The power of 'Humanae vitae'

...This life is, as Paul VI said, sometimes difficult but always possible, and it is never, ever, boring...

...We could perhaps contend that the frightening disrespect and hostility evidenced toward females in our time merely coincides with, and is not an effect of, the widespread use of contraception...

...Similarly excluded [as a lawful means of birth regulation] is every action that, either in anticipation of the conjugal act or in its accomplishment or in the development of its natural consequences, would have as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible...

...Yet it doesn't follow that the practice of NFP inevitably leads us toward these ends...

...in which husband and wife generously share everything, without undue reservations or selfish calculations...

...We would...

...Rather than run the risk of distorting the views of Catholics who disagree with me, I will as much as possible refrain from attempting to present them from my point of view...

...On the contrary, we can avail ourselves of genital inactivity to construct a more varied sexual relationship...

...teaches that each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life...

...this discipline [the observance of periodic continence], far from harming conjugal love itself, rather confers upon it a higher human value...

...How do the principles enunciated in Humanae vitae help or hinder us in that search...

...On the one hand, we collaborate in surgically, hormonally, and chemically altering each other's natures...

...But we were hardly fulfilling our potential as construed by Humanae vitae...

...We know that children often grow out of their egocentricity by coming up against the fact that they can't necessarily have what they want...

...As with many old marital feuds, we act as if we have forgotten whatever it was we originally argued about...

...I don't see any alternative but to agree, if we premise that the church should validate the attitude that conception is a complication of sex, rather than an immanent reality...

...We were adhering to the letter of the law...

...Humanae vitae is not primarily about Natural Family Planning...

...Love, God...

...The practice of almsgiving disposes us to charity...

...In trying to live out the encyclical's standards, spouses must focus their sights beyond the practice of one particular mode of birth regulation, and continually ask themselves how in that practice they are intentionally fostering the "communion of their beings...

...My wife and I have practiced Natural Family Planning (NFP) for all fifteen years of our marriage, having taken instruction during our engagement, in part to better understand the church's view of sexuality...

...It disposes us to marital chastity—whether or not we choose to actively cultivate that virtue—but by itself cannot effect it...

...We are called to be in touch with that power at all times...

...Given the document's statement of the goods to be pursued in integrating the whole person in one's sexuality, and the evils following from the use of contraception, what other conclusion can be drawn...

...Can we Americans ever transcend our "forbidden fruit" attitude toward sex, wherein we continually try to evade someone else's prohibitions...

...those who enjoy the gift of conjugal love while respecting the laws of the generative process show that they acknowledge themselves to be not the masters of the sources of human life, but rather the ministers of the design established by the Creator...

...That so few have read the encyclical precludes any meaningful public discussion of its merits...

...If that isn't what a church is for, then I don't know why we have one...

...We then evaluate our actions in light of whether they further this end: "By this particular act, do I work for, or against, my true vocation...

...We recognize the growth of maturity in children when they deal constructively and creatively with such deprivation...

...Something continually dynamic, through which we change and are changed, and not altogether under our control...

...In the hallway of the building where our children attend religious education classes there is a poster depicting the Earth wrapped up and beribboned, with a note attached reading, "Dear Mankind: Please take care of my gift...

...Ultimately, we must recognize that this call originates with God, and not with any individual pope...

...Long-time readers will know that Commonweal does not agree with Mr...

...As a veteran of all too many extended periods of marital silence, I have some suggestions to make...

...What Has It Done to Us...

...As we were all acutely aware before becoming sexually active with our spouses, periods of abstinence can be very sexually intense...

...All readers will learn that we do agree with other views expressed by Mr...

...To the fact that sexual intercourse implies a union not just for one discrete moment, but forever, through our capacity to co-create another human being...

...So it is with NFP...

...I perceive the contraceptive ethic, if one can be said to exist, as essentially negative...

...Governing my own sexual desire allows me to expect them to do likewise...

...But the practice is not synonymous with the virtue, nor can it force that virtue on us...

...Part of the problem is that, while we are called to live in eternity, we can only heed the call and pursue the vocation in the here and now...

...Murray's contention that natural family planning is the only morally acceptable form of birth control...

...In doing thus and such, am I conscious of working in collaboration with God, or am I disregarding or opposing him...

...Much of what is said in the debate over this encyclical seems to constitute a clash of "partial perspectives...

...mutual recrimination...

...Here it is...

...Are our sexual desires and motivations going to develop and become more comprehensive, or remain physically, sensually, and emotionally self-centered...

...We all know where babies come from...

...An example might be almsgiving...

...It is a means of extending, deepening, and intensifying our relationship...

...Ring out the old year, ring in the new, and be done with fruitless discussions of Humanae vitael As a church, we call to mind an estranged couple who carry on their individual business and fulfill their separate responsibilities without advertence to the differences which divide them...

...We now have the power to pursue fulfill15 ment of certain aspects of our sexuality independently of others, or to integrate them using natural methods of birth regulation that rival artificial means in their effectiveness...

...We can now choose to do things which literally were not possible until recently, and can choose not to do things which have always been considered unavoidable...

...Will our understanding of our sexual nature grow as has our understanding of the world's nature...

...6. Pope Paul VI was prescient about the consequences of contraception: "Let [responsible persons] consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened to conjugal infidelity and to a general lowering of morality...

...I think it is possible for the difference to amount to no more than that which exists between the letter and the spirit of the law, and indeed that is not saying much...

...and make one's consideration in the light of an integral vision of man and of his vocation, not only his natural and earthly vocation, but also his supernatural and eternal one...

...In short, I would be extremely uncomfortable explaining to my children why they should wait for years to make love, when I can't wait two weeks...

...Through the application of sophisticated technologies, we have liberated ourselves from many of the material and time-space constraints imposed on people of the past (and in much of the world at present...

...Through the promulgation of Humanae vitae, the church challenges Catholics to grow simultaneously in both "sense and spirit," at some cost to our temporal comfort...

...For my wife and me, the practice of NFP is one expression of our commitment to love and accept each other as fully and unreservedly as we can, and a means of extending our sexual communion beyond the genital...

...Would we, he asked, "consider it for inclusion as an article" that would continue the discussion...

...We are now NFP instructors ourselves...

...It seeks to justify a behavior which we will for ourselves...

...Why shouldn't they experience the same intimacy (or sensual pleasure) that we do, if this is what sex is all about...

...June 18,1993...

...It is an ever-growing sense of the deeply pervasive power of sexuality that convinces me of the basic truth of Humanae vitae...

...I experience it in the unselfconscious beauty and desirability of my wife at her fertile time, the cyclical engagement in mutual courtship and consummation, and, yes, the frustration over sometimes long periods of abstinence and the apprehension felt when contemplating an unintended pregnancy...

...We seem to forget that the Commandments do not contain the words "if," "unless," or "try to...

...I will leave it to others to explicate the positive value in their own position, and I hope they do so...

...Yet somehow, when it comes to contraception, we seek to make the exception the rule, as if to justify a priori our failure to attain an ideal which we have deemed impossibly (or inconveniently) high...

...We probably all know of people who seem to give only out of a sense of obligation or guilt, or whose generosity is reduced to writing checks, and maybe disproportionately small checks at that...

...Humanae vitae specifies how we can sanctify our sexual conduct within the context of our basic Christian call to sanctify the world...

...This is how I interpret much of the repartee in the pages of Commonweal and other journals last year...

...4. Humanae vitae challenges us to practice what we preach to our children...

...What value do we seek to develop in them...

...1. Humanae vitae transcends conventional wisdom regarding sexual abstinence...

...They will, after all, be physically mature long before they are ready to enter constructively into a sexual relationship...

...8. Pope Paul VI apprehended the connection between fertility and the power of sexuality: "Those who make use of this divine gift while destroying, even if only partially, its significance and finality, act contrary to the nature of both man and woman and of their most intimate relationship...

...5. The encyclical confronts the sixty-four-dollar question, and calls us to seek the ideal in practice...

...7. Humanae vitae asks that we keep our eyes on the real prize: "One must look beyond partial perspectives...

...Newer readers can find out why from an editorial in this issue [page 4...

...Then, several months later, we received a letter from Paul Murray, who had embarked on writing a letter to the editor commenting on Bishop Untener, but realized that it was too long and too late to qualify for our correspondence pages...

...This exclusion is often denounced as a harsh, intractable prohibition...

...At a time in history when we have become able to accomplish it, Humanae vitae challenges us to a responsible integration of the unitive and procreative aspects of sexuality and so to a personal evolution that will undoubtedly be as painstaking, yet at least as consequential, as our technical development...

...We must bear in mind the end which is placed in front of us: the "integral vision of man and his vocation," the mutual commitment to "personal perfection" and collaboration with God...

...Given the prevailing level of sexual morality and its far-reaching consequences, it is not only appropriate, but essential, that the church address the issue directly...

...The way in which we choose to use this power will say much about how we define ourselves as human and sexual beings...

...Those who have studied it can redress this limitation—and encourage a wider reading of the document—by engaging in an open dialogue about the encyclical's substance...

...It has been greatly facilitated by the fact that we have time which need not be spent in the struggle to survive...

...It is from this pattern of limiting the scope of our most intimate relationships that Humanae vitae calls us to free ourselves...

...We undercut our alleged commitment with our actions...

...It requires continual effort, but thanks to its beneficent influence husband and wife fully develop their personalities and are enriched with spiritual values...

...It can also be feared that the man who becomes used to contraceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman, and no longer caring about her physical and psychological equilibrium, come to the point 16 of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion...

...I have to think there are exceptions to this enjoyment just as there are exceptions to, say, the Sunday obligation, or the Fifth Commandment...

...It's that very attitude, however, that Humanae vitae sees as ultimately dehumanizing...

...Yet the argument seems directionless, more a repetitive litany of the other's faults than a serious attempt at reconciliation...

...Yet the harmony that we enjoy with the church's position does not render us immune to the sense of dissonance that many Catholics feel about the question of contraception...

...I am afraid that we run the risk of trivializing sexuality when we first willfully isolate it from our procreative capacity, and then disable that capacity...

...Is our capacity to make sexual decisions going to evolve as have our technological capacities...

...That most Catholics don't agree with or abide by this summons is held to be evidence that the church has overstepped its authority or spoken erroneously...

...Yet it can be...

...Would that she could do it without shaking us up so, but sometimes we need it...

...Yet I see it as altogether fitting and perhaps inevitable, that sexuality be the arena in which church and culture confront each other so explicitly...

...children and young people grow up with a correct appreciation of human values, and enjoy a serene and harmonious development of their spiritual and sense faculties...

...It also seems to my layman's sense that most exceptions have to do with the imposition of circumstances beyond one's foresight or control...

...It also implies a basic relationship to God in which we, for our own good, must both refer and defer to his wisdom in making our choices...

...We now have the ability to exercise true responsibility in our sexual decision making...

...Who can remember one thing that was said about the encyclical itself during 1993...

...When we separate the unitive and procreative aspects of sexuality, when we engage in sex only for its unitive (or perhaps its sensual) value, what possible grounds have we for insisting to our children that sex be reserved for marriage...

...In view of the harm we have done and continue to do to our environment, little of it directly intended and much of it serving some apparently compelling reason, are we wise in trusting entirely to our own judgment the safeguarding of the Earth...

...Little attention is given the holistic approach to sexuality to which the encyclical calls us...

...Our fertility did not find very dynamic expression, sexual or otherwise, at those times...

...The question is often put, "What is the difference between NFP and ar17 tificial contraception, since they both are used to avoid pregnancy...

...While twenty-sixth anniversaries don't usually lend themselves to commemoration, this one might provide the occasion to raise a useful question: What are we Catholics to do now...

...If donations haven't improved one's spiritual poverty, perhaps it's because of a nonreceptivity to that collaboration with God and communion with others which Humanae vitae holds out as the ideal for us to seek...

...Humanae vitae acknowledges the permissibility of "recourse to the infertile times," and so in utilizing NFP a couple at least fulfills certain minimum requirements...

...Conversely, we sense a lack of maturity when children go to great lengths to avoid it...

...Second, I think that the process of resolution can begin only when partners speak positively for themselves, rather than merely react to the other...

...Humanae vitae calls us to transcendence, not by repressing or avoiding sexuality, but by entering more fully into it...

...If only we can bring ourselves to perceive the liberation that can be effected by our acceptance of this challenge...

...In fact, we seem to have succeeded in doing so: witness our culture's banal and superficial preoccupation with sex as reflected in the media, and the rising number of sexual partners with whom Americans have dallied as contraceptives have become more effective and available over the course of the last three decades...

...We of Western culture stand at a defining moment in human development...

...The expectation of genuine, long-term sexual fulfillment is a relatively recent phenomenon...

...The process of maturation does not end with childhood, and we don't foster it by contriving to have our way in this aspect of our lives...

...By means of the reciprocal personal gift which is proper and exclusive to them, husband and wife tend toward that communion of their beings whereby they help each other toward personal perfection in order to collaborate with God in the begetting and rearing of new lives...

...Clearly I think that the practice of contraception, when all its ramifications are considered, leads us away from the perfection, communion, and collaboration of which Pope Paul speaks...

...Enough said...

...The anniversary was marked by a flurry of correspondence which broke—should I say, interrupted?— the sullen stalemate into which many Catholics seem to have been frozen on the issue of church teaching concerning birth control...

...Contracepting couples can seek to develop their sexuality aside from their particular contraceptive practice, but I don't see how they can do so within it...

...Perhaps these two responses are variations on the same theme...

...In its way, this message conveys a truism that is readily acknowledged when stated in an environmental context: that we are stewards, not the owners, of the Earth...

...Would we be held in such thrall by an act that did not contain within itself the same permanent ramifications...

...Natural Family Planning is a practice...

...If intercourse is intimate sharing, then a conscious decision to abstain under such circumstances is intercourse in all but the physical sense of the word, and is utterly sexual in its nature...

...That may be true, but I won't believe it until I see American society ridding itself of the one while maintaining the other...

...In the meantime, I think we are vainly trying to cling to both ends of a contradiction...

...I am 14 also uncomfortable with the way in which Humanae vitae is often—though not always—presented and defended...

...The difficulty involved in what the church defines as legitimate methods of birth regulation is something we ought to consider as we freely prepare to marry...

...Our technological proficiency enables us to rule nature as we once were ruled by it...

...Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the practice of NFP has been that my wife and I feel comfortable in demonstrations of affection and expressions of our sexuality without inevitably associating such displays with intercourse...

...The article generated numbers of letters of praise and dispraise, many of which were published [July 16, August 13, September 10, October 22...

...In a culture that sneers at chastity, it is sometimes difficult to speak of abstinence as good...

...on the other hand, we denounce it when someone is denied the opportunity to fully develop his or her nature physically, professionally, educationally, or economically...

...Our conventional cultural wisdom cannot account for the sense of abandonment of self, the creative use of sexual energy in other aspects of the relationship, and the exhilaration experienced in a mutual decision to forgo sexual intercourse, when the desire to have intercourse is also mutual...

...Among the supposed benefits of contraception, this possibility seems conspicuously absent...

...Humanae vitae calls us to a love that "is total...

...I sense that in matters sexual as well as environmental, we are better off trying to live in accordance with nature, rather than trying to re-create it as we would have it...

...That is what I hope for my children: that they be secure and comfortable in their sexuality without needing to affirm it in bed...

...But if almsgiving does not serve to perfect the giver or to further the vocation, the error lies not in the practice itself, but in the way it is undertaken...

...the church, calling men back to the observance of the norms of the natural law...

...The silence is disturbed only by occasional outbursts of PAUL MURRAY is an elementary school teacher in Pocatello, Idaho...

...No one is forced to marry and make love...

...Commonweal, June 18,1993], and compare them with the sexual and cultural terrain I have been walking in my own marriage...

...in order to collaborate with God...

...He and his wife Susan have four children...

...Why is contraception to be evaluated differently from other moral shortcomings...

...Still, the encyclical asks of us much more than that...

...The actions and practices through which we activate our vocation are limited by the fact that it is limited, imperfect human beings who practice them...

...In contrast, use of contraception implies that we have justified for ourselves the sundering of nature, the selection of certain aspects for our enjoyment, and the synthetic suppression or elimination of others as undesirable...

...What do we want from our sexual relationships...

...Is there any doubt that the power of sexuality is inherently connected to the power to conceive...

...2. The encyclical reminds us that we are not God...

...Last July marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Pope Paul VFs Humanae vitae...

...3. Humanae vitae challenges us to evolve personally as well as technologically: "By safeguarding both these essential aspects, the unitive and the procreative, the conjugal act preserves in its fullness the sense of true mutual love and its ordination to man's most high vocation to parenthood...

...My wife and I have found that our submission to the rhythm of fertility has made our way of birth regulation itself a medium of sexual interaction between us...

...Marriage has long been held to be the only appropriate context for sexual activity, because it affords the only suitable context for the upbringing of children...

...Our personal experience is one of profound alienation from our popular culture on anything to do with sexuality and family planning...

...The call of God is often jarring, and the implications of following it sometimes seem incredible when considered through the eyes of the world...

...I have to wonder how I would preach to my children about the value of chastity were my wife and I practicing contraception...

...First, the way to resolution of this impasse lies through Humanae vitae itself...

...Murray, and why we think that what he says, and his way of saying it, should be part of the conversation begun in 1968, and continuing for these many years up to Bishop Untener's courageous reflections a year ago...

...parents become capable of a deeper and more efficacious influence in the education of their offspring...

...In what other aspect of our lives are we so demanding of our autonomy and less open to another's questioning of our behavior...

...I would like to speak for myself in considering these questions...

...They are behaviors by which we seek to manipulate and control the terms of our involvement with other persons...

...And I suppose it's good that we speak to each other...

...We think that men of our day are particularly capable of confirming the deeply reasonable and human character of this fundamental principle...

...That isn't the case with contraception...

...18...

...THE POWER OF 'HUMANAE VITAE' TAKE ANOTHER LOOK PAUL MURRAY Last year, Commonweal noted the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication o/Humanae vitae with a pastoral reflection by Bishop Kenneth Untener, "Humanae vitae...

...It does not define a value which encourages and allows us to transcend ourselves...

...So, without presuming to have composed a comprehensive discussion of it, I will examine some salient points presented by the map of Humanae vitae, to borrow Bishop Kenneth Untener' s analogy ^Humanae vitae: What Has It Done to Us...

...I should also identify the perspective I bring to the issue...

...As long as we do, the chance exists that we might agree on something...

...But there have been times when this was not the case, when we defined our sexuality primarily by its genital expression, which in turn would occur only within certain predictable parameters...

...Isn't our ideal of sexuality something like that: something that has the power to transport us beyond ourselves...

...This is ironic in a society which purports to be committed to sexual equality and dignity...