Veritatis Splendor No. 78 and the morality of the human act

In his Encyclical Letter Veriitatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II teaches us that "the morality of the human act depends primarily and fundamentally on the 'object' rationally chosen by the deliberate will" (No. 78). He then explains (again in No. 78) what is meant by the 'object' rationally chosen by the deliberate will. He writes: "In order to be able to grasp the object of an act which specifies that act morally, it is therefore necessary to place oneself in the perspective of the acting person. The object of the act of willing is in fact a freely chosen kind of behavior. To the extent that it is in conformity with the order of reason, it is the cause of the goodness of the will; it perfects us morally...By the object of a given moral act, then, one cannot mean a process or an event of the merely physical order, to be assessed on the basis of its ability to bring about a given state of affairs in the outside world. Rather, that object is the proximate end of a deliberate decision which determines the act of willing on the part of the acting person."

In other words, Pope John Paul II is telling us that the "object" specifying the act is precisely what one feely chooses. Now the object of contraception, according to the Popes, is precisely to impede procreation. For example, in Humanae Vitae, No. 14, Pope Paul VI teaches that: "Equally to be rejected is every act which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, either as end or as means, to impede procreation."

However, human acts can legitimately be taken to protect a woman who has been raped from being made pregnant by the rapist's sperm and such acts do not constitute contraception, which is intrinsically evil and may never be morally justified. Why is it that such acts do not constitute contraception? Because, the object freely chosen and morally specifying them is not the impeding of a new human life that could begin through a freely chosen genital act but rather the protecting of the raped woman from further violence by the rapist.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae, 2-2, 64, 7, says that: "moral acts are specified by what is intended, not by what falls outside the scope of one's intentionality" (actus autem morales recipiunt speciem secundum id quod intenditur, non autem ab eo quod est praeter intentionem).

God love you,
Until next time
Paul Anthony Melanson