Married
love, therefore, requires of husband and wife the full awareness of their
obligations in the matter of responsible parenthood, which today, rightly
enough, is much insisted upon, but which at the same time should be rightly
understood. Thus, we do well to consider responsible parenthood in the light of
its varied legitimate and interrelated aspects.
With
regard to the biological processes, responsible parenthood means an awareness
of, and respect for, their proper functions. In the procreative faculty the
human mind discerns biological laws that apply to the human person.
With
regard to man's innate drives and emotions, responsible parenthood means that
man's reason and will must exert control over them.
With
regard to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible
parenthood is exercised by those who prudently and generously decide to have
more children, and by those who, for serious reasons and with due respect to
moral precepts, decide not to have additional children for either a certain or
an indefinite period of time.
Responsible
parenthood, as we use the term here, has one further essential aspect of
paramount importance. It concerns the objective moral order which was
established by God, and of which a right conscience is the true interpreter. In
a word, the exercise of responsible parenthood requires that husband and wife,
keeping a right order of priorities, recognize their own duties toward God,
themselves, their families and human society.
From
this it follows that they are not free to act as they choose in the service of
transmitting life, as if it were wholly up to them to decide what is the right
course to follow. On the contrary, they are bound to ensure that what they do
corresponds to the will of God the Creator. The very nature of marriage and its
use makes His will clear, while the constant teaching of the Church spells it
out.
Pope
Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, 10
Reflection –
‘Responsible parenthood’
is one of the key phrases of the encyclical, one which is necessary to
understand what the Church is teaching. It is worth pausing to parse out
exactly what this phrase means.
The two
antitheses of this phrase would be irresponsible parenthood and autonomous
parenthood. The first is obvious—the Church does not present a model of
reproduction where couples simply exercise their fertility without a care in
the world. We are not animals who couple and mate randomly or in simple accord
with their instinctive drives. Human sexuality is wholly taken up into and is
meant to be lived in accordance with, human rationality and relationality.
The Church is,
in other words, in favor of ‘birth control’ and of ‘planned parenthood’,
reading those two phrases according to the strict letter of the law. This is
quite different of course from being in favor of Planned Parenthood, which is
the single biggest abortion provider in North America and has the blood of
countless human beings on its hands.
But for a
couple to plan their family, to be making rational, careful decisions about
when it is time to welcome another child and when it is not that time, and to
order their sexual lives as a couple accordingly to whether or not it is that
time—this is deeply responsible parenthood, and the Church not only ‘approves’
that (horrible word, and not ours), but simply states that this is part of the
dignity and grace of state of husband and wife in the vocation of marriage.
Responsible
parenthood is different, however, from autonomous parenthood, and that is what
the Pope is getting at in the last bit here. ‘Responsible’ implies ‘response’,
and response implies that one is living one’s life in a dialogue with an other.
In this case, it is an Other. In short, responsible parenthood is one vital
element of how a Christian called to the vocation of marriage lives out his or
her call to discipleship, to conformation to the will of God, to obedience to
God.
The Church has
no interest whatsoever in stepping into that dialogue, into that individual
path of discipleship. That is why the Church does not go into great details
about when or why couples might choose to not have a child or to have another
child. This is between them and God, and nothing and no one can interfere in
that discernment.
But it is,
indeed, between them… and God. In all of our lives, whatever our vocation is,
there is this God, this Other, this One who continually calls us to greater
heights of love and generosity, greater openness to serve and surrender and
follow and trust. Every Christian, without exception, is called to the pattern,
height, depth of love that is revealed and given to us by the death of Jesus on
the Cross. Every Christian is called to be that kind of lover, that kind of
disciple, be he a priest, a religious, a husband, a wife, a single person in
the world—all of us trying to make some kind of muddled sense of how each of us
is supposed to become that living offering of love through, with, and in Jesus.
The whole
matter then, of fertility within marriage and the difficult questions of how
many children when, cannot be rightly answered from a Christian point of view
apart from this fundamental awareness of who we are, who we all are, as
disciples of Him whose own ‘openness to life’ brought him to the Cross, and
whose fruitfulness in love involved a pretty bloody and difficult disposition
of his body and his person towards his spouse.
All of this—everything
the encyclical has said and that I have written as commentary—sets the stage
then for where we will go tomorrow, when the Pope will reiterate the teachings
of the Church on the question of artificial contraception and it moral status
within marriage. Talk to you then. But remember—the Church’s teaching in
Humanae Vitae 12 makes no sense, and can make no sense whatsoever, outside of
this context established and expressed with great beauty and depth in HV 1-11.
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