Natural Family Planning International

Pope John Paul II and Humanae Vitae, 1985-1986

Excerpts from J.F.Kippley, Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius, 2005, Chapter 7.  References are in the endnotes of Chapter 7.)

My incomplete files do not show any statements of Pope John Paul II dealing directly with the contraception issue during 1985. On January 28, however, the official Vatican newspaper published an article by Archbishop Edouard Gagnon, Pro-President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, commenting upon the series of talks the Holy Father had concluded the previous November 28^th. Archbishop Gagnon noted that “In the preface to the Polish translation of Humanae Vitae he [John Paul II when he was bishop of Krakow] wrote: ‘The doctrine concerning the ethics of marriage has been transmitted and defined with precision by the authority of the Magisterium of the Church in Humanae Vitae. Therefore, after the promulgation of this document, it is difficult, as far as Catholics are concerned, to speak about inculpable ignorance or about error in good faith.’”

Archbishop Gagnon continued:  “Today, after the Synod on the family, after the Exhortation Familiaris Consortio, and above all after the Pope’s brilliant catecheses, there can no longer be doubts about the authoritative doctrine of the Church and about the unacceptability of dissent.”²⁹

10 April 1986: John Paul II has delivered some of his strongest words about sexual morality to groups of moral theologians gathered under orthodox auspices in Rome. (The heterodox or heretical theologians avoid such congresses.) His address to the participants in the International Congress of Moral Theology (7 to 12 April 1986) forms an important part of that pattern. He started by noting the importance of living the truth “to which the Church is called to give witness” by quoting Matthew 7:21: “Not every man who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

He then noted that the “essential linkup of Truth-Goodness-Freedom has been lost to a large extent by contemporary culture. Therefore, to lead man to rediscover it is one of the particular requirements of the Church’s mission today for the salvation of the world.”

Noting the dangers of moral relativism he said:  “Indeed, an even more serious thing has come about: man is no longer convinced that he can find salvation only in the truth. The saving power of truth is questioned. People are entrusting to freedom alone, uprooted from any objectivity, the task of deciding autonomously what is good and what is evil. In the field of theology, this relativism turns into distrust of the wisdom of God, who guides man by means of the moral law. Against the prescriptions of the moral law are opposed the so-called concrete situations, with people no longer holding, basically, that the law of God is always the only true good of man.”

Recognizing that moral relativism is at the heart of alleged exceptions for contraception and abortion, the Pope said:  “To reduce the moral quality of our actions, regarding creatures, to the attempt to improve reality in its non-ethical contents would be equivalent, in the last analysis, to destroying the very concept of morality. The first consequence, indeed, of this reduction is the denial that, in the context of those activities, there exist acts which are always and everywhere in themselves and of themselves illicit. I have already drawn attention to this point in the Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliatio et Paenitentia (cf. n.17). The whole tradition of the Church has lived and lives on the conviction contrary to this denial. But even human reason, without the light of Revelation, is in a position to see the grave error of this thesis.
It is the result of deep and serious presuppositions which strike at the very heart not only of Christianity, but also of religion as such. That there in fact exists a moral good and evil not reducible to other human goods and evils is the necessary and immediate consequence of the truth of creation, which is the ultimate foundation of the very dignity of the human person.”

The Holy Father then went on to apply these principles to two pressing issues of the day:  “Man bears a law written in his heart (cf. Rom 2:15 and Dignitatis Humanae, 3) that he does not give to himself, but which expresses the immutable demands of his personal being created by God . . . This law is not merely made up of general guidelines, whose specification is in their respective content conditioned by different and changeable historical situations. There are moral norms that have a precise content which is immutable and unconditioned . . . for example, the norm that prohibits contraception or that which forbids the direct killing of an innocent person. To deny the existence of norms having such a value can be done only by one who denies the existence of a truth about the person, of an immutable nature in man, based ultimately on the creative Wisdom which is the measure of all reality (emphasis added).”

The Pope also recorded his rejection of the appeal to the numbers of Catholics who practice contraception or who say they see nothing wrong with it.   “To appeal to a “faith of the Church” in order to oppose the moral Magisterium of the Church is equivalent to denying the Catholic concept of Revelation. Not only that, but one can come to violate the fundamental right of the faithful to receive the doctrine of the Church from those who teach theology by virtue of a canonical mission and not the opinions of theological schools.”

Finally, the Pope reminded the theologians of their obligation in charity to oppose those who dissent and teach false doctrine:  “The scholar of ethics today has a grave responsibility, both in the Church and in civil society.
The problems he faces are the most serious problems for man: problems on which depend not only eternal salvation, but often also his future on earth. The word of God uses words in this regard that we ought continually to meditate upon. Love for whoever errs must never bring about any compromise with error: error must be unmasked and judged. The love which the Church has for man obliges her to tell man how and when his truth is being denied, his good unrecognized, his dignity violated, his worth not adequately appreciated.
In doing this, she does not simply present “ideals”: rather she teaches who man is, created by God in Christ, and therefore, what his true good is. The moral law is not something extrinsic to the person: it is the very human person himself in so far as he is called in and by the creative act itself to be and to fulfill himself freely in Christ.
With humility, but with a great firmness, you have to give witness to this truth today. In recent years we have seen the growth of an ethical-theological teaching that has not lived up to this . . .”³⁰ 

Pope John Paul II and Humanae Vitae, October –Nov 1984

Excerpts from J.F.Kippley, Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius, 2005, Chapter 7.  References are in the endnotes of Chapter 7.)

7 November 1984: The periodic abstinence of natural family planning should not be thought of as a mechanical application of biological laws. What makes it truly natural is at the deeper levels of personhood wherein the person has developed the virtue of continence and the resulting freedom of self-mastery:  “ The virtue of continence in its mature form gradually reveals the “pure” aspect of the spousal meaning of the body. In this way, continence develops the personal communion of the man and the woman, a communion that cannot be formed and developed in the full truth of its possibilities only on the level of concupiscence” (414-415).

28 November 1984: This was the last talk of the five-year, 129-lecture series. Pope John Paul II noted that “the catechesis which I began over four years ago and which I am concluding today can be summed up under the title: ‘Human love in the divine plan,’ or more precisely, ‘The redemption of the body and the sacramentality of marriage.’ The catechesis can be divided into two parts”(419).

The first part was based on a study of Christ’s words about the indissolubility of marriage, about concupiscence, and about the resurrection of the body (420).  The second part “was dedicated to the analysis of the sacrament based on the Letter to the Ephesians (5:22-23)” which in turn refers to the biblical beginning of marriage in Genesis 2:24 (420).²⁸

The Pope went on to note that the term “the theology of the body” was used extensively in both parts of the catechesis and that the fifteen talks dealing with Humanae Vitae constitute the final part of the overall catechesis dealing with the redemption of the body and the sacramentality of marriage. In short, there can be no authentic catechesis about marriage without an affirmation of the truths expressed in Humanae Vitae (420-422).

My incomplete files do not show any statements of Pope John Paul II dealing directly with the contraception issue during 1985. On January 28, however, the official Vatican newspaper published an article by Archbishop Edouard Gagnon, Pro-President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, commenting upon the series of talks the Holy Father had concluded the previous November 28^th. Archbishop Gagnon noted that “In the preface to the Polish translation of Humanae Vitae he [John Paul II when he was bishop of Krakow] wrote: ‘The doctrine concerning the ethics of marriage has been transmitted and defined with precision by the authority of the Magisterium of the Church in Humanae Vitae. Therefore, after the promulgation of this document, it is difficult, as far as Catholics are concerned, to speak about inculpable ignorance or about error in good faith.’”

Archbishop Gagnon continued:  Today, after the Synod on the family, after the Exhortation Familiaris Consortio, and above all after the Pope’s brilliant catecheses, there can no longer be doubts about the authoritative doctrine of the Church and about the unacceptability of dissent.²⁹

Pope John Paul II and Humanae Vitae, September-October 1984

Excerpts from J.F.Kippley, Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius, 2005, Chapter 7.  References are in the endnotes of Chapter 7.)

5 September 1984: The international press took note that in this talk the Pope noted that natural family planning can be abused:   “The use of the “infertile periods” for conjugal union can be an abuse if the couple, for unworthy reasons, seeks in this way to avoid having children, thus lowering the number of births in their family below the morally correct level.  This morally correct level must be established by taking into account not only the good of one’s own family, and even the state of health and the means of the couple themselves, but also the good of the society to which they belong, of the Church, and even of all mankind” (402).

“Responsible parenthood [is] in no way exclusively directed to limiting, much less excluding children; it means also the willingness to accept a larger family “(402).

Finally, the Holy Father quoted Humanae Vitae to show that what is at issue is not just a technique, but “an attitude which is based on the integral moral maturity of the persons and at the same time completes it” (403).

3 October 1984: The Holy Father noted that in Humanae Vitae, “the view of married life is at every step marked by Christian realism”(405). That is, it both recognizes the difficulties of living a chaste, non-contraceptive marriage, and it also places those difficulties in the light of the narrow gate of life and the thought of eternity. Furthermore, the encyclical points out the necessity of prayer, the Eucharist, and the Sacrament of Penance. “These are the means—infallible and indispensable—for forming the Christian spirituality of married life and family life”(406).

10 October 1984: John Paul II squarely faced what has been deliberately avoided in most of the 25 years of the modern debate about birth control. The difficulty of the Christian Tradition against marital contraception and other abuses of sexuality “arises from the fact that the power of love is implanted in man lured by concupiscence: in human subjects love does battle with threefold concupiscence (cf. 1 Jn 2:16), in particular with the concupiscence of the flesh which distorts the truth of the ‘language of the body.’ And therefore love, too, is not able to be realized in the truth of the ‘language of the body’ except through overcoming concupiscence” (407).

24 October 1984: With this talk, Pope John Paul II opened a series of three lectures dealing with the virtue of continence, a virtue which needs a “clear perception of the values expressed in the law and the consequent formation of firm convictions” plus the proper “disposition of the will” (408).

Whereas “concupiscence of the flesh . . . makes man in a certain sense blind and insensitive to the most profound values that spring from love,” (409) the virtue of continence enables a couple to practice many “manifestations of affection” (410) that build and can express their marital communion.

While the virtue of marital chastity first of all enables the couple to resist the concupiscence of the flesh, it goes beyond that to “progressively enrich the marital dialogue of the couple, purifying it, deepening it, and at the same time simplifying it” (409). In other words, marital chastity helps a couple to enrich their social intercourse so that their sexual intercourse will be a fitting reflection of their marriage covenant and ongoing relationship.

31 October 1984: In this talk, the Pope made a helpful distinction between excitement and emotion.  “Excitement seeks above all to be expressed in the form of sensual and corporeal pleasure. That is, it tends toward the conjugal act which (depending on the “natural cycles of fertility”) includes the possibility of procreation.  Emotion, on the other hand, is a much broader response to another human being as a person even if conditioned by the femininity or masculinity of the other person. It does not per se tend toward the conjugal act. But it limits itself to other ‘manifestations of affection’ . . .” (413).