The Tuesday, July 3 edition of NPR’s “All Things Considered” celebrated the anniversary of the encyclical Humanae Vitae with the headline “50 Years Ago, The Pope Called Birth Control ‘Intrinsically Wrong.’” The story focuses on how the Church’s stance on contraception has led Catholics to contravene Church authority. Sources include a Jesuit at Boston College (whose Jesuitical charism enables him to twist the Thomistic insight that “‘bad law … breeds contempt for good law’”); a Georgetown researcher; a baby boomer puzzled by how contraception offends God; a millennial who equates NFP with “the ‘rhythm method’”; a divorced mother of seven; a divorced female lay minister; and a priest who finds the word “believe” problematic.
To believe NPR, pro-encyclical representatives have little to say for themselves: Mary Eberstadt is quoted in generalities, an archbishop talks about a desire to retain the Church’s “uniqueness,” and a lay Catholic is concerned about the dilution of an unspecified “‘message.’” But such “revisionist” views are, according to NPR, in evidence only among “some Catholic conservatives” reacting to “the move toward a more tolerant approach under Pope Francis.” The piece ends by noting that American Catholics mostly don’t accept the prohibition on contraception, and (according to the Georgetown researcher) “‘The American Catholic church is assimilating ever further into American culture.’”
It is hardly accidental that the piece ran a day before July 4: it reads like a veritable declaration of independence from Church teaching. Superficially, the main teaching in question is contraception. But disagreement about artificial birth control is not really the heart of the matter. What is at stake is a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the family.
For the NPRs of the world, the family is defined by the individuals who make it up. Every family, they argue, is like every person unique: “Let a thousand flowers bloom.”
On the other side, followers of Pope Paul VI share Leo Tolstoy’s belief that happy families are all alike. This does not imply that happy families fit a certain rigid structure, that they all practice the same hobbies, or include a certain number of children. Tolstoy’s axiom suggests rather that there are certain important factors upon which the happiness of a family depends. According to this viewpoint, while families possess their own unique cultures, a “family” must meet certain baseline criteria in order to be happy—and, to extend the principle, a family must meet a certain baseline definition in order to be a family at all. This view defines a family in the strict sense as a man and a woman who live together in a way such as is liable to produce children.
That is where the orthodox Catholic’s quarrel with NPR truly lies. That definition of family is the root matter in dispute when arguments about contraception, IVF, donor babies, divorce, abortion, polygamy, transgenderism, or gay marriage surface. Sister Lucia of Fatima wrote that “the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family." If she was correct, then NPR’s latest sally is but one of many in this long-drawn-out war.
But why is there a war at all?
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