The Peirasmòs of Humanae Vitae

In the most recent issue of FT, Mary Eberstadt candidly traces the cultural consequences of the birth-control mentality, foreseen and forewarned by Paul VI. Writing for the Catholic News Agency, James Francis Cardinal Stafford illuminates a different dimension of the forty-year-old story: the theological underpinnings to the controversy, both roots and consequences.

What went wrong and why did it matter?, he begins by wondering:

In a 1955 letter to a friend, Flannery O’Connor describes the significance of the virtue of purity for many Catholics at that time. “To see Christ as God and man is probably no more difficult today than it has been . . . . For you it may be a matter of not being able to accept what you call a suspension of the law of the flesh and the physical, but for my part I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and physical reality really are, then I will know what God is. We know them as we see them, not as God sees them. For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church places on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. I have always thought that purity was the most mysterious of the virtues, but it occurs to me that it would never have entered human consciousness if we were not to look forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh and spirit united in peace, in the way they were in Christ. The resurrection of Christ seems the high point in the law of nature.” O’Connor’s theology with its remarkably eschatological mark anticipates the teaching of the II Vatican Council, “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light” ( Gaudium et Spes 22).
. . .

I came across an idea which was elliptical: the gift of love should be allowed to be fruitful. These two fixed points are constant. This simple idea lit up everything like lightning in a storm. I wrote about it more formally to the Cardinal [Shehan]: the unitive and procreative meanings of marriage cannot be separated. Consequently, to deprive a conjugal act deliberately of its fertility is intrinsically wrong. To encourage or approve such an abuse would lead to the eclipse of fatherhood and to disrespect for women. Since then, Pope John Paul II has given us the complementary and superlative insight into the nuptial meaning of the human body. Decades afterwards, I came across an analogous reading from Meister Eckhart: “Gratitude for the gift is shown only by allowing it to make one fruitful.”

As Stafford goes on to narrate sorrowfully, the rejection of this Christian anthropology—divorcing body and soul, fertility and unity, man and God—did not only harm families and couples. It also proved to be a great peirasmòs , or trial, for the Church herself, a trial analogous to the physical violence of the 1968 riots: “Ecclesial dissent can become a kind of spiritual violence in its form and content. A new, unsettling insight emerged. Violence and truth don’t mix. When expressive violence of whatever sort is inflicted upon truth, the resulting irony is lethal.”

The fruit of the post- Humanae Vitae dissent (a dissent formulated before many bishops and priests had even read the encyclical) was bitter indeed, and it remains with us. But Stafford ends with a message of hope. “You desire proof that Christ is speaking in me,” St. Paul wrote to his Christian Corinthian dissenters. “He is not weak in dealing with you, but is powerful in you. For he was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we are weak in him, but in dealing with you we shall live with him by the power of God. Examine yourselves, to see whether you are holding to your faith. Test yourselves” (2 Cor 13: 3–5).

The peirasmòs of the Christian’s obedient trust inseparable from moral imagination is often painful. But it bears good fruit, too—the fruit of the Cross. As Stafford concludes: “The rupture of the violent death of Jesus has changed our understanding of the nature of God. His Trinitarian life is essentially self-surrender and love. By Baptism, every disciple of Jesus is imprinted with that Trinitarian water-mark. The Incarnate Word came to do the will of him who sent him. Contemporary obedience of disciples to the Successor of Peter cannot be separated from the poverty of spirit and purity of heart modeled and won by the Word on the Cross.”