By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Dr. Janet Smith, distinguished professor of theology and one of America’s most valiant defenders of Humanae Vitae, sat down with us recently at the Population Research Institute’s Humanae Vitae Project.
How is the encyclical doing after 53 years?
The good news is, the worst is behind us, “For the most part, it’s been ignored by the priests and the hierarchy over the years,” Dr. Smith reports. And that means that many among the laity have never heard of it.
Why? “They haven’t been taught by the priests and the hierarchy.”
Nonetheless, Dr. Smith senses the promise of a revival of the Church’s teaching on family, sex, and marriage.
On the practical level alone, many women now realize that the pill is an abortifacient, and that messing with hormones can be dangerous.
Add to that the damage that the contraceptive mentality can inflict on a relationship, and more women are thinking twice. “She might get pregnant!” “He might get me pregnant!”
“Maybe it’s better to be faithful to Church teaching after all. Living in accord with God’s will always has its benefits,” Smith says.
For fifty years, seminary professors like Charles Curran told future priests that Humanae Vitae would soon be overturned, Smith said, so it’s not surprising that many priests have never bothered to preach on it. But today, seminaries are doing a much better job. Most of them now have a “largely faithful faculty, which is a novelty in the last 50 years,” she tells us.
Why Is Humanae Vitae A “Hard Teaching”?
In spite of its truths on every level, “it’s still a hard teaching,” Dr. Smith says, “because everything in the culture is against it. Even priests who honor the encyclical often avoid teaching it. In fact, in church these days, there’s virtually no moral teaching given from the pulpit. You generally hear, ‘be nice and be kind’.”
But priests who do dare to preach on the subject are often pleasantly surprised at the reception they receive
“Sure, some are mad, but others say, ‘Father, I’ve never heard that, thank you’.”
Smith doesn’t hesitate to point out the obvious when it comes to the cohabiting craze.
“Many young people have a hard time with this, of course, because no one has ever told them that it’s wrong. Parents don’t want to alienate their children,” she says, “but they need simply to say, ‘I brought you into this world to bring you into Heaven. And what you’re doing now is not easing your way into Heaven’.”
While parents are the “first teachers” of their children, we still can ask our priests for help. “We can gently suggest to them that they help us spread the word,” she says — and then volunteer to give them all the help they might need. Buy the pamphlets, offer to put them in the shelves by the entrance, and keep them supplied. You do all the work.
And that goes for other moral challenges as well. For instance, “the Church’s teaching on homosexuality is not hard to get, once you understand that sexuality means the complementarity of male and female, to be able to show complete love to each other.”
And since sex is for procreation, “the homosexual sexual relationship doesn’t fit in that picture at all. So the benefits of speaking on this particular teaching are widespread.”
Consider: “If sex belongs within marriage, people will prepare better for marriage, they won’t cohabit. If it’s for procreation, people will understand what a great gift babies are.”
And pornography? “It’s a difficult issue because the culture is saturated in it, but people who are living this teaching become very reverential towards everything involved in the sexual relationship. It is really a great gift from God that should be treasured and reverenced.”
Summing it up, Smith says, “I just wish young people would open their eyes, look around, and see who’s happy and who’s unhappy. They’ll see that if they look at people who have been faithful to the Church’s teaching and are having large families. I go to a Traditional Latin Mass now, and the pews are just filled with people who have had large families or people who are starting their families. When you watch them, you say, ‘wow,’ I mean, it’s hard, obviously, a lot of responsibility. And that’s what makes adults out of people — responsibility.”
“But the fact is, these kids are looking out for each other. The older ones take care of the younger ones. And the parents who have the younger kids, sure, it’s hard to keep them still. But there’s just this pride, that I’m doing something meaningful with my life. And I have these adorable children who it’s my responsibility to help grow up to adulthood.”
As St. John Paul II put it, it’s all about “Love and Responsibility.” That’s the challenge — and the gift — of Humanae Vitae.
Biden’s Justice Inaugurates Mengele Project
“Catholic Joe” Biden’s team disagrees.
On August 28, 2019, the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a notice of violation against the University of Vermont Medical Center (UVMMC) after it violated federal law by forcing a nurse to assist in an elective abortion, despite her well-known objections to abortion.
HHS declared that UVMMC’s actions violated the (Sen. Frank Church, D., Idaho) Church Amendments, passed unanimously by Congress, which have been a component of federal conscience protections since 1973. The Amendments, sponsored by Idaho’s Democrat Sen. Frank Church, prohibit HHS grant recipients from discriminating against healthcare personnel who “refused to perform or assist in the performance of…[an] abortion on the grounds that his performance or assistance in the performance of the procedure or abortion would be contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions.”
According to the 2019 HHS report, “UVMMC not only violated one nurse’s conscience rights, but it kept policies in place that explicitly required members with conscience objections to participate in procedures to ‘ensure that patient care is not negatively impacted’.” HHS found that the hospital scheduled approximately 10 nurses who had registered conscience objections to assist with approximately 20 abortion procedures.
When UVMMC refused HHS’s demand to comply with the law, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued UVMMC on December 16, 2020, for violating the Church Amendments.
However, last month “Catholic Joe” Biden’s appointees at HHS revoked its notice of violation, withdrew the referral, and requested that DOJ dismiss the lawsuit against UVMMC.
“The DOJ did in fact voluntarily dismiss the case on Friday, July 30, 2021,” according to an August 11 letter signed by 92 senators and members of Congress to Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Garland chose to make his move on a Friday afternoon in July — a “dead zone” often used to bury bad news — because he didn’t want the public to notice his defiance of the law or his zeal in forcing unwilling medical professionals to kill innocent children or lose their jobs.
Josef Mengele, the zealous “Angel of Death” who killed countless Jewish victims at Auschwitz, also forced prisoners with medical credentials to help him in his grisly experiments. Mengele was designated as a war criminal in 1945, but escaped from U.S. custody and spent 34 years eluding an international manhunt.
Obama used diktats to legalize illegal aliens with DACA and the notorious HHS Contraceptive Mandate. DACA has since been ruled unconstitutional and Biden has promised to reinstate the HHS Mandate.
But the lockdowns have added momentum to defiance of the law. Democrat governors, and now Biden, are going for broke across the board.
Will they be stopped? Or will they follow Mengele into a comfortable and peaceful retirement?
That is the challenge.
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