What Do Contraceptive Societies Become
From The Alliance for the Family Foundation Philippines, Inc.:
http://alfi.org.ph/home/index.php/2008/11/what-do-contraceptive-societies-become/
Out of Wedlock Births
In 1960, the oral contraceptive, or birth control pill, was approved for sale. Over the years since, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births in the U.S. has gone from about 6% per cent to about 37%, a more than 500% increase, and more than one-third of all births. In Europe, more than half of the children in Sweden and Norway are born to unmarried mothers. In Denmark, it’s 45%. Other countries have seen commensurate increases.
Why did this happen? Since birth control pills prevent pregnancy, shouldn’t the out of wedlock pregnancy rates have gone down? The answer is no, because of the law of unintended consequences, which is sometimes expressed as “You can’t change only one thing.” That is, when you change one thing, others change as a consequence. That is what happened here. The acceptance of contraception changed the way people think about sex. The logic is simple: If contraception is legitimate, then sex is not necessarily related to producing children. If sex is not necessarily related to producing children, there is no compelling reason to limit it to marriage. While the logic was important, the fact that sex is the strongest physical attraction that human beings experience also plays a big role, because it distorts people’s judgment. And contraceptives just aren’t as effective as is popularly believed: a year’s worth of “typical” Pill usage results in one to eight pregnancies per 100 women, while typical condom usage results in ten to eighteen pregnancies per 100 women.
So, contraception vastly increases out of wedlock births. What else?
Divorce
During the twenty years following the introduction of the contraceptive world view which came along with the Pill, the U.S. divorce rate reached 250% of what it had been, despite having been fairly stable in the preceding decades.
Why did this happen? Because, since acceptance of contraception changed the way people think about sex, it changed their way of thinking about marriage: If contraception is legitimate, then marriage is not necessarily connected to having and raising children. If marriage is not necessarily connected to children, then it is about finding happiness. If I am married and unhappy, my marriage is not fulfilling its purpose. I should get a divorce. Studies show that over 50% of contracepting couples divorce. (By the way, research has shown that people who divorce because they are unhappily married usually are not happy five years later, whether they remarry or not.)
Decline of Marriage
So divorce is also one of the major consequences of a contraceptive society. What next? In the developed world, marriage is dying out. Britain is now experiencing the lowest rate of marriage since records began in 1862.
The same is true of many of the countries of Europe. Japan and the U.S. are also experiencing this phenomenon. What accounts for this? Again, the logic of contraception: If contraception is legitimate, there is no need to enter into marriage, with all its obligations, in order to have a sexual relationship, since the consequences of sex can be controlled.
As a result of this thinking, by 1998, American households that consisted of a father, a mother and one or more children were just 26% of the total, while in 1970, they were 45%. The number of unmarried cohabiting couples had increased 865% since 1960, the year the pill was introduced. The percentage of adults who were currently divorced had increased 300% during the same period. The percentage of children in single-parent families increased from 9% in 1960 to 28% in 1998, a 211% increase. 35% of children were living apart from their biological fathers. More than 50% of teenagers said that out-of-wedlock childbearing is a “worthwhile lifestyle.” Only 35 percent of adults now consider children an important component of marriage.
Crime
What happens to society as a whole in the face of the major changes that the contraceptive lifestyle produces? Over the thirty year period following the introduction of the birth control pill in the U.S. — the same period in which artificial contraception became a mainstream practice instead of a fringe phenomenon — the rate of violent crime rose by nearly 500%. During the next twenty years, the U.S. incarceration rate in prisons and jails also rose nearly 500%, despite the fact that it had already increased significantly during the thirty year period of massively rising crime rate. But how can these crime statistics be related to contraception? Because the greatest predictor of criminality is family status of children: A large number of scientific research studies have shown that children of broken families on average, not necessarily any particular individual, but especially those raised in homes without the presence of their biological father, are very much more likely to engage in criminal behavior. In fact, they fare significantly worse in virtually every category of human welfare that can be measured, from physical health to mental health to achievement in school to completing school to success in a career to annual income to happiness in life and on and on.
Depopulation
What other effects of the contraceptive society are there? The most important is that the societies themselves are dying out. Human beings must have an average of 2.1 children each in order to replace themselves. (The figure is 2.1, and not just 2, because some of these children will not bear children of their own.) A typical child born today in Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, or the largest cities in China, has no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts and no uncles – although he or she does have four grandparents to eventually support with pension contributions. More than fifty of the world’s nations, representing 44% of its total population, already have fertility rates below 2.1, some far below, and most of the rest are headed there. As a result, demographers now know that the world’s population will peak sometime in the next half century, and then rapidly collapse, unless there is a very dramatic reversal of the decline in fertility rate. So far, no nation in the world that has fallen below replacement fertility since records have been kept has managed to climb back above it, despite some having made efforts to do so.
For the worst example of this consequence of the contraceptive society, the population of Russia is currently declining by three quarters of a million people per year, and will probably continue to do so indefinitely.
China also will suffer this fate, sooner rather than later. Its working age population will be falling within six years from now.
We in the Philippines are also going to experience this, even if the Reproductive Health Act is not passed. It will simply happen sooner, and become worse, if it is. This graph represents a consensus projection of existing conditions — not those under Reproductive Health.
Abortion
Another very important component of the contraceptive society is abortion. All countries that adopt the contraceptive mentality eventually legalize surgical and chemical abortion. Part of the reason for this is that most popular contraceptives sometimes cause very early abortions: the pill, the patch, suppositories, and all other hormonal contraceptives, as well as IUD’s, or Intrauterine Devices [as you have heard from Dra. Leah]. This creates a climate of disrespect for life. The other part of the reason is that contraceptives don’t work very well. One-half of all unintended pregnancies in France and the U.S., as examples, occur to women who were using contraception. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, reports that the failure rate of the Pill for low-income, cohabiting teenagers is almost 50% — one-half of them get pregnant each year. When this happens, because they cannot accept the fact that they are pregnant, since contraception was supposed to prevent it, failed contraceptive users are much more likely than non-users to turn to abortion to accomplish what they are told is the same result.
STD’s
Another observed consequence of contraception is a vast increase of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, or STD’s. For example, a “culture of promiscuity” has led to almost 400,000 new cases of sexually transmitted diseases in Britain in 2007, the highest number since record-keeping began thirty years ago. The vast increase in STD’s occurs because those who use contraception are told and believe that they are “protected” by doing so. This gives a false sense of confidence concerning the risks associated with engaging in sex outside a lifelong monogamous relationship. Of the many contraceptives in common use, none gives any protection against sexually transmitted infections except the condom, and that protection is limited for most STD’s, and non-existent for others, because they are spread by mere skin contact. Despite widespread condom usage in the U.S., which has a population less than four times as large as ours, there are nearly 19 million new STD cases each year, more than half of them among 15- to 24-year-olds. To take just one of the more than twenty STI’s in circulation, it is estimated by medical authorities that three million new cases of Chlamydia occur in the U.S. each year, 1.2 million of them among teenagers. In other words, the U.S., with less than four times the population, contracts as many cases of Chlamydia each year as the Philippines has in total. But this favorable disparity will disappear if we too adopt the contraceptive mentality. And while the U.S. has the most extensive medical establishment in the world to deal with this serious disease, which can be treated effectively if diagnosed in time, we do not have that advantage, and timely diagnosis is unlikely here — since it is often asymptomatic — let alone treatment. Direct medical costs associated with STD’s in the United States have been estimated at up to 14.7 billion dollars annually. We can expect equally devastating health and financial consequences here if the Reproductive Health act becomes law.
AIDS
The use of condoms to prevent AIDS corresponds to an increase in the rate of AIDS cases. Edward C. Green, a senior research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a former condom advocate, has said, “The way condoms are marketed in Africa and other developing parts of the world is as if they were 100 percent safe. Condoms have brand names like Shield and Protector that gives the impression that they are 100 percent safe.” But he has found that “20 years into the pandemic there is no evidence that more condoms leads to less AIDS.” Citing data on condom availability in many African counties, Green went on to say that “we are not seeing what we expected: that higher levels of condom availability result in lower HIV prevalence.” Dr. Norman Hearst of the University of California — San Francisco supports this analysis with statistics on Kenya, Botswana, and other countries, which show an increasingly alarming pattern of increased condom sale correlation with rising HIV prevalence by year.
The Philippines and Thailand. Another example of how condoms fail to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS is presented by the Philippines and Thailand, which have comparable populations.
In 1984, the first case of HIV was detected in both of these nations. By 1987, Thailand had 112 cases of AIDS, and the Philippines had 135 cases. In 1991, the World Health Organization predicted that, by 1999, Thailand would have 70,000 deaths from the disease, and the Philippines would have 85,000 deaths. Consequently, in 1991, both nations took concrete and comprehensive measures against the spread of the HIV virus — but directed their efforts in completely different directions. The Thai Minister of Health instituted a “100% Condom Use Program.” All houses of prostitution were required to have supplies of condoms, and condom vending machines were installed in all supermarkets, bars, restaurants, and other public gathering places. This program was widely accepted and implemented by the people of Thailand. Two years later, Rene Bullecer, M.D., received authorization from the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) to establish the organization AIDS-Free Philippines as its official program to combat HIV/AIDS nationwide. The government signed on to this effort as well. By the end of 2003, the disparity in the effectiveness of both types of programs had become glaringly obvious, as shown in this table;
Disparity in the effectiveness of Thailand Method and Philippines Method
Parameter
Thailand
Philippines
Adults and Children Living with HIV
570,000
9,000
AIDS Deaths in 2003
58,000
500
Population
62,833,000
79,999,000
HIV Infection Rates Per Million
9,072
113
This table shows that the Thai HIV infection rate is eighty times higher than the Filipino HIV infection rate.
The current rate of HIV infection in the United States, with all its sex education, all its sexual freedom, all its advanced antiviral drugs, and all its billions of condoms, is 3,900 per million, thirty times higher than in the Philippines.
What lesson does this teach us?
USAID has concluded that the reason that the Philippines has such a low incidence of HIV/AIDS is that youth here have a very high rate of abstinence, and married people largely remain faithful to their spouses. The USAID report grudgingly admitted that “The Catholic Church must be credited with influencing sexual behavior.”
Economic Stagnation
Population growth has been the historical driver of economic development. Because of shrinking numbers of workers and consumers, as well as the pressure of increased social security taxes, economies stagnate and eventually shrink in a contraceptive society. This has been occurring in Japan, the world’s second largest economy, over the past decade, and will soon be playing a large role in Europe, if it isn’t already.
Impoverished Elderly
A long-term consequence of enacting Reproductive Health will be the impoverishment of our elderly, particularly women. As family ties become weaker, and fewer children are born, there will be many elderly with no one to support them. Given the state of our public finances, the government will not be able to assume this role, as it has in some countries. (In fact, most of the developed countries are already facing severe difficulties in funding their pension systems, for the same reason.) Both the Asian Development Bank, in its 2002 annual report entitled Population And Human Resource Trends and Challenges, where the authors state that the bank’s “Developing Member Countries are aging faster than they are developing,” and the United Nations, for example in a press release by UN ESCAP News Services dated May 15, 2002, where it states “The combination of a declining birth rate, and lack of adequate provision for senior citizens in many Asian and Pacific countries, could result in future destitution for many people, especially women,” have essentially admitted this.
Pornographic Sex Education
Because of the large numbers of out of wedlock pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, especially among the young, there is an irresistible demand for sex education, which in modern secular society is not permitted to have a true moral component, and is limited to techniques, variations, and how to reduce risks – generally without seriously promoting abstaining from sex. SIECUS, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, is the original and largest organization for sex education in the country. Its guidelines for sex education in schools include the following: Beginning at age 5, teaching that masturbation feels good; starting at age 9, teaching there are many ways to give and receive sexual pleasure without having intercourse; at age 12, more on the joys of masturbation alone or with a partner, as an alternative to intercourse; and at age 16, common sexual behaviors including use of pornography, bathing/showering together, and oral, vaginal or anal intercourse.
The state of California recently overhauled its sex education requirements. When fully implemented, SB 777 and AB 394 will teach children in California government schools to support homosexuality, bisexuality and transsexuality via instructional materials, programs and activities, and school ’safety’ guidelines. In addition, the California State School Board this year implemented SB 71 requiring public schools that provide sex education to promote unmarried sexual activity with no restraints other than mutual consent.
Allan Guttmacher, former president of Planned Parenthood, was once asked,
“What makes abortion so secure in America?” He answered in two words:
“Sex education.” Atheist Madelyn Murray O’Hare, responsible for outlawing prayer in U.S. schools, wrote: “The issue of abortion is a red herring. . . . The fight is over sex education, including information on birth control.” These quotes illustrate the internecine relationship between these phenomena.
Government Bankruptcy
Because the number of workers per retired person in a nation declines as population growth slows, each worker must support more retirees. However, this requires increases in social security taxes that are extremely unpopular, and therefore don’t often take place. For example, the European Union’s population is set to reach 506 million by 2060 when there will be only two people of working age for every person aged 65 or more. Currently there are four. This will necessitate a doubling of social security taxes, which is unlikely to happen. All developed nations are facing similar problems. One compounding factor is that in difficult economic times people are more reluctant to have children. Since the current difficulties are caused by too few children in the first place, this could lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of population decline and economic decline.
It is not only developed nations that are facing this problem. China, for example, by 2040 will have about 400 million citizens over the age of sixty, most without access to pensions, and without relatives nearby. By 2050 there will be 100 million Chinese over age 80 in the same condition. Starvation is a realistic threat. A similar situation will eventually take place in the Philippines.
Euthanasia
The lack of respect for the value of human life that produces abortion leads to pressure for euthanasia, including its legalization in some countries, and practice in others. At first voluntary, it tends to often become involuntary over time. In the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal since 2001, surveys by Dutch researchers have shown that doctors have killed at least 1,000 patients annually through euthanasia without the patient’s consent or request. This year the Netherlands legalized the killing of children under the age of 12 by euthanasia, without consent — it is already legal to euthanize children between the ages of 12 and 17 if they request death. As retirement costs begin to bankrupt governments, we can expect to see euthanasia proposed, and even adopted, as a solution.
In 2005, Terri Schindler Schiavo, a woman who had suffered brain damage but was not in a coma, was starved and dehydrated to death – which it is illegal to do to a dog – by order of a judge in the state of Florida, because her husband claimed she had said she wanted to die if she became incapacitated. Her husband stood to collect on a large life-insurance policy when this began, and was living with another woman. Similar cases have occurred since 2005.
Terri Schiavo
Terri Schiavo in hospice with her mother on August 11, 2001
Euthanasia is also justified as a source for organ donation. In a paper just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, heart transplant surgeons described how they “modified” the definition of death for three brain-damaged infants so they could justify removing their hearts for transplantation into three other infants who suffered from severe heart problems
Coercive Laws
Under a proposed amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in the UK, those groups advertising services to pregnant women who provide “false information” or even information that is “factually correct” that convinces a woman to change her mind about abortion, will have committed an offense.
A court in Lille, France, handed down a sentence on a French Parliamentarian, fining him 3000 Euros and forcing him to pay an additional 6000 Euros to be split between three homosexual activist groups who brought the charges against the MP. This despite the fact that the MP, in the remarks upon which the charges were based and in his defense, was clear that he was not speaking against homosexual persons but homosexual sex acts.
Ake Green, pastor of a Swedish Pentecostal church in Kalmar, Sweden, was given a 30-day suspended sentence in July, 2004, by a Swedish court for inciting hatred against homosexuals by speaking out in a sermon against homosexual acts. In February 2005, an appeals court overturned the conviction. However, Sweden’s chief prosecutor disagreed with the appeal court’s conclusion, claiming the sermon did in fact amount to hate speech, and ordered a review of the case.
Alberta, Canada, Pastor Steve Boissoin filed an appeal to the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal ruling that convicted him of hate speech. The pastor was found guilty last November of having written a letter to the editor that was “likely” to expose homosexuals to hatred. In June of this year, the Alberta Tribunal issued a remedy ruling that ordered Boissoin to pay $7,000 in fines, to never speak disparagingly about homosexuality or about the complainant, and to apologize in a letter to be published in the same paper. Besides the fines, Boissoin had to spend many tens of thousands of dollars defending himself against the complaint. The complainant was never mentioned in the letter which was the basis of the complaint.
Crystal Dixon, associate vice president of human resources at the University of Toledo, a state university, was first suspended, then fired, after writing a letter to a local newspaper. Dixon, an African-American, challenged the civil rights comparison of race with homosexual behavior, saying that science has never found a genetic cause or DNA for homosexuality.
If the Reproductive Health Act becomes law, this meeting could be ruled illegal, and I and the other speakers would be subject to arrest: The act provides as follows:
SEC. 21. Prohibited Acts. – The following acts are prohibited:
f} Any person who maliciously engages in disinformation about the intent or provisions of this Act.
SEC. 22. Penalties. – …the accused who is found guilty shall be sentenced to an imprisonment ranging from one (1) month to six (6) months or a fine ranging from Ten Thousand Pesos (P10,000.00) to Fifty Thousand Pesos(P50,000.00) or both such fine and imprisonment… An offender who is an alien shall, after service of sentence, be deported immediately without further proceedings by the Bureau of Immigration.
The great problem with this language is that those who support the Act and believe it to be beneficial get to define what is disinformation.
Prostitution
About 240 underage girls are transported into the Kansas City metro area every month to be prostituted. Kansas City is not even in the top 25 largest urban areas of the U.S. It has been estimated that up to 300,000 children in the U.S. are at risk of commercial sexual exploitation. This doesn’t even consider adult prostitutes.
Sexual Chaos
In the U.S, during a typical week, according to an authoritative polling firm, 38 percent of adults younger than 25 engaged in sex outside of marriage, 33 percent viewed pornography and 25 percent got drunk.
A recent study in the UK revealed three leading potential “triggers” for serious mental health problems in girls: premature equalization, commercialization, and alcohol abuse. The report reveals a loss of childhood innocence and says girls today experience high levels of “stress, anxiety and unhappiness.” Sexual advances from boys, pressure to wear clothes that make them look too old and magazines and websites directly targeting younger girls to lose weight or consider plastic surgery were identified as taking a particular toll. Two-fifths of the 10 to 14 year old Girl Guides surveyed know someone who has self-harmed, a third had a friend who suffered from an eating disorder and almost two in five know someone who had experienced panic attacks. Many feel strongly that self-harm could be within the spectrum of “typical teenage behaviour” A quarter said they know someone who has taken illegal drugs.
A 2007 report of the American Psychological Association found evidence that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls and young women in advertising, merchandising, and media is harmful to girls’ self-image and healthy development.
UK Schools are now handing out Morning-After contraceptive/abortifacient pills to students without age restrictions.
New York’s Office of Children and Family Services, which runs the state’s juvenile-detention centers, has quietly adopted new rules that cater to lesbian, gay, bisexual and “transgender” youth in its custody, The Village Voice reported. “Transgendered” youth can request private sleeping quarters and be called by their chosen name. The new guidelines even allow boys to wear girls’ panties and bras, use makeup and shave their legs.
The U.S. states of California, New York and Massachusetts have legalized same-sex marriage.
California is changing its school textbooks and teaching to eliminate all references to husband or wife – any teacher who uses these terms will be punished.
The U.S. state of Colorado has passed a law that all public facilities, including restrooms, must allow people to use them based on their own gender perception. Thus, a public restroom might have 40 year old males, and nine year old girls using it simultaneously, as well as all other possible combinations.
Over half of all infants born to girls younger than age 18 are fathered by adult men.
Sex education courses include teaching masturbation techniques and homosexual sex.
In the new CBS program Swingtown, an apparently naked man seduces a woman while her husband watches. Millions of children watched this program.
One of the most popular programs on television is Desperate Housewives, with the theme of promiscuous adultery, including with adolescents.
A Florida High School drama teacher with a history of alleged sexual misconduct is wanted for having sex with two 17-year-old students, impregnating one of them, and taking her to a clinic where she got an abortion.
A woman in Germany who became pregnant after an online sex auction has won a court battle to force the Web site that hosted the sale to reveal the names of the winners, so she can find out who’s the father.
You’ve all heard of the sad sad sagas of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears – and Charlotte Church, who began her career singing Catholic hymns.
Junior-high school girls in the U.S. often dress in a way that was limited to prostitutes a generation or so ago.
Serious cases of sexually-transmitted disease in Scotland have more than doubled over the past decade thanks to the huge number of young Scots being infected.
At high school proms in the U.S., it is common for students to perform simulated sex dances: so common that some parents and cultural writers are suggesting it should not be prohibited. At one California high school students complained that they didn’t know any other way to dance.
A second-year law school student and former beauty queen who posed for a racy calendar while brandishing a weapon and recently completed a semester-long unpaid stint clerking for a Federal judge, has been accused of kidnapping, biting and threatening a former boyfriend with a handgun.
British schools are taking on the mantle of providing pupils with a stable upbringing because the skills of parents are declining, according to the general secretary of the union for education professionals. There has been a “downward spiral” in the quality of parenting, he said, that is likely to continue in the future.
A U.S. Federal prosecutor, married with children, was arrested as he arrived in Detroit to have sex with a five year old.
In the U.S.
64% of abortions involve coercion
84% were not fully informed
52% felt rushed and 54% uncertain beforehand, yet …
67% received no counseling beforehand, and
79% were not informed about alternatives
Coercion can escalate to violence
Homicide is the leading killer of pregnant women
Risk of death for women is 62% higher after abortion
31% suffer health complications after abortion
65% suffer symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
60% said “part of me died”
Teens are 6 times more likely to commit suicide if they’ve had an abortion in the last 6 months
Clinical depression risk is 65% higher after abortion
Suicide rates are 6 times higher after abortion*
U.S. Catholic bishops state that harvesting embryonic stem cells involves the deliberate killing of innocent human beings, a gravely immoral act.
Planned Parenthood, which receives more than 300 million dollars of government funding annually, has a promotional Web site which targets youth and features short “public service” video vignettes which, among other things, promote casual sex, immodesty, homosexuality and even group sex.
U.S. Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama voted against and spoke against the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act. This act bans killing babies who survive abortions by starving and dehydrating them to death. He also voted repeatedly against banning partial-birth abortions, which involve delivering a baby except for its head, then evacuating its brain.
Withering of Christianity
For more than a thousand years, Europe was known as Christendom. Today, 16 percent, 14 percent, and 13 percent, respectively, of the British, French and Germans consider religion very important.
Researchers estimate that the percentage of adults in the U.S. who actually attend religious services during the previous weekend dropped from 42% in 1965 to 26% in 1994.
“… figures from the 1989 English Church Census and additional attendance data from the 1996-97 UK Christian Handbook indicate that only around 10 percent attend worship services each week.”
In Ireland, where 90 percent of the population is nominally Catholic, less than 50 percent attend Mass even once a month, according to church officials’ estimates. That figure is more dramatic given that 91 percent of the country attended Mass regularly just 30 years ago, according to a recent church study.
At the Most Precious Blood parish in Dublin, parishioners over age 30 say they remember when the church, which seats 1,700, was packed for all four Sunday Masses. There were about 75 persons — including only five children — at the 11 a.m. Mass at Most Precious Blood on a recent Sunday.
“I don’t go to church, and I don’t know one person who does,” says Brian Kenny, 39, who is studying psychotherapy and counseling at Dublin Business School. “Fifteen years ago, I didn’t know one person who didn’t.” But he says he’s merely typical of his generation. “I’m very spiritual,” he says. “I speak to an energy force I call God, and I get answers,” he says. “If you can get a spiritual connection without going to church, why go to church?” A generation ago, Ireland was possibly the most Catholic country in the world.
Although some 85% of Swedes are church members, only 11% of women and 7% of men go to church, the government says.
European leaders rejected any mention of the role of Christianity in creating European society in a new constitution for the 25 European Union countries, despite a personal plea from then Pope John Paul II.
Italy’s nominee for justice minister of the EU, Rocco Buttiglione, was rejected because he was openly religious and condemned homosexuality.
In Ireland, the Archdiocese of Dublin, the capital city, ordained only one priest in 2004. In 2005, for the first time in what historians say is hundreds of years, the diocese did not expect to ordain a single priest.
Dissolution of Society
In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul II said: “By living `as if God does not exist,’ man not only loses sight of the mystery of God, but also of the mystery of the world and the mystery of his own being” (n. 22) He added that “the eclipse of the sense of God and of man inevitably leads to a practical materialism, which breeds individualism, utilitarianism and hedonism” (n. 23). In all of this, said Pope John Paul, “we see the permanent validity of the words of the Apostle: `And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct’ (Romans 1:28)” (ibid).
Pope Benedict XVI wrote, as Cardinal Ratzinger, ”In order to survive, Europe needs a critical acceptance of its Christian culture. Europe seems, in the very moment of its greatest success, to have become empty from the inside. Crippled, as it were.”
The Old Testament, the New Testament, and even Augustine’s City of God warn that calamity befalls nations that are not faithful to the Lord. Unfortunately, as we heard at Mass yesterday, “The natural man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God: for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”
But there are also secular witnesses to this: Noted sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who founded the Sociology department at Harvard University, found in his studies no culture surviving once it ceased to support marriage and monogamy.”
J.D. Unwin, a British anthropologist in the 1930’s, studied 86 cultures that stretched across 5,000 years. He found, without exception, when they restricted sex to marriage, they thrived. But not one culture survived more than three generations after turning sexually permissive. Unwin had no Christian convictions and applied no moral judgment: “I offer no opinion about rightness or wrongness, he wrote.” Nevertheless, he concluded, “In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence.”
There are already two consecutive sexually-permissive generation’s in the West.
We read the following in St. Luke’s account of the Passion, as Jesus walked the road to Calvary: “…Jesus turning to them said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. 29 For behold, the days are coming when they will say, “Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!’ 30 Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us’; and to the hills, “Cover us.’ 31 For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” 32
This passage has long been a source of mystery as to what events Jesus was referring to. The world has experienced the greatest economic boom in the history of mankind over the past six decades, yet families have far fewer children, and the wealthiest nations have the fewest. Now we are at the start of what we are told will be the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Birth rates fell significantly during the Great Depression.
Hope
Our country has a choice: We can adopt the contraceptive model of society like most of the other nations of the world, and become like them, as described. Or we can reject the contraceptive model of society, and make our own path to a better world, in the footsteps of Jesus. It will be one or the other – we can’t do both. But if we choose to follow our Lord, we have to recognize that consistent prayer and sacrifice must come first in our efforts: this battle cannot be won by human action alone, because at bottom it is a spiritual battle, for our souls, and the soul of our country.
We are not to parade our gifts. Oh, is that ever hard! As my fourth grade teacher told me — (God bless her) she is still living and tells me she is praying for me. I tell her, “Sister Georgine, keep praying!” She took me aside one day after class and she said, “John, don’t be a showoff.”
PDF: Novena to St. Josemaria for Work