CHRISTIAN MORALITY

God and the Pill

by Terence J. Hughes

The great revelation of Jesus Christ is the interior life of God. Pope John Paul II has dedicated these last three years of the second millennium as a time to contemplate God’s interior life, a Trinity of Three Persons united as One by love, in anticipation of the third millennium—The Trinity Millennium. This is appropriate and necessary, as the last century of the second millennium has been the bloodiest and the most oppressive in human history, with the worst atrocities originating in the lands of an apostate Christendom, from whence they have been propagated into non-Christian lands by godless men more zealously than Christians have propagated the Word of God.

    Let us therefore contemplate the Blessed Trinity, as revealed by Jesus Christ. God is a family of three Persons, a Father and a Son bound together in love so chaste that God is one in a third Person, the Holy Spirit. God is spirit and the three spiritual Persons are analogous to will, intellect, and love. The Father begets the Son as the will begets the intellect. A perfect Father is He who wills only good for His Son out of love for Him. A perfect Son is He who obeys His Father out of love for Him. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the love between the Father and Son, and is the Personification of their love, such that all three Persons are bound together as one God. It is a bond forged by giving.

    Creation is an act of giving, God’s gift to mankind. The decision to create is an act of the will, so it is attributed to the Father, but how that decision is carried out is an act of the intellect, and can be attributed to the Son. The Son acts as the Father’s craftsman in constructing the Universe out of nothing, which delights His Father because it is an act of love (Proverbs 9:22-30). Out of the dust of the Universe, God created man and breathed into him His Holy Spirit, so that man was created in the image and likeness of God and was ordered to be fruitful as God is fruitful (Genesis 1:26-28). The love between the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, created by God was to be personified in children, as the love between the Father and Son is Personified in the Holy Spirit.

    God created the Garden of Eden to be the home of His human family. At its center were two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Life was the fruit of obedience to God, just as obedience of the Son to the Father gave life to creation. Death was the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. The sin of Adam was to use what is good, his free will as a gift from God, to do evil by rebelling against God. He wanted to be like God, which is good, but by disobeying God, which is evil (Genesis 3:1-7). Out of His boundless love for us, the Father sent His Son to teach us His way to union with Him, through the loving obedience that was incarnated in Jesus Christ (John 1:1-18).

    God became man in Jesus Christ because teaching us how to be like Him is a function of the intellect, as personified in the Son, the Word of God. He taught us that God created two orders of creatures with intellects, angels and men, and gave them both free will and the capacity to love. Both orders were therefore created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26). However part of the angelic order willfully rebelled against God and its leader, Lucifer (Isaiah 14:12-15), became Satan who used Eve to tempt Adam also to rebel (Genesis 3:1-24). In God’s plan to unite man with Him, Adam and Eve were meant to become one in love, and the fruit of their love, their children, were to become the human race (Genesis 1:26-28, 2:21-24). After their rebellion against God, their intellects were no longer wholly subordinated to their will, and they were inclined toward sin, experiencing the passion of hate as well as love. This disorder was Original Sin. Adam and Eve’s descendants also inherited Original Sin and were disordered in will, intellect, and passions, so that even Saint Paul could admit, “For I do not the good that I wish, but the evil that I do not wish, that I perform. Now if I do what I do not wish, it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells within me” (Romans 7:19-20).

    The model of how God wants us to be one with Him is the Holy Family. The head of the Holy Family was Saint Joseph, who subordinated his will entirely to the will of God the Father, from taking Mary as his spouse (Matthew 1:16-25) to sheltering Mary and Jesus from Herod’s wrath (Matthew 2:13-15). Mary was the seat of Wisdom in the Holy Family (Luke 1:46-55, 2:51-52). Wisdom is a manifestation of the intellect, born of love (Proverbs 8), Jesus Christ. A mother teachers her children, as the Church founded by Christ teaches her children. A father protects his family in obedience to God’s will, out of love, and thereby deserves the obedience of his family. As Saint Paul put it, “as the Church submits to Christ, so should wives submit to their husbands in all things. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed Himself for her” (Ephesians 5:24-25). Just as Mary was the heart of the Holy Family, with Joseph as its head and Jesus as its most precious Child, so analogously Mary is the heart of the Church, with Christ as its head and we their most precious children (John 19:25-27). Thus has God restored His original creation in love (Apocalypse 21:1-5).

    This brief reflection on the Blessed Trinity shows us that tranquillity in our personal lives is achieved only if we conform our will to God’s will, so our intellect can submit to our will because the binding passion is love. Tranquillity in our family life emerges the same way. It is difficult for a wife to submit to her husband unless she knows that he has submitted in love for her and God. The expression of their love will be children, with the Holy Family as the perfect model. Tranquillity in society has the same requirement. All people must submit to the Great Commandment to love God and one another (Matthew 22:34-40), with Christ’s Church as the perfect model.

    Pope Paul VI indicated in his prophetic encyclical, Humanae Vitae, that contraception destroys the bond of unity in marriage between God and the couple and between man and wife. What happens when this bond of love is broken? Our individual personalities disintegrate because our will is motivated by selfish desires that make unloving demands on our intellect. The family disintegrates because men make selfish unloving demands on women, who become mere objects of sexual gratification. Society disintegrates because adultery destroys families, fornication stops families from even forming, fathers abandon responsibility for their children, children in fatherless homes rebel against their mothers and roam the streets searching for love in gangs, crime, prostitution, pornography, sexual perversion, and drug addiction.

    What “forbidden fruit” from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil brought this about? If one cause can be isolated, it would be using our knowledge of the human reproductive system, which is good and a legitimate use of our intellect, to deny God a role in creating new human life, which is evil and an assertion of our will above His. It is the Sin of Adam, rebellion against God (Genesis 3). The sin consists in the development and use of artificial contraceptives, all represented in the popular mind by “the pill.” The next sin recorded in the Bible occurred within Adam’s family. It was murder, the Sin of Cain (Genesis 4). In America, murder in the human family was “legalized” in 1973, only five years after legalization of the pill. Since then, one-third of the next generation of Americans has been murdered by abortion and American society is now in the process of “legalizing” killing elderly and handicapped people. The excuse is “compassion” for them, “putting them out of their misery,” when we really want them out off our misery so the time and effort we spend caring for them can be squandered on our own selfish pursuits. This same pattern exists throughout the historic lands of Christendom.

    Adam and Eve were tempted to rebel against God by Satan, who Christ said was a liar and a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44). If the pill is from Satan, not God, then lies and murder accompany it. The lie is that it would “free” women and produce “wanted” children. The truth is that it has left women and children more enslaved, abused, abandoned, and impoverished than ever before, because all too many men have abandoned the joy of being a husband and father who sacrifices for his family as Christ sacrificed for His Church. Such men prefer thralldom to selfish urges that abandon them to bitter despair and the fear that they will die alone without love.

    Lies also mask killing on a monstrous scale that demands more lies. The pill does indeed act to prevent contraception, some of the time. The rest of the time it acts to prevent implantation of a newly conceived human being in the womb, thereby killing the child. In America, Pharmacists for Life estimates that these chemical abortions are four to eight times more common than the 40 million surgical abortions since 1973, so that in the last 25 years the pill has killed from 160 to 320 million Americans. This is equivalent to killing the entire American population of some 260 million.

    When chemical and mechanical abortions from “contraceptives” are added to surgical abortions worldwide, with abortion touted as a “backup to contraception,” it is clear that “the pill” and its accomplices have killed far more human beings in the last decades of our century than has occurred in all previous recorded history. All of this killing is sustained by lies.

    How else can the mindless slaughter end but by contemplating our creation in the image and likeness of God, revealed as a Blessed Trinity of three Persons united in One by love? Without reflecting and then acting on this eternal Truth, three forecasts can be made about the third millennium, the Trinity Millennium, with absolute certainty. First, men who were created “a little below the angels” (Psalms 8:4-6) will descend beneath beasts, savagely and willfully killing each other, beginning as now with the weakest, in mindless pursuit of selfish opulence that ends in utter decadence and depravity, a literal Hell on Earth. “For they cannot rest unless they have done evil” (Proverbs 5:16). Second, children will be seen increasingly as a curse instead of a blessing, because they interfere with our selfish profligacy, so few children will be born and mankind will have no future but empty cradles and organ-stripped corpses as the last generation desperately staves off extinction. Third, the culture of Death will spread over the Earth from the lands which once constituted Christendom, because these lands had once thrived on the fruit form the Tree of Life, Jesus Christ, and have now become glutted on the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

    This unholy trinity of evil that is manifest and rampant at the close of the second millennium will not prevail long into the third millennium because Satan will not prevail over Christ. But evil in the name of good is insatiably malignant, so it can desecrate the opening decades of the Trinity Millennium unless we abandon the pill and all it stands for (Satan and all his works) and once again joyfully accept God’s greatest gift to mankind, the gift of obediently joining Him in creating new life, a gift He denied even to His angels. This is what fuels Satan’s hatred of us. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that those who believe in Him may not perish, but may have life everlasting” (John 3:16).

Terence J. Hughes, Professor of Geological Sciences and Quaternary Studies at the University of Maine, is a pro-life activist. His prison name is “Iceman.”