Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humane Vitae gave the perennial “no!” to the question of whether contraception could be used without endangering and degrading the human person. Since its release and world tour in 1968, critics have characterized the encyclical as an abstract, moral ruling stamped down like some horridly-shaped cookie cutter on the real sexual lives of loving couples. But as the Western sexual landscape is revealed as a wasteland of bored masturbation rather than an Eden of sexual liberation, more people are willing to give Humanae Vitae another glance.

The encyclical centers around an ecological vision of the human person; its primary punch calls contraception anti-holistic. Before the rest of the world had the wits to even pretend to see themselves as bound up within a natural environment, this pope paved the way towards an ecologically-friendly sexuality. . . .

I advise everyone to read the Book of Sirach, if for no other reason than to understand how completely strange the formation of the Scriptures makes a man to the world. It seems as if Ben Sira wrote especially for our modern age, not so much for our edification, as to mercilessly contradict our every truism with his own.

To our “follow your heart,” he recommends that we “do not follow your inclination and strength, walking according to the desires of your heart” (5:2).

To our “try new things,” he advises that we “do not winnow with every wind, nor follow every path” (5:9).

Those who deny the possibility of miracles usually come in two types: people who like Outer Space and undergraduates who remained sober long enough to read a paragraph of David Hume. The former type do not like miracles because they take things like “wonder and mystery” to be scarce resources which, if taken by Christians, will be denied to Scientists and astronauts. One cannot believe in the mystery of the Eucharist without denigrating the mystery of the Milky Way, and any claim of a miracle is met with a hopstep: “The real miracle is that we’re all floating through Space on a Rock.” To argue with such people is largely mean-spirited . . .

It has been said that we’d all be a good deal better off if we governed less. This is wrong, for the simple reason that it isn’t possible. Governing less is a form of government as available to overuse and overreach as any other. Inactivity is a choice, and an active one at that. Nero never governed Rome with so hot a passion as when he fiddled while it burned.

No one would argue that the mother that parents the best is the one that parents the least. . . .

If the gates of Hell should prevail against the Catholic Church, and should her mourners—condemned henceforth to practice the submissive rites of paganism—ask what epithet should be put on Her grave, I would like it to read, “she tried to put hats on everyone.”

For the Church really does have a mad passion for hatting . . .

The modern world is forever calling things “inevitable” that are self-evidently not. It is “inevitable” that rent will go up in a certain neighborhood, given the presence of a new business or the rehabilitation of an old house nearby. But rents have never gone up, or down, in the history of landlording. The medievals spoke of fire having a natural desire to rise, of earth having the natural power of falling, but rents are without any buoyancy or gravitas beyond what we give them. Still, in every neighborhood you’ll hear a landlord saying, in all seriousness, that “rents are going up” like so many hot air balloons — he, borne away by them. . . .