2005, Pope Benedict XVI published the first encyclical of his pontificate, Deus Caritas Est (“God Is Love”). Convinced that the world had lost the true meaning of love, Pope Benedict used this encyclical to reaffirm what love means to us as human beings, especially in a culture that seeks to redefine it as anything that fulfills the individual. First, he compared the great gift of eros (romantic love) with the love that God reveals in Jesus Christ, showing how the human desire for eros is confirmed, elevated, and transformed in the love of God. Next, he offered a meditation on how love is to be “organized” in society, concluding that ideological motivations for reordering society are different from the motivation provided by Jesus Christ. If “charitable activity is to maintain all of its splendor and not become just another form of social assistance,”9 it must be centered on Christ and performed for God’s glory alone.
The last document is Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), written by Pope Francis in 2016. When asked in the summer of 2017 if the Church was going to take up the theme of birth control once again, Pope Francis (who has shown strong support of both Pope Paul VI and his encyclical) responded, “All of this depends on how ‘Humanae Vitae’ is interpreted.”10 He added, “The question is not that of changing the doctrine but of going deeper and making pastoral (ministry) take into account the situations and that which it is possible for people to do.”11 Francis wants the Church to reach out with mercy to those who have found the Church’s teachings difficult or who have reaped the negative consequences of the vast cultural changes affecting so many lives.
In the following chapters we will take a close look at these eight Church documents that pertain to human life — its dignity, its mystery, and its complexity. In addition to Humanae Vitae, I have chosen to focus on the other seven documents for two reasons. First, they provide both historical and theological context for the central precepts of Humanae Vitae. And, quite simply, they articulate the Church’s teachings that are most significant for the survival of a civilization in which the human person is fully valued, empowered, and able to flourish in accordance with the plan of God.
Chapter One
The Times, They Are a-Changing
Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae
Man, Machine, and the Manifesto
On the morning of Monday, October 13, 1884, Pope Leo XIII had a vision that would surely haunt him for the rest of his days. He had just finished celebrating Mass in one of the Vatican’s private chapels for a few cardinals and members of his household staff. After the Mass, he stopped at the foot of the altar and stayed there for about ten minutes, as if in a trance, his face ashen white. Then, suddenly, he collapsed from what appeared to be a heart attack or a stroke. Shortly thereafter, however, he arose, immediately went to his office, and composed the prayer to Saint Michael. Later, the pope gave instructions to all the faithful to recite this prayer after all low Masses. God had shown him the future of the Church that he loved so much, and there was more than enough reason to be alarmed.12
Pope Leo later explained that he had heard two voices — one kind and gentle, the other guttural and harsh. He recalled the prideful voice of Satan boasting to Our Lord:
“I can destroy your Church.” To which the gentle voice of Our Lord replied, “You can? Then go ahead and do so.” Satan answered, “To do so, I need more time and more power.” The Lord said, “How much time? How much power?” “75 to 100 years, and a greater power over those who will give themselves over to my service,” was Satan’s reply. Mysteriously our Lord said, “You have the time, you have the power. Do with them what you will.”13
Today, we know that this short exchange prophesied a time of darkness and evil. The twentieth century would see much darkness, in the form of wars, immorality, genocide, and all out apostasy. It would be a century of martyrs.
Prior to the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII, the Catholic Church of the nineteenth century had been under siege and on the defensive. However, under Leo XIII, the Church would rally and boldly respond to the challenges of the day, gaining the moral high ground “where she had [previously] lost physical territory and political support.”14 During his nearly twenty-six years in office, he wrote a record eighty-five encyclicals. Arcanum (on Christian marriage) was the fourth.
Gioacchino Pecci, the future Pope Leo XIII, was born in 1810, in the midst of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. His was an era of extremes. From the moment of his birth, it was clear that the world was already changing in monumental ways. Never before had the lives of so many men and women changed more dramatically in the course of only a century.
The invention of railroads, telephones, the telegraph, electricity, mass production, forged steel, automobiles, and countless other modern discoveries transformed the world at a dizzying pace and well beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. What began in Great Britain quickly spread to North America, Japan, and Western Europe, as well as other parts of the world. As Walter Carroll writes in his book The Crisis of Christendom, “The Industrial Revolution transformed the world forever … it led to the Age of Enterprise, which created wealth and raised the standard of living to a degree unheard of in human history.”15
However, change did not come easy. For better and for worse, the Industrial Revolution had a profound impact on the family. It altered traditional values, roles, and behaviors, influencing all aspects of life and culture:
The Industrial Revolution, with its influx of workers from the farms into the cities to find work in the factories, raised new economic problems, and made possible a new sort of poverty. The worker, who on the farm would never have been absolutely without, was now dependent entirely upon the wages he earned. He had at his disposal no land to cultivate, no livestock; he had no investments, because he had nothing to invest. All his earthly needs had to be met from the wages he received in exchange for his labor. The poor man scratching out a living on his tiny plot of land was replaced by the poor man who had only his labor to sell. His very existence depended upon his finding work and receiving a just wage for his labor.16
With improved forms of transportation, people were able to move from one place to another. Consequently, laborers migrated from rural areas to towns in order to be closer to the factories in which they worked. They frequently left their families behind. The family-centered focus of economic life changed to a focus on each separate individual. The hours were long and the work was grueling; for many, working conditions were deplorable. Not surprisingly, marriages suffered, birth rates declined, and year after year divorce rates increased. These harsh and seemingly hopeless realities led to a decrease in faith, which resulted in a decrease in church attendance.
As all this was happening, an unknown political theorist named Karl Marx was living in exile17 in Brussels writing one of history’s most influential texts. In 1848, together with his financier and fellow author, Friedrich Engels, Marx released his ideas in the form of a pamphlet called The Communist Manifesto.18 With this small booklet, the father of communism set in motion a tidal wave of social change. His ideology would have far-reaching consequences, affecting the lives of millions of people around the world throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and still today.
The Communist Manifesto was written to propose solutions to the problems created by industrialization. Based on the idea that the “history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles,”19 the Manifesto provided a narrative for how the “capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by Socialism, and then eventually Communism.”20
Marx intended to provide a foundation for practical answers to the miseries of the working class that had
