How Pope Paul VI Kept Me Catholic

Like many Catholics all over the
world, I was thrilled with the canonization of Pope John Paul II and Pope John
XXIII.   The first was the pope of my
coming of age and adulthood!  He was the skiing
pope, the traveling pope, and the forgiving pope.  When someone mentions “The Pope”
it’s his face that still briefly enters my mind.

I’m still too young to really
remember John XXIII, (event at my own quickly advancing years!)  However, if John Paul appealed to me because
of the relative youth and vigor of his early years, Pope John appeals to me because
of the work he accomplished in old age. 
At the twilight of his life he did something really big and awesome – he
called for the Second Vatican Council. I guess his example just gives me
inspiration as person in middle age to keep on fighting the good fight because
it ain’t over until it’s over!

But as happy as I was for the
canonization of these two, I keenly felt the absence of Pope Paul the VI – the
“Paul” part of “John Paul.”   For me, it was the mystic nature of Pope
Paul’s papacy that brought me all the way home – back into the Catholic Church.

As a young Catholic, I remember
learning that Christ said that the gates of hell would not prevail against the
church, and that whatever the church “bound on earth” would be
“bound in heaven.”  Those seem
like impossible statements!   Yet that
seems to have been proven true through Paul VI’s encyclical Humane Vitae.

Humane Vitae came out in 1968. The
fact that it came out at all was a miracle. 
Wanting to understand all of the issues surrounding family life and marriage,
Pope John  assembled a commission on
birth control to study the issue, and the recommendation to lift the ban on
artificial contraception was given to Paul VI.

Despite the recommendations of
this commission, Paul VI did not lift the ban, but wrote Humane Vitae instead.  I was 9 years old. That document overshadowed
the rest of my religious formation. Teachers at my “Catholic” high
school ignored it or even taught against it under the banner of “social
justice.”  In hindsight I can even
see that we students were not being inspired towards chastity but lured towards
the ever changing morals and lifestyles of the progressive 1970s. 

It wasn’t until I became a mom
myself that I could see God’s protection on the church, and His will working
through Pope Paul’s writing.  One of the
arguments from the commission was that the birth control pill prevented
ovulation and could thus be licitly used by married Catholic couples.  Humane Vitae clarifies that any type of
contraceptive that separates the pleasurable and procreative aspects of the
marital act are sinful.  But what if the
Pope had swayed to the opinions of the commission?  If he had, 30 years later science would show
us that ovulation isn’t always prevented, babies are sometimes conceived and
that the oral contraceptive many times causes these children to be lost to very
early miscarriage. 

The gravity of this is huge.  God protected his church through Paul VI, who
bravely wrote his Encyclical that saved the church from entering a grave error,
scandal and embarrassment. We have also seen with time that Paul VI was a
prophet. Many of the things he wrote about in Humane Vitae as being dangerous
and sinful have since come to pass.

Despite his courage in this
matter, Pope Paul spent the rest of his papacy saddened by the reception and
disobedience of the encyclical by laity and some of the clergy in the west. Paul
surely suffered as a servant of God.

Pope Paul’s courage and stand against
artificial contraception is a big part of what brought me back to the Catholic
Church and reiterated for me that the church is instituted by Christ and
protected from error by Him. But further “proof” came this week when
Pope Francis, the darling of the progressive media, beatified Paul VI, moving
him closer to sainthood. 

God truly does have a sense of
humor.