Roberto Latorre - A Catechesis on Contraception

In1968, Pope Paul VI upheld the teaching, for many centuries maintained by allChristians, that contraceptive practice was a grave moral evil. He issued the encyclical letter HumanaeVitae (HV) (On the Transmission of Human Life) aware of the seriousopposition it would meet up with in a highly secularized world. Some other Christian communities had alreadybent over secularizing pressures and had publicly announced its change of moralposition. Many Catholics, including a group of experts that the Pope hadconsulted, recommended and expected that the Pope would follow suit. But he did not.

As theVicar of Christ on earth, with the responsibility incumbent on the successor ofSt. Peter, Pope Paul VI, as other Popes had done in the past on similar moraland doctrinal issues, had to uphold the moral truth that each and everymarriage act must be open to life.(HV, 11) At that time, Pope Paul VI seemed like a lonevoice crying in the wilderness (Mc 1:3) in the climate of sensuality andhedonism that was being spread by the so-called sexual revolution.

Indeed,the years that have passed since Humanae Vitae have coincided with thegeneral breakdown in morals associated with the sexual revolution. This revolution has made steady progress, fromthe free love practiced by isolated hippie communities in the nineteen sixties,to the ongoing gay movement seeking to normalize homosexual"marriages" and to the different social engineering attempts tolegislate sexual promiscuity. At present, the sexual revolution is taking atoll on human society in the form of increase in pornography, promiscuity,marital infidelity, divorce, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, andunhappiness in general.

We arewitnessing a progressive reversal of values in the fields of human sexualityand family life. The true experience of love is confused with lust. If a childis born out of wedlock, he is called a "love child"; and the childwho is a product of the conjugal love of spouses, in contraceptive mentalityfashion, is considered a "mistake." Sex is treated as a plaything, anobject of recreation, engaged in for pure pleasure. It is something casual;commitments destroy its fun.

PopePaul VI somehow foresaw this revolution when he warned us of the negativeeffects of the widespread use of contraception. He saw that contraception wouldbe the cutting edge of the "general lowering of morality." (HV, 14)In retrospect, we can now see that the distortion of sexual values is a directconsequence of the distortion of conjugal love linked to contraceptivepractice. Paul VI even foresaw how some governments (public Authorities whotake no heed of moral exigencies) can abuse their power and tyrannicallydictate the behavior of citizens because of contraception. (See HV, 17)

St. Paul 's description of the moralsituation of pagan antiquity in Rom 3:24-32, is reminiscent of our owntimes. Yet the early Christians, likeleaven in the mass of society, were able to transform society through the powerof the doctrine of Christ and the Church, which they lived and practiced withconsistency. Causes for optimism are thepositive response among Catholics to the clarifications and teachings on lifeand sexual morality from the successors of Paul VI, most notably from theprolific writings and speeches of the late Pope John Paul II on the theologyof the body. Furthermore, confusionamong some Catholics, though still present, has been amply addressed by suchauthoritative sources as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), theApostolic Exhortation about the family Familiaris Consortio (FC) and theencyclical Evangelium Vitae.

We hopethat this brief exposition of the Church's teaching on contraception can be ofhelp to Catholics who want to put their faith into practice and help in theChristian transformation of our society. The contraception issue hasramifications in many other fields as well. We have limited this exposition tothe strictly religious and moral aspects of the issue, with the conviction thatthe Author of the moral law is also the Creator of the universe and the Lord ofsociety, and He cannot contradict Himself.