The irony of this connection is just too much for me. Humanae Vitae, one of the greatest works on the dignity of the human person, is altogether overlooked even by Catholics, while polls show the majority of Catholics in America are 'for artificial insemination as well as contraception'.I'm reminded of a woman I once met who was a 'serious Catholic' and yet worked in a fertility clinic promoting un-natural fertility and yet denying the natural. She had never read Humanae Vitae. Sure, she personally hated abortion. Sure, she would never advocate euthanasia. She herself didn't see the harm in promoting life through In Vitro Fertilization, but wouldn't do it herself. She personally got nearly everything right, but like most who pass the big stuff and miss the minor points, missed what Humanae Vitae didn't: personhood and its consequent relationship to contraception.
As soon as contraception is introduced into society, SO IT GOES, so does human dignity. Allow the Pill and soon you'll be aborting the young and killing the elderly. They are invalid. Invalid in the sense of GATTACA. Make the control over fertility commonplace, and then people become a commodity. That is where we're at today. We weren't in 1968, at least not quite.
And the Church knows that DISSENT FROM THE TEACHINGS of Humanae Vitae is at the root of many of our problems today. According to Cardinal James F. Stafford:
"The deadliest thing to hit the Catholic in the last 40 years, he says, was not the encyclical which reiterated the Church's stand against contraception - but the dissent from it."Catholics the world over would do themselves a great favor by reading and internalizing Humanae Vitae. And then maybe we'd be back in the driver's seat when it comes to directing the world in human dignity issues, rather than being those freaks who listen to pedophiles on the weekend and get artificially inseminated during the week. And then we might have fewer pedophiles and women infertile because of long term contraceptive use.
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