It's an anniversary more important than you might think.

This summer marks 50 years since the publication of Pope Paul VI's encyclical, Humanae Vitae, the document clarifying the Catholic Church's opposition to artificial contraception. Both hated and hallowed, it signifies a watershed. As with other half-century cultural anniversaries marking all that happened in 1968, this very brief papal document shaped our epoch too, as much as anything, pitching battles still fought.

The birth control question was controversial since first posed, and Paul VI had removed it from discussion at the Second Vatican Council, putting it rather to a select commission of theologians, doctors and married couples. However, when the commission recommended the church modify its stance, the pope instead reasserted the traditional Augustinian understanding of marriage with its classic ordering of the goods and ends of sex. Against the counsel of experts, the pope practiced that mystical sort of stubbornness that belongs to successors of Peter, standing against the world and much of the church, too.

It was, and remains, a viscerally unpopular papal pronouncement. Seeing himself the guardian of not just tradition but also natural truth, Paul VI stood alone against many, provoking what one theologian called "theological anger," as I said, not just from the world, but from many of the faithful. The encyclical inaugurated a bitter season in the church. In some ways, after Humanae Vitae, Paul VI's papacy never was the same, his ministry more reticent, some would say depressed.

Strained cultural shifts: remembering everything else that happened in 1968, the anniversary of Humanae Vitae highlights how in just a half-century so much has changed. Global politics, civil rights, economics, sex and biology, everything: so much of what began in 1968 is still unfolding, the fires of riots from Watts to Paris to Prague still, in a sense, burning. The Catholic Church's lonely hold of many of its views on sex and marriage, abortion, and now gender, and so much else, testify to the vast cultural difference 50 years makes, that things aren't as they once were, profoundly so.

But about sex and biology, and related matters, the genre of Humanae Vitae, what exactly is different? The question isn't leading; I don't want to argue the Catholic position here. Rather, I want to highlight the observable fact that now ours is a culture that sees things like sex and marriage, family and children differently. But how?

Once woven into a natural and sacramental sense of things, sex is now thought a construct, the sexual act an exchange, an emotive commodity. Also, the bonds of family, thinned out by capitalist ideologies of will, now command far less respect, what the ancients called pietas. And also, although once thought unlawful, today terminating the life of an unborn child in its mother's womb (call it a fetus if you want) is now thought a right to be protected by the state.

And it's a difference that has forced a divergence, for some a divorce, between many who identify as Catholics and the teaching of the Catholic Church itself. See Ireland for what's true, undoubtedly, not only there but all over the world: a laity profoundly shaped by something other than the thinking of the Catholic Church, voting to liberalize abortion restrictions to which, in theory, no Catholic should object.

Again, offering no assessment, I only note what I think an observable fact: that cultural Catholicism has become untenable; that more and more, except for the privileged who can still afford to blur lines, the choice between Catholicism and conventional cultural morality has become too stark to ignore, more and more a choice between Nietzsche or Jesus Christ. And, of course, it's a choice for non-Catholics too, and that's because it's nature we're talking about, not something merely religious.

But what next? For those for whom faith matters ethically, for whom ancient wisdom still holds, what's the next step? It's that Christians obviously need to convert themselves before trying to convict and convert the world, persuading themselves again what they believe before trying to persuade politicians or win elections.

Paul Claudel, that political and poetic French Catholic, said once, "It is not from the mote from one's neighbor's eye that the house of God can be built, but with the beams one takes out of one's own." The last 50 years, the chasm between Christian thought and the world's imagination has only widened; all while Christians, Catholics especially, have mostly played ignorant of the irreconcilables. A half-century since Humanae Vitae, too many Christians simply don't know Christianity, bereft not just of the barest facts of the faith, but more and more its fundamental moral instincts.

And that's the problem. Touching matters like abortion and neglect of children, for example, it was Mother Teresa who said, "But that is not the way for us; our way is to preserve life, the life of Christ in the life of the child." For her, such judgment was instinctive, second nature. Which is precisely what's gone, instinctive morality, erased collectively by an innumerable mass of Catholics who haven't thought seriously about the faith since they were children.

This is also precisely where we Catholics should begin if we truly want to promote a culture of life, if we want to win arguments again. Not with our declared enemies, but with ourselves and with our own ignorance. Which is the more daunting task.

Joshua J. Whitfield is pastoral administrator for St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and a frequent contributor to The Dallas Morning News. Email: jwhitfield@stritaparish.net

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