It was 45 years-ago today that Pope Paul VI promulgated one of the most important Church documents of the 20th century – Humanae Vitae.

Writing for Zenit, Dr. Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, President of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations (FIAMC) says he’ll never tire of thanking Pope Paul VI for his courage in publishing a text on the transmission of human life and spousal love.

“He did so in the year of the sexual revolution of ’68 and probably against the opinion of some experts and of great media opposition,” Dr. Castellvi writes.

But times have changed, and the text has now proven to be prophetic.

For instance, Pope Paul VI made four major predictions about what would happen to individuals, families and nations if we allowed the widespread use of artificial contraception.

First, he wrote: “Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards.”

None of us can argue with this one. Marital fidelity is at an all-time low. According to Duquesne University’s Family Institute, in 1960, the percent of marriages ending in divorce was 25 percent. By 2006, it had leaped to 48 percent. And that’s just the stats for people who bothered to get married. The U.S. Census Bureau says that between 1960 and 2004, there was a 1200 percent increase in the number of people cohabitating – from 439,000 to 5.08 million.

How much have our moral standards lowered? Between 1960 and the year 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau reports a 600 percent increase in unwed childbearing.

Another prediction the Pope made in this document was that “ . . . a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”

According to the United Nations Study on the Status of Women, 2000, somewhere in America a woman is battered, usually by her intimate partner, every 15 seconds.

Physical violence is estimated to occur in four to six million relationships every year in the United States. Sixty-four percent of women who report being raped, assaulted or stalked since the age of 18 were victimized by a current or former husband, cohabitating partner, boyfriend or date.

Pope Paul VI also warned about allowing the power of preventing birth to fall into the hands of the state. “Careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. . . . Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone.”

The most glaring example is China’s draconian one-child policy where families are not permitted to produce more than one child. However, the World Fertility Report states that nearly half of the world’s governments are also actively working to reduce the fertility of their populations and almost all governments now support family planning programs and the distribution of contraceptives.

Finally, Pope Paul predicted that “Unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions   – limits, let it be said which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed . . . .”

Evidence of this hubris is everywhere. Today’s biotechnology has replaced human reproduction with in vitro fertilization, cloning, creating hybrid organisms, experimenting on human embryos, etc.

While the widespread use of artificial contraception is not totally to blame for all these ills, the promiscuity it encourages certainly is.

“In teaching that contraception is intrinsically immoral, the Church is not imposing a disciplinary law on Catholics,” wrote Professor Janet Smith, Ph.D., a Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family, in “Humanae Vitae: A Challenge to Love.”

“She is preaching only what nature and the gospel preach. By now we should have learned – the hard way – that to defy and overindulge our sexual nature, to go against the laws of nature and God, is to inflict terrible damage on ourselves as individuals and our society as a whole.”

As Dr. Castellvi writes, Humanae Vitae was “spot on” and time has proven this to be true. And if we are to beat the scourge of the contraceptive mentality, we must change the way we view human life.

“We must think that each and all of us human beings are forever,” he writes. “Once created and having passed the test of this world, we exist forever. It seems that up to now total humanity has been 15 billion human beings. God could have created an infinite number more, but we are those who are, every one different from the other and at the same time an unrepeatable brother. God already thought of us before the creation of the world. Not one of us is extra. All of us are desired by God.”

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