Continuing his analysis of Humanae Vitae, Pope John Paul II gets to the heart of the matter which is love. Pope Paul VI teaches that married couples must be responsible in their decisions concerning procreation. Marriage is about bringing children into the world and creating a family. The Church, consistent with God’s commission to the human race at the beginning, encourages couples to be generous in having children. However, this generosity does not mean that man and wife should ignore situations that call for a postponing of pregnancy or spacing of births. But the methods for doing so must be morally licit.
This gets to the heart of the matter. In managing their fertility, man and wife must use the method of self-mastery and not count on technology to make up for the self-control they refuse to exercise. The reliance on self-mastery — virtue — is truly personalistic, because the person is master of himself and has dominion over himself. Love demands that the person reread the language of the body in truth. Failure to do so constitutes the essential evil of the contraceptive act. John Paul II notes also that continence is important in itself. Ascesis has a necessary place in our lives and in marriage this can be found in sexual continence, even outside of natural family planning. What John Paul calls for here is our maturity, manifest in the virtue of temperance.
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