Humanae Vitae

I have been reading Humanae Vitae of late and have been struck by a few things.

Firstly, I was struck by paragraph 13 (Faithfulness to God's Design).  In it, Paul VI writes:

But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator.

I think this is a key point.  It goes with my understanding of the confusion which grips our society.  Our culture believes, and is taught, that man is an accident; the result of a random comingling of organic molecules.  But the Church correctly teaches that we are not accidents, that each of us is called to life by God.

Without "the design established by the Creator," there are no human rights.  This perspective is written into the founding documents of our country, but has been abandoned in recent decades.

How long can a country founded on the perspective that human rights are founded in a "design established by the Creator," survive without it?

 Secondly, there is the paragraph to Christian Couples (25), in which Pope Paul says:

While the Church does indeed hand on to her children the inviolable conditions laid down by God's law, she is also the herald of salvation and through the sacraments she flings wide open the channels of grace through which man is made a new creature responding in charity and true freedom to the design of his Creator and Savior, experiencing too the sweetness of the yoke of Christ.

and

For the Lord has entrusted to them (Christian husbands and wives) the task of making visible to men and women the holiness and joy of the law which united inseparably their love for one another and the cooperation they give to God's love, God who is the Author of human life.

Read the entire paragraph.  It is wonderful and encouraging.