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Fifty years after its publication, Paul VI 's encyclical Humanae Vitae presents himself to the eyes of men today in a completely different way: was a courageous – and therefore controversial – document that went against time. , that of the badual revolution, for which a safe contraceptive was fundamental and also the possibility of abortion.
It was also the time when economists were talking about "human bomb", that is to say the danger of overpopulation that threatened the rich countries and could diminish their prosperity.
Two powerful forces therefore lined up against the encyclical: the utopia of happiness that the badual revolution promised to every human being and the wealth that would have been the logical consequence of a demographic decline in large scale. Today, fifty years later, we see things in a completely different way.
These two utopian visions were realized, but they did not bring the desired results: neither happiness nor wealth, but rather new and dramatic problems. If the collapse of the population in the advanced countries barely cope with the arrival of mbades of immigrants needed but at the same time unacceptable to many, the invasion of procreation by science started with medical results, with ambiguous results. , often disturbing and dangerous.
Today, when we pay all the costs of strong and strong denaturality, when many women after years of contraceptives can not conceive a child, we realize that the Church had reason, that Paul VI had been prophetic to propose a natural regulation of the births which would have saved the health of the women, the relation of the couple and the naturalness of the procreation.
Now that ecologically pbadionate girls are turning to natural methods of regulating fertility, without even knowing that Humanae Vitae exists, now that governments are trying to put in place policies favoring birth rates , one must re-read the encyclical eyes. And instead of seeing it as the great defeat of the Church in the face of creeping modernity, we can affirm its prophetic lucidity by grasping the dangers inherent in these changes and congratulate us, Catholics, that once again Church did not fall into the trap of utopias Twentieth century, but was able to immediately grasp the limits and dangers.
But few are successful: for many, it is still hard to break with the old opposition between progressives and conservatives, in which the encyclical was torn apart, without grasping its critical thinking and its strength. innovation. Even now, no one seems to remember that for the first time a pope accepted birth control and urged doctors to look for effective natural methods.
It is therefore very important to be able to look at Humanae Vitae with new eyes, the eyes of human beings living in the 21st century, aware of the failure of so many utopias and so many economic theories that had been proposed as infallible. It is only in this way that we can face the problems of today 's family, the new role of women and the difficult relations between ethics and science, whose roots – even unconsciously for certain aspects – in this distant text of 1968.
by Lucetta Scaraffia
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