On July 25, 1968, Paul VI made a historic decision, and signed the encyclical ‘Humanae Vitae’ … “With this he signed his own passion,” said his Secretary of State, Cardinal Casaroli.
The new documentary by Goya Productions, “The Prophecies of the Humanae Vitae“, takes stock of one of the most controversial documents of the Catholic Church 50 years after its publication. International experts talk the questions raised about the great debate on contraception that shook a society and a Church still under the impact of the May 68 “sexual revolution”.
Have the prophecies warned by the Pope been fulfilled: increase of conjugal infidelity, general degradation of morality, and loss of respect for women? Or were fulfilled those of the revolutionaries of 68 who promised a happy world with the contraceptive pill?
One of the critical aspects emphasized in the documentary is Paul VI’s warning that contraception would lead to the loss of respect for women. According to Professor Micaela Menárguez “the contraceptive pill has freed the man to do with the woman what he pleases and use her, not love her. And this is terrible because the woman has taken the pill thinking that she was the one who freed herself, when what she has freed is all the men around her so that they may have sexual relations with her without any responsibility or self-control” .
For the German writer and sociologist Gabriele Kuby “pornography is a form of the most savage and brutal lack of respect for women, as it is also for men.”
The 26 minutes long documentary shows testimonies of people converted after reading the encyclical. One of them comes from the director of the Couple to Couple League for the United States, Michael Manhart: “I am a convert, both to Natural Family Planning and to Catholicism. I read Humanae Vitae expecting the church to tell me what I couldn’t do over and over again, and yet it was a document that painted such a wonderful picture of what marriage is”.
Mgr. Mario Iceta, President of the Family and Life committee of the Spanish Bishops Conference, attended the presentation of the documentary and said: “It presents the encyclical in a positive way full of hope. It can do a lot of good to boyfriends and marriages and also to a suitable and luminous concept of the wonderful gift of life”… read more
The documentary “The Prophecies of Humanae Vitae” is available online at: vod.encristiano.com
