Vatican Newspaper Welcomes Humanae Vitae's "Prophetic Prophecy": News Headlines

Catholic World News

July 25, 2018

Fifty years after the publication of the encyclical of Blessed Paul VI on the regulation of birth, L'Osservatore Romano publishes a chronicle that pays tribute to the "lucid prophecy" of the text.

The Italian historian Lucetta Scaraffia, a frequent contributor to the Vatican newspaper, stated that Humanae Vitae was "a courageous, and therefore controversial document," because it was going to Against the conventional wisdom of 1968, when the badual revolution promised a utopia of happiness, and economists warned that a population explosion was threatening the prosperity of rich nations.

Five decades later, she continues, "we see things in a completely different way": the badual revolution has not brought happiness, and the rich nations are grappling with the fallout from the collapse of the population, some nations adopting policies to encourage births. At a time when "so many women after years of contraception can not conceive of a child" – and at a time when young women "pbadionate about ecology are turning to natural methods of regulating fertility" – we can also to see that Humanae Vitae was prophetic in his ideas on the natural regulation of births and the health of women.

Scaraffia says that the encyclical must be saved from "the old opposition between progressive and conservative" and seen for what is: a document of "lucid prophecy" in which the Church once seized the dangers of the "seductive trap of utopias of the twentieth century". Humanae Vitae she concluded, must be read with eyes ": the eyes of people living in the twenty-first century," now aware of the failure of so many utopias and so many theories which had been proposed as infallible. "

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