Forty Years of Proof

Spirituality Column #93
August 19, 2008
Current in Carmel, Westfield (IN) newspapers

Forty Years of Proof
By Bob Walters

In July 1968, forty years ago, Pope John XXIII issued the Humanae Vitae (Human Life) encyclical letter outlining the Roman Catholic Church’s position against, and its predicted long-term negative social affects of, contraception (i.e., “The Pill”).

Two months later in September 1968, Paul R. Erhlich, a butterfly specialist, published one of the leading bestsellers of modern times, The Population Bomb, a book outlining – in the most draconian, fear-mongering language imaginable – that hundreds of millions of humans would die in the 1970s and 1980s because of overpopulation and food shortages.

The one was a document of long-held Church disciplines and wisdom, and the other a collection of 1960s socio-science platitudes.

Wanna’ guess which one proved to be almost pure, accurate prophecy, and which one was pure dupe?

Humanae Vitae, in 1968, predicted bad times ahead if the sex act, intercourse, was mentally and morally separated from pro-creation. The document foresaw, in varying degrees of specificity, an increase in all the following: divorce, marital infidelity, single parent homes, juvenile crime, crimes against women, abortion, disease (no one had yet heard of AIDS, and STD was an abbreviation for “standard”), crime rates, homosexuality, sex crimes and pornography, just to name a few.

If you’re keeping score, how’d the Pope do?

Humanae Vitae raised a furor in the Church and polarized much of the Christian world. Behind the rallying cry, “You can’t tell me what to do with my body,” the Pope’s letter was – I don’t think this is an overstatement – widely dismissed and frequently disobeyed by just about everyone, including the pew-sitting Church membership and more than a few of the clergy.

And while one major population issue in the world today is sustainability – people in many places aren’t having enough babies, opposite Ehrlich’s doom-saying – one could argue that the blast pattern from The Population Bomb was so widespread that it frightened people worldwide away from large families. Even China adopted a one-baby policy.

It’s obvious though that, witnessing the sexual revolution, Ehrlich’s book didn’t scare anyone out of the bedroom.

And while by no means am I casting the first stone, it’s also pretty obvious that the Pope’s encyclical, despite its prophetic truth, sadly, scared almost nobody into obedience.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) read a terrific article by Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution on all this in the Aug/Sept 2008 issue of First Things magazine. (article available free at firstthings.com)