Paul VI vindicated, Denver bishop
says
By NCR STAFF
Calling it the most misunderstood papal intervention of this
century, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver issued a pastoral letter
July 22 marking Humanae Vitaes 30th anniversary.
Arguing that 30 years of history have vindicated Paul VI, Chaput
called for an active and sustained effort on the part of married
Catholics to observe the ban on artificial birth control. Chaput is widely
regarded as a leading figure on the Catholic right, and his letter is likely to
find an audience beyond the boundaries of his northern Colorado
archdiocese.
If knowingly and freely engaged in, contraception is a grave
sin, because it distorts the essence of marriage: the self-giving love which,
by its very nature, is life-giving, Chaput wrote. It breaks apart
what God created to be whole: the person-uniting meaning of love (sex) and the
life-giving meaning of sex (procreation).
Pointing to a social landscape dotted with rates of
abortion, divorce, family breakdown, wife and child abuse, venereal disease and
out of wedlock births, Chaput said U.S. society is wracked with
sexual identity and behavior dysfunctions, family collapse and a general
coarsening of attitudes towards the sanctity of human life. Its obvious
to everyone but an addict: We have a problem. Its killing us as a
people.
Chaput wrote that contraception has released males -- to a
historically unprecedented degree -- from responsibility for their sexual
aggression; that demands from the First World for developing countries to
adopt family planning techniques, including contraception, amount to a
thinly disguised form of population warfare and cultural re-engineering;
and that birth control reflects a mentality that regards fertility as an
infection, leading to an organic link between contraception and
abortion.
Chaput suggested that support for birth control from advocates for
women is self-defeating. He wrote that an exaggerated feminism has
actively colluded in womens dehumanization, and that while
many feminists have attacked the Catholic church for her alleged
disregard of women ... the church in Humanae Vitae identified and
rejected sexual exploitation of women years before that message entered the
cultural mainstream.
Dismissing charges that Catholic doctrine on sexuality is
repressive or anti-carnal, Chaput wrote that Catholic
marriage -- exactly like Jesus himself -- is not about scarcity but abundance.
... Catholic married love always implies the possibility of new life; and
because it does, it drives out loneliness and affirms the future. And because
it affirms the future, it becomes a furnace of hope in a world prone to
despair.
In that light, Chaput called for renewed emphasis on natural
family planning. When, for good reasons, a husband and wife limit their
intercourse to the wifes natural periods of infertility during a month,
they are simply observing a cycle which God Himself created in the woman,
he said. They are not subverting it. And so they are living within the
law of Gods love.
While acknowledging that the so-called rhythm method
involves sacrifices and periodic abstinence from intercourse,
Chaput wrote that when lived prayerfully and unselfishly, natural family
planning deepens and enriches marriage and results in greater intimacy -- and
greater joy.
Chaput called on pastors to establish natural family planning
coordinators in parishes and directed that all marriage preparation in the
archdiocese must involve adequate instruction in the technique.
I especially encourage couples to examine their own
consciences regarding contraception, Chaput wrote. I ask them to
remember that conscience is much more than a matter of personal preference. It
requires us to search out and understand church teaching, and to honestly
strive to conform our hearts to it.
Acknowledging that Humanae Vitae prompted three
decades of doubt and dissent among many Catholics, Chaput suggested that
the generations who led that dissent -- his own and that of his teachers --
are generations still reacting against the American Catholic rigorism of
the 1950s. That rigorism, much of it a product of culture and not doctrine, has
long since been demolished, he said.
In reaching these people, our task is to turn their distrust
to where it belongs: toward the lies the world tells us about the meaning of
human sexuality and the pathologies those lies conceal.
Another defense of Humanae Vitae came from Bishop James T.
McHugh of the Camden, N.J., diocese in a July 17 newspaper column. McHugh wrote
that despite the barrage of ridicule and rejection and a highly
publicized dissent by Catholic theologians that greeted the document, now
we are beginning to see a new atmosphere of acceptance for faithful,
stable and enduring marriages and an openness to childbearing and
parenting.
It was not that the documents reasoning was flawed or
incomplete, McHugh wrote. It was simply that its conclusions were
unacceptable, if not unimaginable, to the world of the late 1960s.
National Catholic Reporter, July 31,
1998
|