spirit," at some cost to our temporal comfort. That most Catholics don't agree with or abide by this summons is held to be evidence that the church has overstepped its authority or spoken erroneously. Yet I see it as altogether fitting and perhaps inevitable, that sexuality be the arena in which church and culture confront each other so explicitly.

In what other aspect of our lives are we so demanding of our autonomy and less open to another's questioning of our behavior? Given the prevailing level of sexual morality and its far-reaching consequences, it is not only appropriate, but essential, that the church address the issue directly. Would that she could do it without shaking us up so, but sometimes we need it. If that isn't what a church is for, then I don't know why we have one. If only we can bring ourselves to perceive the liberation that can be effected by our acceptance of this challenge.