Humanae Vitae

On July 29, 1968, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" ("On Human Life"), which reaffirmed the traditional teaching that artificial contraception opposed not only church law but also conflicted with reason and experience. Roman Catholic identity involves hierarchical authority, authoritative teaching, and organic continuity, including the foundations of Catholic moral reflection philosophically known as "natural law." However, Paul VI's teaching met with unprecedented public dissent from theologians and practical rejection by most married Catholics in the Western nations. The various national and regional conferences of Catholic bishops typically noted that the pope's teaching here, while authoritative, was not "infallible"—that is, required by faith alone. They taught that Catholics should follow the pope's teaching that "natural family planning" (ovulation, basal body temperature, or symptothermal methods) rather than artificial contraception was an ideal that made more transparent the complete gift of self that constituted the sacrament of marriage.

The reader of Humanae Vitae will find a rich and lyrical appreciation of the beauty of committed human love, highly influenced by the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), though the encyclical's public importance has been reduced to its ban on artificial contraception. Humanae Vitae immediately crystallized post–Vatican II debates about the interrelationships among papal and episcopal authority and the place of dissent in the church. The encyclical has also affected in complicated ways the church's post–Vatican II aspiration to contribute to the complex global dialogue about human rights, justice and poverty, and abortion.

In the Second Vatican Council the bishops abandoned the terms "primary end" (procreation) and "secondary end" (spousal unity) of marriage but left a review of the traditional teaching about contraception to a special commission that Pope Paul VI announced on June 23, 1964. In the context of media reports about the birth control pill and international conferences on population, there emerged a broad expectation that, as other dimensions of Catholic life were changing, so, too, would the magisterium's moral prohibition of any use of artificial contraception within marriage. The commission's majority finally came to agree with the conclusion that past teaching did not have to be read or interpreted in a way requiring an absolute prohibition of artificial contraception. Even its minority report, which Pope Paul VI finally adopted, conceded that moral reasoning alone could not sustain the ban. Contemporary defenders of Humanae Vitae as a litmus test of Catholic orthodoxy point to a contemporary "contraceptive mentality" of recreational sex leading to high rates of divorce, wife and child abuse, and increased abortion rates.

While the Catholic Church no longer directly impedes worldwide efforts at promoting contraception, many inside and even more outside the church contend, first, that Humanae Vitae detracts from the church's challenge to political elites who out of self-interest construe contraceptive ignorance, rather than extreme poverty, as the major cause of high fertility rates in poor nations; and second, that the encyclical blurs the church's more widely shared witness against characterizing abortion as a morally unproblematic means of birth control.

See alsoAbortion; Birth; Birth Control; Dogmatism; Encyclical; Papacy; Religious Studies; Roman Catholicism; Sexuality; Vatican; Vatican II.

Bibliography

R. B. Kaiser, The Politics of Sex and Religion. 1985.

J. R. Kelly, "Catholic Sexual Ethics Since Vatican II" in Religion and the Social Order, edited by H. Ebaugh. 1991.

J. C. Schwarz, Global Population from a Catholic Perspective. 1998.

James R. Kelly