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Conference Will Celebrate Humanae Vitae Anniversary
All are invited to "Humanae Vitae Today: Co-Creating with God" on September 20
The fortieth anniversary of the landmark encyclical Humanae Vitae (On Human Life) of Pope Paul VI is being celebrated this year. Catholics are generally misinformed about the Church's teaching on birth control. In response, Sacred Heart Major Seminary has developed a one-day conference, "Humanae Vitae Today: Co-Creating with God," which will examine the encyclical's critical and prophetic teachings. The conference will be held at the seminary on Saturday, September 20, 2008, from 9:00 AM until 8:30 PM.
Who is it for?
Humanae Vitae Today: Co-Creating with God" will draw upon many sources to demonstrate the wisdom of Humanae Vitae: personal witness, social science studies, theology, philosophy and the experience of bishops as teachers. As Catholics become more enthusiastic about its principles, they will be able to reach out to their extended family, neighbors and friends, including non-Catholics, that a generous openness to life is a marvelous aid to becoming holy in addition to having a joy-filled and adventurous life!
The conference will be of immense value to those who are intending to marry and those who are married. It will help them to understand the vocation to marriage is a vocation to parenthood and that abstinence before marriage is a great preparation for marriage. They will come to understand that chastity within marriage is a great aid to a strong and satisfying marriage, as is recourse to natural methods of family planning.
Priests, seminarians and religious will understand more deeply how they can assist married couples to be faithful to their calling as co-creators with God. Many priests, seminarians and religious have found the Church's instruction on contraception to be an obstacle to their full commitment to the Church. When that obstacle is lifted, they often have a renewed and more zealous love for the Church as teacher.
What will you learn?
"Co-creating with God" refers to Pope John Paul II's repeated description of parents as "co-creators with God's creative love." Drawing upon the wisdom of Paul VI and Humanae Vitae, John Paul II stresses the fundamental principle that God creates out of love and that God has chosen spouses to be co-creators with him of new life. Our culture is ambivalent about children: we love them as parents naturally do but also find them to be a considerable burden and inconvenience.
The Church, on the other hand, understands children as a great gift from God and the vocation to parenthood to be one that reveals to man "his natural greatness." This conference will focus on how beneficial it is for those who engage in sexual intercourse to be consciously aware of the possibility that they will become parents. It will explain how contraception diminishes that awareness, whereas natural family planning preserves it.
Why is it now?
The Church customarily celebrates the fortieth anniversary of pivotal documents. The year Humanae Vitae was promulgated, 1968, was, in a myriad number of ways, a pivotal year, both for the secular world and the Church.
The phenomenon of dissent from Church teaching entered the public realm emphatically. A noteworthy example is when Fr. Charles Curran held a press conference on the steps of the Catholic University of America within twenty-four hours of Humanae Vitae and announced to lay Catholics they were free to disregard the document since it was based on an "inadequate understanding of natural law."
And, in fact, for forty years, Catholics have largely done so and matched the alarming rate of the rest of the culture of engaging in premarital sex, abortion and divorce. Pope Paul VI predicted in his encyclical that if contraception became widely used there would be a "general decline in morality." Few can deny that that has happened.
On the other hand, some in the Church have embraced and promoted the teachings of Humanae Vitae. Certainly John Paul II could not have done more in his pre-papal writings and in his pontificate to support the encyclical. His great book Love and Responsibility, written in 1959, and his whole series of talks known as the "Theology of the Body" contain profound and innovative defenses of the ethics of Humanae Vitae. His grand encyclical Evangelium Vitae acknowledged that a contraceptive mentality has been a seedbed for the culture of death.
Some bishops, theologians, and lay people have worked hard to relay the wisdom of Humanae Vitae to the faithful. Where Catholics have accepted this teaching, they have reaped the great rewards of more stable marriages, stronger families and stronger faith.
All are invited
Sacred Heart Major Seminary hopes through this conference to give witness to our confidence that human experience and divine wisdom demonstrate the truth of Humanae Vitae. Featuring seven nationally known speakers on life issues, it is aimed at those who already embrace the document and wish to understand it more deeply, and to those who are skeptical about it.
Although this is a one-time event, we hope it will bear lasting fruit in the lives of those who attend.
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