Tea at Trianon: Does Humanae Vitae Cause Suffering?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, August 9, 2018

Does Humanae Vitae Cause Suffering?

From Catholic Culture:

The National Catholic Reporter headline informs us:

Humanae Vitae’s ban on contraception causes suffering
The argument of the article is lame and familiar: based on the assumption that—what your parents told you about bird and bees to the contrary notwithstanding—Catholic dogma causes unplanned pregnancies. But let’s talk about suffering, anyway. Can you name a form of contraception that does not cause suffering—either by failing or by harming the person (almost always the woman) who uses it—and then possibly failing as well?

The NCR article is illustrated by a picture of a “social health activist” speaking to women in India. The photo is guaranteed to spark guilt feelings in Americans of a certain age. Are women in India suffering? Some are, certainly—when they are pressured to have an abortion because their unborn child is female, or when they are effectively enslaved to bear children for wealthy American male couples. Hard to blame that suffering on Humanae Vitae; in fact, didn’t the encyclical more or less predict it? Any policy, any belief, any moral principle is apt to produce some sort of suffering in those who disagree with it. For me, the mere existence of the National Catholic Reporter is a source of suffering. (Read more.)