Holy Father: Contraception Violates “the Beauty of Conjugal Love”

On Friday, Pope Benedict send a message to the President of the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for the study of Marriage and the Family. The message was occasioned by an International Congress marking 40 years of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. Both Vatican Radio and AFP have coverage of this story.

The tendentious journalism of the AFP report may not be trustworthy, but it contains this notable paragraph:

The 81-year-old pope’s message Friday to a seminar on the encyclical also reaffirmed that the rhythm method is an acceptable form of contraception for couples in “dire circumstances” who need to space their children.

If the Holy Father really restricted the use of infertile periods (he almost certainly would not have said “rhythm method”) to “dire circumstances,” then he is distancing himself from the increasingly liberal interpretations of the Church’s traditional tolerance of this practice. The “tolerance” was limited to highly restricted circumstances, and the practice of the method for putting off contraception was always seen to be temporary.