6th October 2026
Written by Fr Brian Harrison
(This is an amplified and updated version of a homily preached at St. Mary of Victories Church, St. Louis, Missouri, on July 25, 2018, Feast of St. James the Apostle, and the 50th anniversary of the encyclical Humanae Vitae)
At the end of July 1968, the world’s newspapers, radio and television round the world were trumpeting the news of the most controversial papal decision in living memory. Pope Paul VI (now a canonized saint) had issued an encyclical letter dated July 25, 1968, Feast of St. James the Apostle, entitled Humanae Vitae (“Human Life”), with the subtitle, “On rightly ordering the procreation of children”. This encyclical, in defiance of worldly wisdom, reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s perennial teaching that it is always morally wrong for couples to practice contraception – that is, unnatural methods of birth regulation that in one way or another deprive the conjugal act of its God-given procreative power. Those methods can range from the crude method of “withdrawal” for which, as we read in Genesis 38, God punished Onan by death, to the modern methods of pills, condoms or intrauterine devices.
What exactly did Bl. Paul VI say? In a key passage in art. 11, he declares, “The Church . . . teaches as absolutely required that in any use whatever of marriage, there must be no impairment of its natural capacity to procreate human life”. Notice that this doesn’t condemn every method of avoiding the conception of a new child when there are serious reasons to do so. Couples who practice Natural Family Planning by restricting intimacy to the infertile days of the woman’s cycle do not “impair the natural capacity [of their acts] to procreate human life”; for on those days there is no natural capacity to procreate human life. However, her infertility on those days is a result not her own or her husband’s decision, but of God’s decision, manifested in the way he has created human biological processes. And that makes a huge moral difference.
Pope Paul was of course simply repeating what his predecessor Pius XI had declared several decades earlier in his encyclical Casti Connubii, and indeed, what had always been the Church’s teaching. The subsequent pontiffs too have consistently upheld this teaching, in the case of widespread criticism and dissent: St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis. Unfortunately, the late Argentinian pope allowed certain dissenters from HV to assume influential positions in the Church and on one occasion said in an informal airplane interview that condoms might be used to avoid transmitting the Zika virus. However, in his formal teaching, speaking as Peter’s Successor, this pope upheld the unchanging Catholic doctrine that there can be no such exceptions. In #82 of his 2016 apostolic exhortation on marital love, Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis cites and confirms a passage from the relatio of the 2015 Synod of Bishops which says: “We must return to the message of the Encyclical Humanae Vitae of Blessed Pope Paul VI, which highlights the need to respect the dignity of the person in morally assessing methods of regulating birth”. And in his own words, Francis says in #80, referring to the procreative meaning of marital intimacy: “From the outset, [authentic] love refuses every impulse to close in on itself; it is open to a fruitfulness that draws it beyond itself. Hence no genital act between husband and wife can refuse this meaning, even when for various reasons it may not always, in fact, beget a new life” (emphasis added). “No genital act” – period. That language doesn’t allow for exceptions.
Thus, the Church’s authentic, and indeed, infallible and unchangeable, teaching against contraception is very clear. But the question remains as to why such practices are intrinsically evil, as Paul VI affirmed. Here, to be quite honest, I am not sure the Church has always done a very good job of explaining this doctrine to the faithful, and so I’d like to share with you some considerations that, in my own pastoral experience, have, I think, helped to make this teaching more understandable to ordinary Catholics.
Pope St. Paul VI says in HV that the act of conjugal intimacy has two meanings given by God the Creator – unitive and procreative. The unitive meaning is the profound physical and emotional gratification that the couple experience in their acts of intimacy – something that unites them more closely and helps deepen their mutual love. The procreative meaning is of course the potential of these acts to bring into existence new human life. Now, Paul VI declares that these two meanings may never be separated. What contraception does, clearly, is separate the unitive meaning from the procreative meaning by excluding or suppressing procreation. However, while what the Pope says is certainly very true, I think he might perhaps have said more to explain why these two meanings may never be separated. A lot of Catholics (and other Christians and non-Christians too) still find themselves scratching their heads about this.
Some traditional Catholics have criticized Pope Paul on this account, pointing out that in Humanae Vitae he omitted what his predecessor Pius XI said clearly in his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii. Among other things, CC reaffirmed the traditional doctrine on the ends of marriage: contraception is wrong because it frustrates the primary natural end of marriage, which is the procreation and education of offspring. These critics then blame Vatican Council II in turn for this omission by Paul VI. He was, they say, simply following the Council’s refusal to reaffirm that procreation is the primary end of marriage and the unitive love between husband and wife is the secondary end.
In fact, Vatican II did make mention of these traditionally recognized ends of marriage, but only very obscurely, buried in a text referred to in a footnote to the Constitution Gaudium et Spe And I agree that it would have been helpful if Paul VI had spelled out these primary and secondary ends of marriage, as his predecessor has done. Even so, a lot of ordinary people today seem to find it difficult to see why ‘frustrating’ the ‘natural end’ of some process is immoral. This almost requires some basic understanding of the ‘perennial philosophy’ that St. Thomas Aquinas and other great scholastic theologians and philosophers developed from the Aristotelian tradition. And the average Catholic today doesn’t usually have that understanding.
Matters are made still more confusing when orthodox Catholic writers, teachers and preachers contrast ‘natural’ with ‘artificial’ means of avoiding conception. For people naturally ask, “What’s so terribly wrong with using something artificial for our biological or medical needs? The Church doesn’t object to dentures, or wearing wigs, or having a pacemaker inserted, or having artificial hip or knee joints, or adding whole artificial limbs to people who have lost an arm or a leg. So why does she object to ‘artificial’ methods, and insist on a ‘natural’ alternative, only when it comes to family planning?” Why indeed? I have long believed, and urged, that we drop the word ‘artificial’ completely from our vocabulary in explaining Church teaching about contraception and family planning. We should say, rather, that it is unnatural methods of avoiding conception that the Church condemns as immoral. For what is unnatural goes against the natural, God-given end of something human – in this case, it destroys the fertility of an act that would otherwise have generated a child. No one would ever think of calling the aforesaid artefacts (dentures, artificial limbs, etc.) “unnatural”, because far from frustrating or impeding a healthy and natural human function, they all help to repair or make up for some bodily defect. That’s why the Church has no problem with them.
Pope St. John Paul II developed a new way of explaining the evil of contraception as part of his “theology of the body”. He argued that the human body has its ‘language’ and that the conjugal act is like an ‘affirmation’ of total mutual self-giving. That intimate act ‘says’: “I give myself totally to you in love”. However, says John Paul, when a contraceptive technique is used, that language becomes a lie. The spouses are still saying with their bodies, “I give myself totally to you in love”, but in fact they are then deliberately withholding from each other a basic part of themselves, namely, their fertility. Now, I believe this argument contains valuable insights; but it is also rather abstractly philosophical, and in my experience it sounds convincing mainly to those Catholics who already accept the Church’s teaching against contraception and are happy to hear further confirmation of their belief. But while it’s good for “preaching to the choir”, so to speak, I confess to being rather doubtful as to whether it sounds too persuasive to those who don’t yet accept the Church’s teaching, or are having problems with it.
In my own pastoral experience of over thirty years as a priest, especially in preparing for marriage couples who are, let’s say, ‘unphilosophical’ and don’t have a high level of education, I have found that a more effective explanation is the one that personally convinced me and helped me become a Catholic not long after Paul VI issued his encyclical. Rather than appeal to the natural ends (or purposes) of marriage as a whole, as did the common traditional case against contraception, it zeroes in on the relative values of the unitive and procreative results of the fertile marriage act. Paul VI in HV did not clearly address this question: he said the unitive and procreative meanings of the conjugal act must never be separated; but did not enter into the question of the relative importance or value of the results of that act. Values were very important in the philosophy of the distinguished 20th-century Catholic scholar Dietrich von Hildebrand, and I think we can profitably emphasize them in this context. What follows is an outline of the way I have found it pastorally helpful to explain the Catholic and natural-law teaching against contraception:
Many or most acts of marital intimacy do not in fact result in conception. But let’s consider the case of a conjugal act which does generate a new life – the fertile conjugal act. This act has two main results: first, the beautiful physical and emotional gratification that the couple experience in that act of loving intimacy (the unitive result); and second, the new human life which begins as a result of it (the procreative result). Now, let’s ask ourselves, Which is the most important, or most valuable, of these two results? Surely it’s evident that the procreative result, the new human life that is conceived, is by far the most important. After all, the unitive experience of that particular act, while it is certainly very precious, valuable, and a wonderful part of God’s plan for marriage, is after all something transient: it comes and goes within twenty or thirty minutes. But the child conceived in that act is a whole new living being created in God’s image – a new human person endowed with immense dignity, who will live forever!
I don’t think I have ever encountered anything but agreement with that evaluation, among Catholics to whom I have explained Humanae Vitae in this way: the new child conceived from a fertile conjugal act is an even more important and valuable result than the beautiful experience enjoyed by the spouses in that act itself. And once we have that difference in value firmly in our minds, it becomes easy to see what’s wrong with contraception. A contracepted act deliberately suppresses and excludes the most important result that would otherwise have followed from that act, in the interests of the less important result. And that is clearly a corruption or perversion of the God-given gift of our sexuality. It inverts the values inscribed in that gift.
Let’s consider a couple of analogous examples: Imagine you gave your friend a large, beautifully printed and bound volume of Shakespeare’s plays as a gift, and later found out he was using it as a doorstop. Wouldn’t you be grieved and hurt by this deviant, base, use of such a gift? Or imagine your reaction if a priest were to invite you to his rectory for Christmas dinner, and on arriving at the dinner table you were stunned to find that alongside the turkey, ham and high quality chinaware were several gold and silver chalices to be used for drinks during dinner! This incredibly shallow-minded priest, it turns out, has brought them up from his sacristy, thinking these precious vessels would enhance the happy celebration. But of course, his values here are gravely disordered! Our spontaneous response as Catholics would of course be shock and revulsion at this sight: “Chalices are not meant for that!” – we’d think. This would in fact be a perverted use of these sacred vessels. That is, it would be using them for a lower, baser purpose than the proper use for which they are intended. Putting them out on the dinner table for drinking beer, wine or Seven-Up excludes the one and only proper purpose for which they are to be used: as vessels for the precious Eucharistic Blood of our Savior.
Likewise, because any contraceptive technique or device excludes the most precious, God-given result of the conjugal act – a new and immortal human person – it is a perversion, a debasement, of that act.
It’s also, objectively speaking, an act of defiance against the Creator of life himself, even if that’s not what the contracepting couple is usually thinking. It’s like putting up a “STOP” sign to God, saying in effect, “God, even though at this time of the month you may wish to create a new human being from our love, we say No. We’re putting up a barrier to your creative hand! We won’t allow you to enter in here!”
I’ve been a Catholic now for fifty-four years, having entered the Church in 1972, not long after HV was promulgated. Back in the early 1970s, when I was an increasingly dissatisfied Protestant searching for the fullness of Christian truth, these considerations helped me to see that the old white-clad man in the Vatican, whom just about everyone was denouncing because of his stand on birth control, was right after all! And that led me to ask what else he might be right about! This was also the time when ‘gay liberation’ (as it was then called) was picking up steam all over Western culture, with active homosexuals making out an increasingly vocal and aggressive case for their lifestyle. And I came to see that once we open the door to even one kind of genital act that by its very nature excludes all possibility of procreation, the way is logically opened up for justifying other kinds of intrinsically sterile sexual acts, such as masturbation, and sodomy between two persons of the same sex or even of opposite sexes. Today we are seeing that logic being worked out deplorably as the sexual revolution that began with the promotion of contraception in the early 20th century has taken its inevitable course.
Let us give thanks to God for Pope St. Paul VI’s courageous stand against the false wisdom of this world, and pray for the recovery and strengthening of marriage and family life that will depend on upholding and spreading his teaching against contraception in Humanae Vitae. Amen.
