"The Vindication of Humanae Vitae"...

...by Mary Eberstadt,  a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a great article in the August/September issue of First Things and is available online. I'll get you started:

That Humanae Vitae and related Catholic teachings about sexual morality are laughingstocks in all the best places is not exactly news. Even in the benighted precincts of believers, where information from the outside world is known to travel exceedingly slowly, everybody grasps that this is one doctrine the world loves to hate. During Benedict XVI’s April visit to the United States, hardly a story in the secular press failed to mention the teachings of Humanae Vitae, usually alongside adjectives like “divisive” and “controversial” and “outdated.” In fact, if there’s anything on earth that unites the Church’s adversaries—all of them except for the Muslims, anyway—the teaching against contraception is probably it.

To many people, both today and when the encyclical was promulgated on July 25, 1968, the notion simply defies understanding. Consenting adults, told not to use birth control? Preposterous. Third World parents deprived access to contraception and abortion? Positively criminal. A ban on condoms when there’s a risk of contracting AIDS? Beneath contempt.

“The execration of the world,” in philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe’s phrase, was what Paul VI incurred with that document—to which the years since 1968 have added plenty of just plain ridicule. Hasn’t everyone heard Monty Python’s send-up song “Every Sperm Is Sacred”? Or heard the jokes? “You no play-a the game, you no make-a the rules.” And “What do you call the rhythm method? Vatican roulette.” And “What do you call a woman who uses the rhythm method? Mommy.”

Read the entire article.

Thanks to Marcel LeJeune for the link. Read his commentary and thoughts over on the Aggie Catholics blog.

Comments

[LJ]

Paul VI, Pope and Prophet. Like so many prophets of old, rejected in his own time.
What a sad litany Mary Eberstadt has given us. Dark humor indeed. Humanae Vitae endorsed by the anti-Catholics and rejected by Catholics.

I can see only two ways this will end.

Either a huge chastisement of the West,

or a huge Renewal of faith, or Revival, as the Evangelicals call it. The pictures and reports coming out of WYD, and the evangelical zeal of the Holy Father give me some hope that it will be Renewal but I think we're going to have to put in some serious time on our knees specifically asking for it.

[Augustine]

It had to wait until I was in my 40's to hear a homily against contraception. Today I heard the 2nd one of my life.

Blessed the priest and blessed the teenagers there. If only I had heard such homilies when I was young...

May John Paul II pray for us.