July 30, 1968

The close of last week's Natural Family Planning Awareness Week (July 19 - 25) was marked by the 47th anniversary of Humanae Vitae.  Toward the close of that prophetic encyclical, Pope Paul VI spoke directly to priests:

"28. And now, beloved sons, you who are priests, you who in virtue of your sacred office act as counselors and spiritual leaders both of individual men and women and of families—We turn to you filled with great confidence. For it is your principal duty—We are speaking especially to you who teach moral theology—to spell out clearly and completely the Church's teaching on marriage. In the performance of your ministry you must be the first to give an example of that sincere obedience, inward as well as outward, which is due to the magisterium of the Church.... if men's peace of soul and the unity of the Christian people are to be preserved, then it is of the utmost importance that in moral as well as in dogmatic theology all should obey the magisterium of the Church and should speak as with one voice...."

Tomorrow will mark the 47th anniversary of the shameful Statement of Dissent to Humanae Vitae, orchestrated  by Father Charles Curran and about 600 co-signers.  In our time, how are we to interpret the widespread and deafening silence to NFP Awareness Week and the anniversary of  Humanae Vitae in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the Diocese of Trenton?

"Celebrate and reverence God's vision of human sexuality" (USCCB, 1993).‏

Especially over the next two weekends, please incorporate the USCCB's suggestions for bulletins, homilies, and prayers of the faithful, in proclaiming the USCCB's Natural Family Planning Awareness Week (July 19 - 25): 

"It is clear in the Scriptures that God looks at the world and human life differently from human beings with their limited vision....He willed to share with women and men a unique role in his creative generativity which makes human sexuality unique in all creation. It is this uniqueness revealed to us by God in the gradual unfolding of his salvific plan, that Pope Paul VI invoked in his prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae....

"Spouses are called to celebrate their conjugal love by becoming one flesh in the Lord, and to see their sexual intimacy in the context of God's creative role and the nature of marriage itself. By remaining open to life each time they come together in the conjugal embrace, by preserving 'the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning' (HV 12), married couples reverence the presence of God in their union....

"With proper instruction, married couples can readily understand the cycle of fertility and they are able to plan and space births in a way that is both consistent with God's law and supportive of their own intimacy and unity....

"Humanae Vitae represents a call to celebrate and reverence God's vision of human sexuality" (USCCB, Human Sexuality from God's Perspective, 1993)."