It’s Not Enough to be a Humanae Vitae Family

I know of a well-to-do Catholic woman with a gaggle of children, who certainly never so much as looked at a birth control pill in her life. They’re a Humanae Vitae family if ever I saw one. They have a big van and everything. But this woman is absolutely incensed by poor families. She’s particularly angry about the idea of a free lunch for children. In my area they used to have a service where people would bring free, healthy, relatively cheaply made lunches to poor children in parks over the summer because the poorest children couldn’t get a free lunch at school when  school was out. She said the program was “wasteful,” but she didn’t want to replace it with one that wasn’t wasteful. She wasn’t volunteering to help with a program that was church-based instead of using tax dollars. She only wanted the program to go away because she thought it was offensive that kids get a free lunch.  I saw her ranting in facebook fights that lasted a hundred comments, against this program. She also gave a hard time to her neighbors on SNAP– and I don’t mean in the abstract, complaining that the program was poorly formed and wishing it could be done by local churches instead. I mean she attacked and verbally abused me for needing SNAP. I made her sick and she let me know it.

This is not Catholic.

This is not the social teaching of our Church.

In this environment, if this is the example Catholics live and the world they work to maintain, I don’t blame anyone who thinks the Church’s teaching on birth control is a load of sadistic sperm-worshipping hooey. It’s not, but it sure looks that way. And it is very, very hard to be open to life if you know you’re going to be persecuted for it by everyone including other Catholics unless you’re rich.

That is not the way to be Catholic.

It’s not Catholic to be a Humane Vite family if you’re not also, for example, a Dignity of the Human Person family; a Preferential Treatment for the Poor and Vulnerable family; a Dignity and Rights of Workers family; a Solidarity family; a Stewardship of God’s Creation family.

It’s not enough to be a family that’s open to life as long as it’s in your own womb, but bitter and judgmental if that life is in the womb of a poor woman who needs help. We can disagree and bicker about the best way to help her, but if you judge and condemn her for getting pregnant when she didn’t have the wealth to care for the baby all on her own, you sin. It’s not enough to feed, clothe and educate your own brood of children while despising other people’s children in need of food, clothing and education. We can squabble about the best way of getting those things to them. We certainly ought to make our own children our priority. But if all you want to do is tend your own family while letting the other families around you fend for themselves, you’ve failed as a Catholic. Attacking families for needing help is even worse.

If we were all authentically Catholic families– actively caring for one another in our community, upholding the dignity of the poor, being good stewards of creation and loving our neighbor as ourselves– I think we would find that it was natural and almost easy to be Humanae Vitae families. Virtue is always going to be a struggle, but it wouldn’t be this kind of a struggle. We wouldn’t be struggling against society and even our fellow Catholics; we’d receive support and help from them at every step of the journey, and we’d return that help whenever we could. We wouldn’t be living our lives in service to the money and power the world loves while trying to obey Church teaching on sex, and what’s more we wouldn’t be surrounded by allegedly Catholic families who thought we were lazy pigs for not loving money because they wouldn’t love it either. We wouldn’t be jumping up and down on top of each other’s crosses, as the world does. We’d be helping each other carry them, as Christians ought to do.

In that context, the Church’s teachings all fit together much better.

Taken out of context, here in the world where Mammon is worshiped, I can see why it looks like nonsense.

That’s probably not what you wanted to hear, but there.

If you are Catholic, Humanae Vitae isn’t optional. But it’s not enough to be a Humanae Vitae family.

(image via Pixabay)