New Catholic at Rorate caeli weighs in on the positive legacy of soon-to-be Saint Paul VI, a much-conflicted pope, in reflecting on the significance of his most famous encyclical.
Humanæ Vitæ at 50 - I
"It is never lawful to do evil
that good may come of it"
Salomon de Bray (1597-1664) was a Dutch painter. He was also an architect, urban planner, poet, and designer of silverware. He was, above all, a Catholic father of ten children, three of whom also became successful painters (Jan, Joseph, and Dirck).
The tenderness with which Salomon pictures (see our special masthead) his nephew's twin babies, Clara and Aelbert de Bray, is remarkable: How much love De Bray must have dedicated to his large family in the city of Haarlem, amidst the generally harsh conditions imposed upon Catholics in the newly-independent United Provinces!
A strong Catholic identity, a love for life and family in a hostile environment: As most Catholics of most ages, De Brey probably understood intimately what Popes of the twentieth century would have to write explicitly - that
"it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it" (Humanæ Vitæ, 14).
Pope Paul VI is described by most historians as a kind of tragic figure, trying to control the whirlwind of events surrounding him, but unable to do much.
It is probably because of this, because it seemed that Montini often bent to the opinions of the world, because it seemed that he frequently accepted the fabricated notions and texts which committees of false sages delivered to him (with very small modifications), that the moments in which he did not bend shine so clearly with the simple brightness of Peter.
The Nota Prævia to Lumen Gentium, the vigorous defense of the traditional Eucharistic doctrines (in Mysterium Fidei) and of the teachings on Indulgences (in Indulgentiarum Doctrina), the Credo of the People of God are pillars which remain standing in a crumbling edifice, signs of supernatural protection.
Amidst the moral collapse of the 1960s, and against the commission set up by his predecessor to re-examine the matter, Peter spoke though Paul in
Humanæ Vitæ:"It is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it."
It is thus never lawful "to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general."
NUMQUAM - never. Therefore, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.
Fr H riffs on Paul VI and HV in a minor key:
Queries
July 21, 2018
There is a committee in Rome, we are told, researching the genesis of ... the events and processes leading up to ... Humanae Vitae. I wonder what is going on. If anybody actually knows I would be glad to be informed. But I suspect that we all have little to go on except for inferences to be drawn from the composition of the committee.
So ... a hypothesis ...
The committee's task is to construct a claim like this:
"HV says ... apparently and on the surface ... X. But if you examine HV carefully in the context of the evolution of its text, it becomes obvious that HV really means non-X (or not-quite-X or not-always-X)." [That really is a superb precis of Bergoglian pastoral 'logic', otherwise known as Jesuitic casuistry!]
Other hypotheses?
Less hypothetically: Blessed Paul VI is going to be canonised, unless the Eschaton prevents it.
Rather than letting the organisers make headway out of it as a celebration for the Bergoglian view of 'the Council', would it not be rather jolly if something could be done to present the positive aspects of that pontificate? [Which is exactly what New Catholic in Rorate caeli has done in a nutshell!]
Seminars on the biblical typology of the concept of the Smoke of Satan ... that sort of thing, perhaps? On the magisterial teaching of Paul VI on the Latin Language?
[Ah, Fr H, New Catholic actually singled out Papa Montini's doctrinal high points!]
Those who are in heaven and partaking for eternity of the Beatific Vision would be beyond all human vanity and other vices that none of them care at all whether they are venerated as saints on the earth below. It matters to us who seek their intercession, but up there, I imagine the popes who reached heaven having a jolly good time bantering about who among them were declared saints and who were not - and why!
In an anthropomorphic Paradise, I would like to imagine Paul VI sheepishly apologizing to his mentor Pius XII for the random human vagaries that decide who is canonized, why and when, because until not too many years ago, it had been unthinkable to anyone in the Church that he could leapfrog his predecessor - who, except to Catholic-hating Jews, was thought a living saint in his lifetime - in the 'race to the honors of the altar' that the canonization process has become. And I would like to also imagine him apologizing to Pius V and Pius X - and all the saints who knew only the traditional Mass - for what he did to the Mass of the Ages. And maybe, John Paul II has been apologizing to God and St. Peter for making people like McCarrick and Bergoglio cardinals!
Meanwhile, Roberto de Mattei issues an important caveat that is contrary to Sandro Magister's seemingly total approval of the book by Mons. Marengo on the birth of HV, as a positive contribution that counter-acts the Bergoglio Vatican's apparent intention to modify HV and justify artificial contraception for pastoral reasons when a person 'discerns' it is right and good for her (just as it has justified the adulterous life of remarried Catholic divorcees and the choice of many contemporary couples to simply live together unmarried, and may soon be justifying same-sex unions).
The birth of Humanae Vitae
as documented in the Vatican Archives
by Roberto de Mattei
Translated for Rorate caeli by Francesca Romana from
July 18, 2018
At the beginning of 2017, Pope Francis set up “a study committee” to prepare for the 50th anniversary of the encyclical Humanae Vitae (July 25th 2018). The existence of this “secret” committee was brought to light some months later by two Catholic sites - Stilum Curiae and Corrispondenza Romana.
The committee coordinated by Monsignor Gilfedo Marengo, had the task of finding the documentation in the Vatican Archives related to the preparatory work for Humanae Vitae, during and after the Second Vatican Council. The first fruit of this work is the volume by Monsignor Marengo,
The Birth of an Encyclical. Humanae Vitae in the light of the Vatican Archives, published by the Libreria Editice Vaticana. Other publications will perhaps follow and other documents will presumably be submitted, privately, to Pope Francis.
From a historiographical point of view, Monsignor Marengo’s book is disappointing. On the genesis and consequences of the encyclical Humanae Vitae, inserted into the context of the contraceptive revolution, the best book is still, in my view, Renzo Puccetti’s,
The Poisons of Contraception (Edizioni Studio Domenicano, Bologna 2013).
Monsignor Marengo’s study, nevertheless, contains some new things. The most relevant is the publication of the entire text of an encyclical
De nascendi prolis (On the birth of a child) (pp. 215-238), which, after five years of agonizing work, Paul VI approved on May 9th 1968, fixing the date of its promulgation for the Solemnity of the Ascension (May 23rd).
The encyclical that Monsignor Marego defines as “a rigorous pronunciation of moral doctrine” (p.194), was already printed in Latin when there was an unexpected turn of events. The two French translators, Monsignor Jacques Martin and Monsignor Paul Poupard, expressed strong reservations about the document’s too “traditional” approach.
Paul VI, upset by the criticisms, worked personally on numerous modifications of the text, changing, most of all, its pastoral tone, which became more “open” to the cultural and social solicitations of the modern world. Two months later,
De nascendi prolis, had been transformed into
Humanae Vitae.
The concern of the Pope was that this encyclical “would be received in the least problematic way possible” (p. 121),
thanks not only to the reformulations of its language, but also to the lowering of its dogmatic nature (p.103).
Monsignor Marengo recalls that Paul VI did not accept the invitation sent to him
[after the huge controversy in the Catholic world caused by the publication of HV] by the then Archbishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyla,
to issue “a pastoral instruction, reaffirming in no uncertain terms, the authority of the doctrine of Humanae Vitae, in face of the widespread movement of contestation to which it was subjected".
The objective, or at least the result of Monsignor Marengo’s book, seems to be that of
relativizing Paul VI’s encyclical, which appears as if it were a phase in a complex historical journey and which has not been concluded by the publication of t he encyclical nor with the discussions that have followed it. One cannot “claim to have said the ‘last’ word and close, if it were ever needed, decades of debate” (p.11).
[That seems proof enough about the intentions behind the study committee which Marengo headed, and that despite the weight of the documentation he cites contra, Marengo shares those intentions! I am surprised Magister did not catch this.]
On the basis of Monsignor Marengo’s historical reconstruction, the new theologians, who refer to Amoris laetititia, will say that the teaching of Humanae Vitae has not been changed, but must be understood as a whole, without reducing it to the condemnation of contraception, which is only one aspect.
In addition, they will say,
pastoral care ought to be the criterion to interpret a document that refers to the doctrine of the Church on birth-control, but also to the need to apply it according to wise pastoral discernment. In the final analysis, Marengo's book is about reading Humanae Vitae in the light of Amoris laetitia. [Is De Mattei just hypercritical, or did Magister simply miss all that in his reading of Marengo's book?]
Humanae Vitae was an encyclical that caused great anguish (this is how Paul VI himself defined it) and was certainly courageous. The essence of the ’68 revolution, was, in fact, to reject all authority and all laws, in the name of liberating instincts and desires.
Humanae Vitae, by reiterating the condemnation of abortion and contraception, was a reminder that not everything could be permitted, that there is a natural law and a supreme authority, the Church, which has the right and the duty to guard it.
Humanae Vitae was not a “prophetic” encyclical. It would have been, if it had dared to oppose the false neo-Malthusian prophets with the divine words “Increase and multiply”
(Genesis 1, 28; 9,27). It did not do so, as Paul VI, in fear of coming into conflict with the world, accepted the myth of the demographic explosion, launched in 1968 by Paul Erlich’s book,
The Population Bomb.
In 2017, this same Erlich, was invited by Monsignor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo to repeat his theories about overpopulation at the congress organized by the Pontifical Academy for Sciences on the theme:
Biological Extinction: How To Save The Natural World On Which We Depend (February 27-March 1, 2017). Erlich had described the catastrophic scenarios awaiting the earth's inhabitants if they fail to take measures to contain population growth.
What the encyclical correctly condemns is artificial contraception, but without rejecting the new “dogma” of a necessary reduction in births.
Humanae Vitae thus replaces Divine Providence, which until then, had regulated the births in Christian families, with the human calculation of “responsible parenthood”.
The Magisterium of the Church, affirms however, in a dogmatic manner, that contraception needs to be condemned not only because its per se an unnatural method, but also because it is in direct opposition to the primary end of marriage, which is procreation. If the procreative purpose is not declared to prevail over the unitive, it will be possible to sustain the thesis that contraception may be licit when it jeopardizes the
intima communitas of the spouses.
John Paul II affirmed vigorously the teaching of Hunanae Vitae, but the conception of conjugal love during his pontificate is at the origins of many ambiguities. With regard to this, I would refer to the accurate analysis made by Don Pietro Leone, an excellent contemporary theologian, in his book
The Family Under Attack: A Philosophical and Theological Defense of Human Society (Loreto Publications, 2015) of which Maike and Robert Hickson wrote a fine review in Rorate Caeli.
Over the last fifty years, due also to a misleading conception of the purposes of marriage, pontifical teachings have not been applied, and among Catholics the practice of contraception and abortion, cohabitations outside of marriage and homosexuality have spread widely. Amoris laetitia represents one outcome of an itinerary which has been a long time in the making.
Repeating almost verbatim the words pronounced on October 29th 1964 by Cardinal Leo-Joseph Suenens in the Council Hall:
“Perhaps we have accentuated the words of the Scriptures: ‘increase and multiply’ to the point of neglecting the other Divine word: ‘and the two will be one flesh’, Pope Francis affirmed in Amoris laetitia
“Then too, we often present marriage in such a way that its unitive meaning, its call to grow in love and its ideal of mutual assistance are overshadowed by an almost exclusive insistence on the duty of procreation". [36].
By turning these words around, we might say that
in the last decades we have emphasized the biblical words “the two will be one flesh” almost exclusively, to the point of neglecting the other Divine Words “increase and multiply”.
It is also from these words, rich in significance, that we must start again, not only for a demographic rebirth but for a spiritual and moral regeneration of Europe and the Christian West.
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Speaking of 50th anniversaries, 2018 is also the Golden Jubilee of the Cultural Revolution that apotheosized sex, drugs and rock-and-roll (along with Marx, Marcuse and Che Guevara), proclaimed the primacy of individual conscience over any law or norm, and gave birth to the 'me, myself and I' generations. But why is the secular and liberal world not celebrating it at all, nor even referring to it? I live in New York City where I could not possibly miss any sign of it.
So now, forgive me for this personal 'me, myself and I' digression. I remember being in Paris in May 1968 to report on the start of the Paris peace talks on Vietnam for my TV station in Manila - an assignment I got as a fledgling reporter simply because I had a working knowledge of French and knew enough about Vietnam from editing the foreign news for the nightly TV newscast and a crash course I gave myself beforehand on the history of Vietnam from the French colonial era to America's involvement. Willy nilly, I found myself literally on the frontlines of that 'overnight' Cultural Revolution (which, of course, I did not realize for what it was at the time) - covering the peace talks in the daytime (the Americans held their briefings at the posh Hotel Crillon near the US embassy, and the North Vietnamese at the Lutetia on Boulevard Raspail), then crossing over back to the Left Bank at night with my cameraman to photograph the student barricades, where they dug up cobblestones from the streets to hurl at policemen, their rioting and marches, their Marxist banners and slogans, and their occupation of the Sorbonne, then travelling by car to Brussels airport every other night to send home our film (yes, film! - those were the days before videocameras had become portable enough to replace film cameras that also require a cumbersome professional tape recorder for the audio part) because everything was at a standstill in France (no flights out of France and into France on account of the 'greve generale' - general strike - which also meant mountains of uncollected garbage in the streets). I never did have the chance to see President de Gaulle, but I would see him one year later in Washington, DC, when he came to the USA to take part in Dwight Eisenhower's funeral, which we were covering because our President took part.
As my roundtrip ticket in 1968 was on Air France, the only way I could get out after a month in Paris was to take the train to Spain and fly out of Barcelona for home, with day stops in Rome and Tehran. (Day stops were easily arranged on long-distance flights then. Enroute to Paris, I chose to stop off in Beirut for two days.) So I took another week off work to be a tourist in Spain, a kind of spiritual homeland for Filipinos like me who admire all the positive things Spain brought to us in 350 years of colonization, starting with the Catholic faith and their language. And I remember being in Santo Tome church in Toledo admiring El Greco's stupendous 'Burial of the Count of Orgaz' (said to be his greatest masterpiece) when some American tourists near me started exclaiming excitedly at the news on the radio that Robert Kennedy had been shot during a campaign speech in Los Angeles (he would die the next day)... All in all, quite a memorable first trip to Europe.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/07/2018 08:26]