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).