The Prophecy Part 1

One of the arguments I often hear from contracepting Catholics is that they think the Church's teaching is archaic and outdated. It seems that they justify their actions with the belief that eventually the Church will join the rest of the world that seems to believe that the birth control pill is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The fact is that few Catholics or Protestants have any idea of the history of contraception in Christianity. It would probably come as a shock to most people that ALL Christian denominations condemned all forms of birth control until 1930, when the Anglican church made an exception to this rule saying that contraception was okay only in grave circumstances.

This opened the door to people beginning to rethink their ideas about family planning methods across the country, and then the contraceptive pill was released in 1960. However, contraception remained illegal in some parts of the country until 1965 with the case Griswold vs. Connecticut when the Supreme Court ruled that couples had a right to marital privacy in this area of their lives. (This right to privacy was later used as precedent in the legalization of abortion, but that is a whole other post.)

At this point, Catholics fully expected the Catholic Church to move with the times and change her teaching on contraception, and they anxiously awaited the big announcement. Even many of the priests and bishops felt that it was only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, the Vatican was pulling together a panel of highly respected doctors, scientists, and moral ethicists to research the contraceptive pill so that the Church could fully understand how it worked and determine if it could possibly be used without violating the Church's teaching on sexuality and the dignity of the human person.

Perhaps the pill simply helped to regulate a woman's cycle making it easier to use the Rhythm Method... not so.

What they found is that the primary function of the pill is to suppress ovulation, and just in case a pesky egg managed to escape, the pill also changed the lining of the uterus to prevent implantation of any fertilized ovum essentially flushing away any new life that was formed. (It still works this way, and few women are aware that they are potentially aborting their tiny babies each month.)

Both of these modes of operation absolutely worked against the dignity of the human person, and absolutely could not be condoned by the Church.

So in 1968, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae, and it dropped like a bomb on the world.

Stay tuned for part 2!