The Pope and the Pill

A Psychological History

Pope John PAUL II is probably the greatest apostle of peace the 20th century has known.
The book and movie Witness to Hope is a brilliant depiction of how he survived WWII, joined an underground Seminary in Poland during WWII bravely (could have been killed if caught) and witnessed many of the horrors of the war including watching of or knowing of the Nazi attrocities including the leveling of Warsaw after the Warsaw uprising while he lived in the city. Many of his Jewish friends were killed. The entire Jewish population was routed up against their will and walled into ghettos before being sent off to being killed during the Nazi occupation which he lived through.
The child John Paul when he was just Karol W, first saw his mother die in his early adolescence, then his older brother, and later, before he even turned 25, his father died. In the middle was the attrocity and horrors of WWII.
It is very possible that he carried around within himself what we now call PTSD- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. An intensely apprehensive anxiety. Something that made it untenable for him to be comfortable wanting to start his own family- after all they all die eventually and what pain that must have caused.
It is against that backdrop of a persona that one has to look at how he penned the encyclical which forbade birth control. It is too easy to just reduce it to the desire to avoid overpromiscuity. One must look at the psyche of why a man would be so adamant about first not wanting his own family, then what he wants to dictate should be normative practices in formation for others. Perhaps knowing how many people die in wars and of disease made him want no limit of any kind on procreative capacity. Perhaps he didn't want anyone entering into intimacy too intimately for the pain of loss of it.
But whatever his psychological orientation, one cannot merely accept the reasoning without critically examining whether in current modern context it makes any sense. That is not being true to the Holy Spirit.