The Hermeneutic of Continuity

"A Pure Heart Create for Me", published by Family Publications is a collection of articles, mainly based on lectures given last year at St Patrick's Soho Square to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae . Authors include Fr Stephen Langridge ( Southwark Vocations ), Fr Richard Aladics ( Friends with Christ ), and Nicole Parker of the Central London Fertility Care Centre and myself (on Humanae Vitae as a challenge to the culture). Tonight saw the launch of the book at St Patrick's. Fr Anthony Doe spoke of how the eternal Word's divesting himself of glory in the incarnation and the crucifixion, was the model for human love and its fruitfulness. Fr Philip Egan spoke of the authority of the encyclical in a tightly argued talk that concluded that the teaching was proclaimed infallibly by the ordinary magisterium. (Fr Philip Egan's has recently written a book called "Philosophy and Catholic Theology: A Primer." (See Amazon link below.) It wa...

A correspondent has sent me a link to this excellent 1978 piece by Malcolm Muggeridge on Humanae Vitae . At that time, Mugg had not yet become a Catholic but he was a seasoned media operator and understood how the MSM (then the only medium) slanted coverage of Pope Paul's landmark encyclical. The great Mugg's description of the panel is amusing: The people who are assembled for these discussions or panels on the BBC fall, usually, into various categories which are invariable: you generally have a sociologist from Leeds; you also have a life-purist usually with a mustache; you also have a knockabout clergyman of no particular denomination and enormous muttonchop whiskers; and you have, I regret to say, also, usually, a rather dubious father He describes how he mentioned that contraception would not stop with limiting families but would lead to abortion and euthanasia. And I remember that the panel jeered when I said particularly the last, euthanasia. But it was quite obvious tha...

The Holy Father has neatly summed up a number of themes of interest - talking about salvation, saving the planet, gender, Humanae Vitae , that sort of stuff. He even included the rain forests! You have to take your hat off to the man: this was just part of his end of year address to the Roman Curia: Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian Creed, the Church cannot and should not limit itself to transmitting to its faithful only the message of salvation. She has a responsibility for Creation, and it should validate this responsibility in public. In so doing, it should defend not just the earth, water and air as gifts of Creation that belong to everyone. She should also protect man from destroying himself. It is necessary to have something like an ecology of man, understood in the right sense. It is not outdated metaphysics when the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this natural order be respected. This has to do with f...

I received information today of two more events to mark the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae and I am happy to pass this on: London Oratory This year is the 40th anniversary of the publication of Humanae Vitae, in which Pope Paul VI addressed "the whole Catholic World, and all men of good will" on the subject of birth regulation. No other papal encyclical has ever received such a turbulent reception from within the Church. Many laity and priests left the Church in protest, and in much of the Catholic world it was greeted with open dissent, or at best dead silence. But there are also those who hail Humanae Vitae as a work of inspiration, which accurately prophesied the disastrous effects that contraception would have on society in the decades following its promulgation. Many young Catholics today are embracing Humanae Vitae as part of their charter for married love. On Thursday 27th November, John Finnis will talk to our Young Catholics on the subject "Retranslating Hum...

Yesterday I travelled to my one-time home of Oxford to give the first in a series of three talks at the Oxford Oratory to mark the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae . The Fathers kindly invited me to join them for Oratory and Dinner beforehand. "Oratory" is a custom preserved unchanged since the time of St Philip with 20 minutes silent meditation before the Blessed Sacrament, followed by the Litany of Loreto, the Sub Tuum Praesidium and various other prayers. The community is thriving and indeed working very hard at various pastoral projects. They are also in the middle of a restoration of the area above the High Altar so there was scaffolding in the Church. I look forward to seeing the completed work. Last year, I spoke to the Newman Society in Oxford on the same subject but this was an event mainly intended for parishioners of St Aloysius. There was a good response and I was delighted to meet a number of old friends. Andrew and Dora Nash were there Dora has had two excelle...

A presentation by Christian Meert to help couples in their understanding of the Theology of the Body. Vaughan House Westminster 3 September. Full details in the poster below. Christian Meert - Man & Woman in the Plan of God - Upload a Document to Scribd Read this document on Scribd: Christian Meert - Man & Woman in the Plan of God

Thanks to a reader for this link to a very good article: "The Vindication of Humanae Vitae" by Mary Eberstadt, an essay published by First Things. The author looks in detail at the specific predictions made by Pope Paul VI and after demonstrating the striking way in which they have been proved accurate, she quotes Archbishop Chaput who said:“If Paul VI was right about so many of the consequences deriving from contraception, it is because he was right about contraception itself.”

James Preece, Catholic and Loving It , has a fascinating piece by Cardinal James Francis Stafford, describing a meeting held in Baltimore in 1968 at which a gathering of priests agreed to sign up to a statement dissenting from the encyclical Humanae Vitae . Last in the line, he refused to assent to the dissent and was sworn at and ridiculed. (Cf. The Bullies of 1968 .) The article reconstructs the intimidation, bullying and hysteria of those times. Eight years on from that, I was a young adult, going through the first year of seminary, and then on to three happy years at university before going to Rome. It was an era in which one learnt how to be the only one in the room who said the "wrong" thing, how to flop to your knees when everyone else stood or sat, how to say "yes" to the teaching of the magisterium when almost everyone else said "no", how to gather a few comrades of like mind and establish a beach head, how to believe that the Church and her teach...