On May 29, we celebrated the Memorial of Pope Saint Paul VInwho was ordained a priest in 1920 and served in the Vatican diplomatic corps for thirty years before he was named archbishop of Milan. Elected pope in 1963, he presided over the final years of the Second Vatican Council and was responsible for implementing its decisions.
Saint Paul VI was the author of several significant encyclicals and apostolic exhortations including Populorum Progressio (1967 Encyclical on the Development of Peoples) and Evangelii Nuntiandi (1975 Apostolic Exhortation on Evangelization). But his most famous, and most controversial, publication was Humanae Vitae (1968 Encyclical on the Regulation of Birth).
The era in which Humanae Vitae was written was a turbulent one. It was a time of political and civil unrest, and it was a time when the meaning of human sexuality was being challenged and the practice of artificial contraception was changing the way people engaged in sexual activity.
Many people had hoped the pope would relax the Church’s restrictions on sexual activity. They were disappointed when Pope Paul’s teaching affirmed the dual purpose of sexual intercourse as both unitive (expressing the total self-giving love between spouses) and procreative (openness to bearing children). Artificial contraception, the pope argued, separates these two essential elements, compromising the true meaning of conjugal love, and disrupting the totality of self-gift intended by God.
This is a hard teaching even today, but in fact the years that have passed since Humanae Vitae first appeared have shown that its warnings were prophetic. Pope Paul V feared that reliance on contraception could lead to grave consequences—including marital infidelity, a lowering of moral standards, the objectification and disrespect of women, and societal harm, including the potential imposition of contraceptive practices by regimes whose public authorities focus exclusively on population control.
Humanae Vitae emphasizes the sacredness of marriage and sexuality as a total gift-of-self open to life. It argues against artificial contraception due to its potential for spiritual, moral, relational, and cultural harms and the Encyclical proposes natural family planning as the morally licit way to regulate births responsibly while fostering communication, respect, and intimacy in marriage.
Recent popes have affirmed the Church’s teaching on human sexuality and emphasized that responsible parenthood involves prayerful and conscientious decision-making by married couples, taking into account their personal situation, the dignity of each partner, and the demands of the times. This responsibility is exercised through open dialogue and acceptance of life within the framework of marriage, using morally acceptable means such as natural family planning.
As Humanae Vitae teaches:
[Married love] is a love which is total—that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything, allowing no unreasonable exceptions and not thinking solely of their own convenience. Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner’s own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself…. [Married] love is fecund. It is not confined wholly to the loving interchange of husband and wife; it also contrives to go beyond this to bring new life into being (Humanae Vitae, #9).
Let’s thank God for the gift of human sexuality, and let’s pray for the grace to use it wisely.
Daniel Conway
