Our Sunday Visitor had a fine article by Russell Shaw looking at the background and issuance of the Encyclical. It's a good round-up - we have excerpted the first and last paragraphs; hit the link for the full text.
Watershed Moment OSV | Newsweekly | July 27, 2008
In the last 100 years, eight popes have issued 116 of the teaching documents called encyclicals, on subjects ranging from the Sacred Heart to atheistic communism. Amid this outpouring of papal instruction, Humanae Vitae ("On Human Life"), Pope Paul VI's document on artificial birth control, is easily the most controversial and had the largest impact on the Church.
Whether Humanae Vitae was a prophetic document or a blunder remains in dispute. But 40 years after its issuance on July 25, 1968, it stands as a watershed in Catholic life.
Where fewer than one-third of American Catholics approved of artificial birth control in 1963 -- a rate less than half that among non-Catholics -- by 2005 three out of four Catholics believed it is possible to be a good Catholic, in the pollster's words, "without obeying the Church hierarchy's teaching on birth control."
In November 2006, the American bishops, speaking in a collective statement, called the common acceptance of contraception an "impoverished, even sad" view of sex.
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Pope Benedict XVI says he prefers to stress what is positive in Catholic doctrine to emphasizing prohibitions like the teaching on contraception. But his position on artificial birth control is clear.
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he wrote Father Curran in 1985 saying he could no longer teach as a "Catholic theologian" on the pontifical theology faculty of The Catholic University of America because of the "inherent contradiction ... that one who is to teach in the name of the Church in fact denies her teaching."
And last May, in an address to a conference on Humanae Vitae in Rome, he strongly defended the encyclical. "What was true yesterday remains true also today. The truth expressed in Humanae Vitae does not change," he said.
In a long interview with German journalist, published in the United States in 2002 as "God and the World" (Ignatius Press, $19.95), he expressed sympathy for people who sometimes fail in living up to the teaching on contraception. But he rejected the idea that the Church was causing human "misery" in this way.
"Misery comes from demoralizing society, not from moralizing it, and the condom propaganda is an essential part of this demoralizing," the pope-to-be declared.
Pope Paul VI made much the same point. It was no surprise, he said in Humanae Vitae, for the Church to find itself in the role of a "sign of contradiction" -- after all, Christ also was one of those. But that, he insisted, was "no reason for the Church to abandon the duty entrusted to her of preaching the whole moral law firmly and humbly, both the natural law and the law of the Gospel."
The Church's duty hasn't changed in 40 years. There is no reason to think it will.
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