Monday, July 25, 2011

Off to Market

On this 43rd anniversary of the publication of Pope Paul VI's encyclical, Humanae Vitae, and during this  Natural Family Planning Awareness Week, the following seems a rather apt (and pleasantly cheeky) assessment of the current state of affairs:

"We have ceased to be stewards of the earth and started acting more like irresponsible, short-term renters.  Indeed, this hugely elaborate, technological attempt  to thwart and dominate God's creation is eerily similar to modern reproductive technology.  In the decades when our bodies ache to breed, we dose them into sterility, then as we reach the age when DNA gives up trying, we call in the B-52s to bomb our bodies into conceiving.  If liberals could learn to look at contraception the way they do agriculture, they'd understand the Church's teaching. Conversely, if Catholics applied the same respect for natural law to gluttony as to lust, they'd find themselves shopping at farmers' markets."

--John Zmirak, The Bad Catholics's Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins (2010), p. 78


Our Green Pope, again just last month, referred to this as "human ecology," making a very similar point...but in a much more appropriately papal fashion.

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