Meet Humanae Vitae’s Fiercest And Most Tenacious Defender

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

In February 1994, Pope John Paul II founded the Pontifical Academy for Life to “to study and provide information and training about the principal problems of law and biomedicine pertaining to the promotion and protection of life, especially in the direct relationship they have with Christian morality and the directives of the Church’s Magisterium.”
Members of the Academy did just that until 2016, when Pope Francis revised the organization’s founding documents and appointed Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia as the new president.
It didn’t take long for controversy to break out. In 2017, New Member Fr. Maurizio Chiodi, a new member of the Academy, wrote that Humanae Vitae is optional. It’s “an authoritative document, but with no claim to infallibility,” he said.
In 2019, Archbishop Paglia announced that “The Academy in particular is to become more and more a place of competent and respectful meeting and dialogue,” adding that “the term ‘life’ must be redefined, moving from an abstract conception to a ‘personal’ dimension. Life is people, men and women, both in the individuality of each person and in the unity of the human family.”
At the time, Paglia was involved in several controversies. He was accused of approving of Italy’s pro-abortion law, of decorating his cathedral with homosexual images, and of giving the Academy’s approval to the notion that Humanae Vitae was up for debate.
On July 11, 2022, the Academy’s official Twitter account sent the following message around the world:
“Be careful: what is dissent today, can change. It is not relativism, it is the dynamics of the understanding of phenomena and science: the Sun does not rotate around the Earth. Otherwise, there would be no progress and everything would stand still. Even in theology. Think about it.”
That same summer the Academy published Etica Teologica, a compendium of articles that embodied those “dynamics,” with several contributors arguing that contraception could be used by couples under some circumstances.
Faithful scholars worldwide objected, and last month, the Jerome Lejeune International Chair of Bioethics held a conference in Rome to reaffirm Humanae Vitae as the timeless magisterial teaching of the Church.

The Truth Expressed In
Humanae Vitae Does Not Change

Luis Cardinal Ladaria Ferrer, SJ, prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, delivered the opening address, a resounding defense of Humanae Vitae’s affirmation of the harmony of freedom and nature in the human person.
“The prophetic nature of the encyclical is grounded in the integral anthropological vision of what the truth of love, sexuality, and life means,” he continued. “Grounded on that understanding of the nature of man and marriage,” he said.
“For this reason, its message is still valid and relevant today,” he continued. “Pope Benedict XVI expressed it in these words: ‘What was true yesterday remains true today. The truth expressed in Humanae Vitae does not change; on the contrary, precisely in the light of new scientific discoveries, its teaching becomes more timely and provokes reflection on its intrinsic value’.”
Later in the same program, Dr. John Haas, professor of moral theology, St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, made a fascinating observation about an American reaction to the Episcopal Lambeth Conference’s approval of contraception in 1930:
The Washington Post, today considered one of the most liberal newspapers in the United States, said in an editorial: “The committee’s report if carried into effect would sound the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be ‘careful and restrained’ is preposterous” (March 22, 1931).
Evidently, The Washington Post is not infallible. Is Humanae Vitae?
Dr. Haas continued:
“Contraception always involves an act other than the marital act, and that other act is directed specifically against one of the goods (or ends) which actually make sense of the marital act, i.e., the procreative good, the child. The name of the act itself describes its malice; it is contra, against, the procreative good. Contraception is a chosen and willed act against a good inherent in the marital act in which a couple has chosen to engage.
“I am not suggesting that there is a slippery slope from contraception to abortion. I am maintaining that when one can morally justify the commission of an intrinsically evil act, we are already at the bottom of the slope and virtually any act can be justified. St. John Paul II was emphatic on this when he taught in Familiaris Consortio that there is a profound difference in the understanding of the nature of the human person between those who support contraception and those who accept Catholic teaching. The Pope wrote: ‘It is a difference which is much wider and deeper than is usually thought, one which involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and human sexuality’.”
Yes, Humanae Vitae is infallible.

Archbishop Paglia Chooses Both Sides

Perhaps inspired by the conference, Vatican News interviewed Archbishop Paglia a day later. After all, it was the errors of his carefully chosen members of the Academy that the speakers addressed their remarks. What is his view?
“Today we have to deal with rescuing both our planet and humanity as a whole,” the questioner said. “In this context, looking at Church teaching, what is your assessment of Humanae Vitae, 55 years after its publication?”
“As we have wisely come to understand, we have to continue interrogating Humanae Vitae for a deeper understanding of the connection that ties sexuality, married love and generation together, a connection made clearer by a personalist approach,” the archbishop answered.
The interviewer got specific: “In Article 14 of the Encyclical, Paul VI states that any action specifically intended to prevent procreation is not permissible. A prohibition that is considered to have created ‘distance’ between the faithful and the Magisterium. What is your opinion about it?”
“I am in agreement with every provision of Humanae Vitae,” the archbishop responded. “You will find no one who defends life more fiercely and tenaciously than I do.”
He then considers the issue in a broader context:
“In the Sixties, the ‘pill’ was considered a total evil. Today, we face even greater dangers. All human life is at risk if we don’t stop spiraling conflict, the arms race, if we don’t stop destroying the environment.”
Well, that was then, this is now. So “total evil” isn’t as bad as…as what?
Why, just use a “personalist approach”!

Magisterial Authority

As Jacques Maritain points out, “there are, at least, a dozen personalist doctrines, which, at times, have nothing more in common than the term ‘person.’ Some of them incline variously to one or the other of the contrary errors between which they take their stand. Some tend toward dictatorship, while others inclined towards anarchy. A principal concern of Thomistic personalism is to avoid both excesses.”
“It was natural [in the nineteenth century] that…the concept of the human person, incorporated as such into society, be opposed to both the idea of the totalitarian state and that of the sovereignty of the individual. In consequence, minds related to widely differing schools of philosophic thought and quite uneven and intellectual exactitude and precision have sensed in the notion and term of ‘person’ the solution sought,” Maritain writes.
So, for Archbishop Paglia, “personalist” can mean whatever he wants it to mean, with “at least a dozen” personalist paths to escape from the magisterial truth of Humanae Vitae. Why, there is a host of prudential and ideological distractions, and they’re “even worse”!
According to the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, by “interrogating Humanae Vitae for a deeper understanding” under the personalist lens will put its doctrine on a level of high desirability but not magisterial authority, since it is subordinate to “greater dangers” that must take center stage.
Meanwhile the “person” can subjectively dither while doctrine bows to ideological supremacy.