Love isn't Free

It’s the Fourth of July, which means fireworks, bald eagles, brazen stars and stripes on everything. And even in an age that makes it very hard to love this country, I still think it’s alright to be patriotic and celebrate Independence Day. Along with all the patriotic pomp is the phrase “freedom isn’t free.” It’s meant to remind us that our rights, though inalienable, had to be fought for, that people sacrificed their livelihoods and lives for the principles of freedom and liberty. There is a cost.

On a smaller scale, we’re taught the same idea: “there is no such thing as a free lunch,” and “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” We’re wisely warned against Faustian bargains. And yet we keep making them. Because we want them to be true. We want the little-effort-high-reward option, the free lunch, the no-risk gamble, the democracy that doesn’t need defending, the bite of fruit that will make us like God.

Fifty years ago this month, on July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the Church’s teaching on marriage, parenthood, and the prohibition of birth control in Humanae Vitae. Many expected the encyclical to change the Church’s teaching, to agree with the zeitgeist. It was the Church standing up to the Sexual Revolution and saying “no.” 

Marital relations are just that—done in the confines of marriage and in relationship. Each partner gives completely of oneself to the other, including fertility. It is also done in relationship with God, trusting his will and being open to the possibility of children.

Paul VI says, “Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner's own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.”

The act combines bodies with the all the genetic information to form a new body, one that God imparts a soul into. This, at the very biological core, is the point of sex. But people have always wanted to disrupt the act from its conclusion. An empty release. People want the act of feeling loved without putting in the work of loving someone.

Free love doesn’t exist. Love is sacrificial.

Fifty years on, Humane Vitae is looked on by outsiders as the mean Catholic Church who won’t admit it’s wrong and by too many insiders as the Church being fallible or failing to get with times. The Sexual Revolution won. People are free to sleep with who they want, when they want, without contrition, without commit, without children. If it sounds too good to be true…

Paul VI predicted the consequences of the new sexual paradigm and the wide acceptance of artificial birth control: more people using partners just for pleasure, more demand for pleasure, broken relationships, the breakdown of strong marriages and strong families, the repudiation of the differences of the sexes, and the use of birth control to reduce undesired populations. He was right. In the face of ridicule, the Church continues to teach the beautiful, sacrificial love of a man and woman which is the bedrock of family, and thus, society. As Pope Benedict XVI states in Deus Cartias Est, the spirit and body can only love together; the two cannot be separated. To do so denies a person the fullness of self. He says, “Eros, reduced to pure ‘sex,’ has become a commodity, a mere ‘thing’ to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity.”

In honor of the anniversary of Humane Vitae, I hope address in a few future posts the dangers and consequences of society’s current understanding of sex, contraception, and relationships, and how the Church’s teachings offer freedom through sacrificial love.

Our Bodies
Family Ties
What a Girl Needs
And Decrease the Surplus Population