Pro-life group launches Humanae Vitae Priests web site
Human Life International has launched a web site to help priests, deacons and seminarians teach and evangelize using Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae.
The site producers plan to supply offering reflections, commentaries, homily aids and solid practical resources for priests to preach about and defend Catholic teachings concerning marital love and contraception. The site is located at http://www.humanaevitaepriests.org/
According to John Mallon, director of HumanaeVitaePriests.org, the site will examine the "disastrous aspects of widespread contraception," including its "medical, sociological, hormonal, psychological, cultural, pastoral, spiritual, even environmental aspects." It will feature the commentary of special guest experts.
The site includes a special supplement from the magazine Inside the Vatican's 1998 issue commemorating the 30th anniversary of the encyclical. The free supplement, titled "A Prophecy for Our Time," includes interviews with Human Life International founder Father Paul Marx, Priests for Life president Father Frank Pavone, Dr. Janet Smith, and Dr. Alice von Hildebrand. It also contains a pastoral letter from Archbishop Charles Chaput and an article from then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before his election to the papacy.
"Our prayer is that this project will be a positive effort to spread the light and truth of God's plan for love, marriage and sexuality," said Mallon.
It is said that to truly receive a gift, one must be at rest. Keeping holy the Lord's Day, solemnly inscribed in the Third Commandment of the Decalogue, provides the premiere setting each week for the reclining of the soul and body in order to receive God's total gift of love - Christ in the Eucharist.
Date posted: 2008-10-09
When we think of these words from Our Lady of Fatima, "Russia will increase her errors" we can't help thinking of current events involving Russia's recent incursion into the Republic of Georgia, and indeed that is very worrisome, and involves, of course, oil.
Date posted: 2008-09-19
We hear so much today about the breakdown of the family and we see it right before our eyes. Where has the breakdown of the family come from? One reason is that parents today never had this valuable lesson given to them. The experience of a small family was something they grew up with and did not equip them as children to become responsible parents. Parents have to struggle with what they hear or read about responsible parenting instead of having lived and learned it.
Date posted: 2008-08-24
Justice and conjugal union are two topics rarely spoken of together. However, in his commentary detailing Pope John Paul II's teaching on God's loving plan for human sexuality, Christopher West reveals a surprising connection. He states that "since man and woman's relationship is the deepest substratum of the social structure, there can be no social justice without a return to the full truth of the Christian sexual ethic" (Theology of the Body Explained, Revised Edition, Pauline, p. 186). Further developing this thought, we can indeed discover the intimate connection between justice and nuptials.
Date posted: 2008-08-16
Paul VI was described as a prophet. At the time he seemed to be a martyr His letter on the transmission of human life was his finest hour. It did have an uncanny accuracy in light of the past forty years. He said that contraception harmed women (Humanae Vitae 17). People laughed at him. Forty years down the track various feminists agree with him. He argued that artificial birth control can be used by governments to impose population control. Vatican led struggles against population control at the UN Conference in the 1990's vindicated his stand. He was criticized for linking sterilization and abortion to contraception. But recent decades have revealed these three ugly sisters of a "culture of death" are inseparable. His teaching....
Date posted: 2008-08-06
It is no accident that Benedict XVI's first encyclical is entitled Deus Caritas Est, God is Love. In the encyclical, Benedict reminds us that "God's way of loving becomes the measure of human love."
Date posted: 2008-08-01
Humanae vitae, the papal encyclical "on the transmission of life," stands as a solid bulwark against the constant degradation of marriage and family in our modern age. Like Jesus, this teaching is indeed a "sign of contradiction" and even a reproach to those who wish to give human selfishness unbridled permission to wreak havoc on these divine institutions.
Date posted: 2008-07-24
OPTION 1: Focus on the message of the Gospel (The Parable of the Sower)
OPTION 2: Focus on the message of Romans ("The spirit comes to the aid of our weakness")
Date posted: 2008-07-17
One of Pope Benedict XVI's most interesting talks dealing with the problem of couples not having children came during an address to the Curia in December, 2006. In his remarks he said an astounding thing about his trip to Valencia, Spain for the Fifth World meeting on Families. He said, "The visit to Valencia became for me a quest for the meaning of the human being." How does the search for the meaning of the human being relate to married couples not wanting children? Answering this question will get to the root evil of contraception and related issues.
Date posted: 2008-07-09
Benedict XVI's comprehensive pastoral approach to so-called hard issues like contraception and related topics might astound many people. As a teacher and apostle he is second to none in his ability to proclaim the truth in a holistic fashion. Despite spending the majority of his adult life as an academic and Vatican official, the Holy Father is a master of evangelization not only to intellectuals but to the common man as well.
Date posted: 2008-07-06
The summer of "love". 1968. The hippy movement. Flower power. Free love. Anti-war protest. Love without responsibility. These were the vacuous slogans and "movements" that gave pseudo-mystical, pseudo-intellectual cover for a culture wide hedonistic holiday from reality.
Date posted: 2008-06-19
Human Life International is proud to announce the publication of our full Clergy Pledge of Assent to Humanae vitae which we would like every Catholic bishop, priest, deacon and seminarian in the world to sign! It is a veritable manifesto of priestly love for our beloved Magisterium, doctrine and priesthood. It is our desire and purpose to tell the world that we will not be silent about this encyclical or its teaching. Nor will we stand by idly when Pope Paul VI's predictions of cultural and spiritual degradation are manifesting themselves around us in broken marriages, devastated families and pernicious immorality.
Date posted: 2008-06-14
Pope Paul VI has been called a prophet for his intuitions expressed in the 1968 encyclical, Humanae vitae, about what would happen to society if contraception ever became widely used. But a "prophecy" is much more than just a prediction: it is really a view of reality and an assessment of what happens when the right order of things is snubbed.
Date posted: 2008-06-07
The "family planner's bible," Contraceptive Technology, (CT) provides the most critical piece of information that shows how condoms actually promote the spread of AIDS. According to a summary of fifteen studies using more than 25,000 condoms, CT found that they broke 4.63 percent of the time and slipped off 3.40 percent of the time, for a total of 8.03 percent. This means that, if a person uses a condom only ten times, he has a 57 percent chance of having at least one failure. After fifty uses, he has a 99 percent chance of having at least one failure and a 39% chance of having at least five failures. If he uses 100 condoms, a typical amount in one year, he will have at least one failure and has a 91 percent chance of having at least five failures. Yet, despite the clear evidence, the population controllers are still doing everything they can do defund abstinence programs and ramp up condom distribution.
Date posted: 2008-05-29
In 1968 when Humanae Vitae was released, there were great howls of protests from lay and clergy alike. The notion was that the Church was "behind the times" "out of touch" with the needs of married couples, lacking in compassion and so forth. In truth, it was the secular culture that was out of touch in its notion that the Church had to take her marching orders from the culture instead of vice-versa. On this issue as on many others the Church has been sadly vindicated, although many still do not recognize it.
Date posted: 2008-05-23
Couples who use contraception "'manipulate' and degrade human sexuality - and with it themselves and their married partner - by altering its value of 'total' self-giving. Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other." (John Paul II)
Date posted: 2008-05-09
A priest friend of mine, ordained within the last 12 years or so, told me that during his first parish assignment he dutifully preached on contraception, but immediately afterwards was "spoken to" by the pastor. The pastor ordered him "not to do that again," and muttered, "just watch the collection receipts go down."
Date posted: 2008-05-01
The first time that I noticed it was while preaching. I found it unsettling. Everyone was listening intently, their eyes riveted to me, hanging on my every word. "What is happening here; what am I saying that is so powerfully connecting with them?" It is not unusual in preaching to observe people drifting off, day-dreaming till the sermon was over. Now they were listening intently.
Date posted: 2008-04-28
Precisely when Humanae Vitae was being publicly rejected by many bishops and priests, scientists were enrolling their parishioners into the three landmark contraceptive studies of the 1960s finding excess suicides, neurotic depression, accidents, violence, sexual dysfunction, divorce, and other problems among "pill" users. Investigators attributed these bad outcomes not to altered biochemistry but rather to contraception itself - i.e., the precise behavior these pastors should have consistently condemned.
Date posted: 2008-04-28
When people tell me they like the Catholic Church but "disagree" with many of her teachings, I tell them they have the cart before the horse. It's hard to be faithful to a spouse you've never met.
Date posted: 2008-04-28
In their issue of February 11, 2008, Newsweek magazine carried a column in which the author unwittingly shed a great deal of light on a glaring problem in the Church today. Namely, the ignorance of the Catholic Faith by otherwise educated Catholics. It is a clear case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, or to bring it back to the words of Jesus, "Beware of the learned and the wise, they will lead you astray."
Date posted: 2008-04-26
In Persona Christi, the priest stands for the Bridegroom in ministering to His Bride, the Church. In bringing new life to the Bride in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, he acts in a husbanding role and as a father. He cultivates.
Date posted: 2008-04-26
You are on the front line of battle ministering to the broken families, the abused women and girls (and boys), the abandoned wives (and husbands), single people having difficulty finding spouses, and just plain lonely people, all suffering from what Paul VI predicted would be "a general lowering of morality," HV, No. 17).
Date posted: 2008-04-26
It is HLI's mission, then, to address the root cause of abortion by challenging contraception everywhere we can. You and I, consecrated men of the Church, are the stewards of the Church's long-standing teaching on contraception. We are the ones who must communicate and witness this teaching to our dear people, not only to help them avoid killing babies - that is, of course, fundamental - but more importantly, to help them avoid killing their very souls through the sin of contraception!
Date posted: 2008-04-24