Questions Answered – October 2022

Church Teaching and the Theological Ethics of Life Question: There has been much talk about the Church changing her teaching on Humanae Vitae. This apparently is due to a recent document from the Pontifical Academy of Life: Theological … [Read more...]

The Sweetness of the Yoke of Christ

Hope for those struggling to live out the teaching of Humanae Vitae

My wife, Kristina, and I were married just weeks after our twenty-second birthdays. We were still in our final year of college, young, naive — and in love. Our Catholic faith was always a central part of our lives and our relationship. We t … [Read more...]

Reclaiming a Lost Voice in Catholic Moral Theology

Who Was Fr. Gommar DePauw?

Many Catholics attached to the traditional rites of the Church are familiar with the brief video “Why the Latin Mass.” Fr. Gommar-Albert DePauw, the speaker, was a priest famous for his celebration of the Tridentine Mass during the pre … [Read more...]

The Theological Anthropology of Karol Wojtyla (Pope St. John Paul II)

Every so often, there appears in history a person who has an effect on the world, that the whole world is changed for the better as a result of their being there. A person of recent memory is Father Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope St. John … [Read more...]

Abortion Stories

Exploding the Myths of Consequence-Free Sex

The stories in this article are about several women I've known personally, one fictional woman, and one famous Catholic woman, Dorothy Day, who is being considered for sainthood — all of whom had abortions. Their stories illustrate in v … [Read more...]

The New Acceptance of Sodomy

Why? And What Now?

How could a Catholic priest ever come to think that it was morally acceptable for him to engage in sodomy? In the light of more than a dozen events or factors affecting one’s thinking since 1960, a priest with a same-sex orientation might a … [Read more...]

Teaching Humanae Vitae in the “Front Trenches” — Where It Ultimately Counts

Tumult Late July, 1968; large-tiered classroom at a Jesuit university. New Testament scholar Max Zerwick, SJ, is expounding upon the prologue to John’s Gospel, word by word, pericope by pericope. We graduate theology students, 150 s … [Read more...]

Celebrating Humanae Vitae

On April 4, 5, and 6, this year, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput and twenty renowned theologians, lawyers, philosophers, and medical professionals celebrated Blessed Pope Paul VI’s visionary encyclical, Humanae Vitae, proclaimed 50 y … [Read more...]

Humanae Vitae: An Unwelcomed Anniversary in the West

Conceptually pastoral weaknesses in expression, not errors, within Humanae Vitae, might have led to its lack of reception on the part of some priests, bishops, and people. For a host of reasons, it did not turn hearts and minds to … [Read more...]

A Reflection on Humanae Vitae

Recently I watched a television interview with an eloquent defender of Humanae Vitae, but at its conclusion I was disappointed. To be sure, the speaker made a brilliant consequentialist defense of the encyclical, but this time the emphasis … [Read more...]

Misconceptions About NFP

When I heard the election results in 2012, my very first thought was that if Catholics had reacted appropriately to the invention of the pill, instead of the way they did, we would have won this election. It is a subject which has … [Read more...]

Humanae Vitae and the New Evangelization

Introduction This year sees the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae. Over the years, the encyclical has received quite a mixed response across the Church. Even now, we still have theologians, bishops, and others s … [Read more...]

Being Open to Life—Abstract Norm, or Embodied Word?

Preamble We have a temptation to separate a moral norm from its existential reality and, in so doing, to imagine that we have “an abstract norm”[1. Although the expression, ‘abstract norm’ (ncregi … [Read more...]

The Centrality of Love to the Teaching of Humanae Vitae

Introduction The approach of the 50th anniversary of Humanae vitae gives us the opportunity to once again meditate on the Church’s teaching on human generation, and on the magnificent articulation of this teaching in recent decades, coming … [Read more...]

How the Synod of 2015 Ignored the Real Problem, 50 Years in the Making

It’s hard to believe now, but at the beginning of the year, Synod 2015 was predicted to be a possible game changer for the Church. According to various media reports, the Synod promised to be: “stormy,” “intense,” a time of “great expectatio … [Read more...]