Video from EWTN
Humanae Vitae: Blessed Pope Paul VI’s Prophetic Pro-Life Work
"This year (2018) marks 50 years since the release of “Humanae Vitae” – Fr. Anthony Roe of the Venerable English College in Rome puts the life-affirming document into context and our Catholic panelists, Matthew Bunson and Mary Rice Hasson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, tell us how Blessed Pope Paul VI’s work has proven to be prophetic." from the video introduction.
In the time in which we live human life is valued little by many, with abortions in the many millions each year, genocide and fear of the "other" we would do well to revisit Pope Paul VI document.
"Humanae Vitae" was Published in 1968
"One recurring theme in Pope Francis’s teaching is that human realities trump scholarly abstractions: “La realidad es superior a la idea.” His signature phrase about pastors who have the “smell of the sheep” is the folk version of this maxim. Cautions about “rigidity,” “empty rhetoric,” and getting “stuck in pure ideas” appear often in his work, and in that of his inner circle, too. What matters most are “the realities people face in their daily lives,” as Blase Cardinal Cupich put it in a speech at Cambridge recently.
Attention to “reality” is especially fitting as we mark this fiftieth anniversary year of one of the most famous, and infamous, encyclicals in church history. Ten years ago, on its fortieth anniversary, First Things published an essay of mine called “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae.” Citing contemporary evidence from many sources, including sociology, psychology, history, and contemporary women’s literature, I argued:
Four decades later, not only have the document’s signature predictions been ratified in empirical force, but they have been ratified as few predictions ever are: in ways its authors could not possibly have foreseen, including by information that did not exist when the document was written, by scholars and others with no interest whatever in its teaching, and indeed even inadvertently, and in more ways than one, by many proud public adversaries of the Church." from the article: THE PROPHETIC POWER OF HUMANAE VITAE