On Saturday we celebrate the feast of SS Joachim and Anna, the parents of Our Lady, grandparents of Our Lord. I will write their story later. Saturday is also the 40th Anniversary of the promulgation of Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI. This is a very important anniversary in the life of the Church as this prophetic document was roundly and very publicly condemned by dissident priests and theologians across the Western part of the Church. One of the leading voices in this movement was Charles Curran. He remains firm in his anti-HV stance despite all that has happened to prove the pope right. I would not say he is a leading voice of dissent these days-Dr Janet Smith utterly smoked him in debate not so long ago-but he is still the figurehead of HV dissent I would think. Click on the links. If you haven’t heard Dr Smith take some time and listen to her; she changed my mind.

Contraception goes back a long way. Egyptian women and their crocodile dung, potions involving mistletoe and various womb bindings; mercury and herbs including poisonous ones were the answer to a pagan woman’s wish to avoid a baby. Most of the market for this seems to have been temple based.

Linked with this of course was Molech worship in which babies and children were sacrificed in the fires of this god.

Kimberly Hahn while still a protestant did her MA thesis on Christian attitudes to contraception. In studying Scripture and seeing how it is so pro-life and anti-contraception she came to learn the Catholic Church’s teaching on the matter. This was the first step for her towards conversion.

While the Old Testament firmly teaches that children are a blessing and the sin of Onan is deadly, it is St Paul’s admonition against Pharmakeia (Gal 5:20) in his letter about marriage and the Church that is the most striking. The word is sometimes translated as ‘magic’ but this was a very specific magic-contraception.

Avoiding children was always seen as a pagan approach to life and the Church continued to condemn it from the Didache (80AD) through the Fathers and right the way through to now. Nothing has changed in the teachings of the Church.

St Paul makes it clear that marriage is holy and that it reflects our relationship with God and even more so with Christ and His Bride the Church. He is only teaching the holiness of marriage as Christ Himself had done, and even in the debates about divorce no good Jew would have contemplated preventing children or killing them. That was what the pagans did.

Schisms and protestantism did not change this teaching. All Orthodox churches retained the teaching against contraception until very recently indeed. I heard a rumour that in some parts of the Russian Orthodox there were mutterings about ‘in extreme circumstances’-but I haven’t seen it verified.

All the protestant leaders-Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and so on stuck with Christian Tradition and taught about the evils of contraception. So it remained until 1930…..