“Do you not know that your bodies
are members of Christ? ..the
immoral person sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy
Spirit within you… Therefore glorify God in your body.”
As every scripture scholar acknowledges, St. Paul is here warning the
Corinthians about a particular type of sin – sexual immorality that was so
rampant at the time in Corinth
I read an article this week not even preparing for this homily, but it
ended up talking about how this letter from Paul to the Corinthians that we
have this weekend was the FIRST sexual revolution – a preaching to Corinth a
way of viewing sexuality which would have been almost completely foreign to
them and the rest of the world
There is a certain basic reality that St. Paul is speaking to that makes
Catholicism unique in so many ways – the idea that each of us have a body and a soul and that our
bodies and souls are not a ghost and a machine
Virtually no one else holds the classic Catholic understanding of the
body and soul relationship.
1)
Some go really far towards the bodily and material: “all that is real is
what is the physical world”
2)
Others go too far to the spiritual: “everything that matters is only on
the spiritual realm and what we see around us, all that is “bodily” is bad or
is an illusion”
3)
and most everyone else has the problematic view that body and soul are real
but almost completely unrelated – “I can do with my body whatever I want, and
my soul will remain unharmed. And I can
do whatever I want on the spiritual plane, it will not affect me bodily”
That’s why St. Paul URGES the Corinthians: “Glorify God IN YOUR BODY!”
2018 is the
50th Anniversary of the most talked about encyclical of all time: Humanae
Vitae
It too, like
St. Paul to the Corinthians, seeks to speak to humanity about the importance of
keeping the body and soul together.
A central
idea of the encyclical is that in married love, the coming together of spouses
(the unitive dimension of married love) must always be linked, in every act, to
the procreative dimension of married love (the openness to life)
The Church
has always condemned contraceptives that, in a physical way, intervened in
married love, but a new question arose with the advent of the birth control
pill. Would it be permissible for
marriages to allow a chemical form of birth control?
Pope Paul VI
wrote the encyclical, then, and ruled that no, couples could never use chemical
means of birth control either, that chemicals also serve to sever the unitive
and procreative – the body and the soul of marriage
Pope Francis
reaffirmed all the teachings of Humanae Vitae last year with his letter Amoris
Laetitia (paragraph 80, among others)
What I’d
like to look at for the moment is the prophetic nature of Humanae Vitae. It is probably the most prophetic Church
document of all time
Humanae
Vitae made 4 predictions if use of the contraceptive pill became widespread in
our wider culture:
1)
An increase
in marital unfaithfulness and a general lowering of morality
a.
Would anyone
deny that over the last 50 years that has happened?
b.
In 1968 he
was mocked for worrying about this, but only a couple of years after the
contraceptive pill was legalized in the United States, the divorce rate
doubled, some of those divorces caused BY infidelity
2)
Objectification
of women
a.
Again, many
in 1968 would have asked what the worry is about?
b.
In the wake
of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and so forth, would anyone deny this now? With pornography being the number one thing
the internet is used for, would anyone question his prophecy now?
3)
Governments
would begin to use contraception and encourage it on their populations
a.
Surely in
1968 people probably thought he was crazy
b.
In 2018,
when China and other countries have done this for years
c.
In 2018 when
our own country and Canada and others have been guilty at times of tying our
foreign aid to countries only if they are distributing to their people
contraception. As Mary Eberstadt rightly
noted: “This spectacle of pale people in increasingly barren societies
telling certain other people not to have their own children is going to look
grotesque in history’s rear view mirror” Mary Eberstadt
d.
In 2018,
when the Little Sisters of the Poor are still in appeals courts and are
currently required to pay for contraception for people, would anyone call Pope
Paul VI crazy now?
4)
People would
begin thinking they have total dominion over their bodies
a.
In 1968 –
what does that even mean?
b.
In 2018,
when people say that if you are male, but you think you are female, then you
are – that merely thinking something in your mind is enough – would anyone say
that in 2018 Pope Paul VI was off the mark?
These 4
predictions – to those who mocked them 50 years ago today, Paul VI might say
today “you mocked me 50 years ago, but can you hear me now?”
St. Paul
said the body and the soul are one, nothing can come between them
Pope Paul
said the body and soul of a marriage are one, nothing can come between them
Bishop
Fulton Sheen put it this way “Nothing is more psychosomatic that the union of
two in one flesh; nothing so much alters a mind, a will, for better or for
worse. The separation of soul and body
is death. THOSE WHO SEPARATE SEX AND SPIRIT ARE REHEARSING FOR DEATH.”
As we think
about these warnings of Paul VI in Humanae Vitae, the warnings about separating
body and soul in married love, we of course have likely heard about those who
have, over the last 50 years, not given their assent to the teaching. But St. John Paul II said the following –
“Humanae Vitae’s teaching on Contraception does not belong to matter that can
be freely disputed among theologians. To
teach the contrary is equivalent to leading the moral conscience of spouses
into error.” Address of June 5, 1987
Solution put
forward by Humanae Vitae – Natural Family Planning
Again, just
as the proof of the accuracy of Paul VI’s predictions are obvious and apparent,
equally impressive are the positive statistics of those who utilize Natural
Family Planning that Humanae Vitae proposed
1)
Natural
Family Planning has a success rate of 97-99% for those who discern that they
ought to abstain during fertile windows for the time being for various reasons
discover in prayer before God.
2)
The divorce
rate for couples using NFP is between 1-3%
May our
world recapture the Christian vision of human persons as embodied souls, may we
recognize the link between our bodies and souls, and thus begin again to
affirm, as a culture, that our bodies are Temples of the Holy Spirit, and we
are called, by Paul in today’s reading and also called by the Church in all Her
teachings, we are called to glorify God in our bodies.
May we again be people who are able to say, in different ways, to all those we are called to love, may we say what Christ says to those HE loves: "This is my Body, given up for you!"
Read humanae vitae by clicking HERE
What to learn more about Natural Family Planning? Click HERE
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