MUST-LISTEN: Malcolm Muggeridge, On Humanae Vitae, July 1978

Malcolm Muggeridge, On Humanae Vitae, July 1978 https://t.co/2YJOSGuzbi

— St. Michael, the Archangel (@aveng_angel) February 6, 2024

 
Malcolm Muggeridge quotes.  Books by Malcolm Muggeridge.

Thank you to Katherine Watt.

Now whether and how far and to what extent this inhibition is or can be or will be acceptable, it's not for me to say. What I want to say tonight as a non-Catholic, as an aspiring Christian, as someone who as an old journalist has watched this process of deterioration in our whole way of life, what I want to say is that in that encyclical, the finger is pointed on the point that really matters. Namely, that through human procreation, the great creativity of men and women comes into play. And that to interfere with this creativity, to seek to relate it merely to pleasure, is to go back into pre-Christian times and ultimately to destroy the civilization that Christianity has brought about.

One thing that I know will appear in social histories in the future is that the dissolution of our way of life, our Christian way of life, and all that it has meant to the world, relates directly to the matter that is raised in Humanae Vitae.

And when they are as old as I am, enriches them particularly beautifully when they see, as they depart from this world, their grandchildren beginning the process of living which they are ending. There is no beauty, there is no joy, there is no compensation that anything could offer in the way of leisure, of so-called freedom from domestic duties, which could possibly compensate for one-thousandth part of the joy that an old man feels when he sees this beautiful thing: life beginning again as his ends, in those children that have come into the world through his love and through a marriage which has lasted through 50 and more years.

Now, of course, when Humanae Vitae was published to the world and was set upon by all the pundits of the media, it was attacked as being a failure to sympathize with the difficulties of young people getting married. That was the basis on which the attack was mounted. But it was perfectly obvious, and Colin Clark will remember from that symposium with which the coming of Humanae Vitae was celebrated by the BBC -- it was mentioned then that contraception was something that would not just stop with limiting families, that in fact it would lead inevitably as night follows day to abortion and then to euthanasia. And I remember that the panel jeered when I said particularly the last, euthanasia.

But it was quite obvious that this would be so. That if you once accepted the idea that erotic satisfaction was itself a justification, then you had to accept also the idea that if erotic satisfaction led to pregnancy, then the person concerned was entitled to have the pregnancy stopped. And of course, we had these abortion bills that proliferated through the whole Western world. In England, we have already destroyed more babies than lives were lost in the First World War. Through virtually the whole Western world, there now exists abortion on demand. The result has been an enormous increase in the misery and unhappiness of individual human beings, and again, the enormous weakening of this Christian family.

I should mention to you that the point has been reached in England where a bishop has actually produced a special prayer to be used on the occasion of an abortion. You know, one of the great difficulties in being editor of Punch was something that I hadn't envisaged when I took the job on. And that is that whenever you tried to be funny about somebody, you would invariably find that something they actually did was funnier than anything that you could possibly think of. I really don't know how you could get a better example of it than a bishop solemnly setting to work to produce a measured prayer on the occasion of murdering a baby.  But that is actually what has happened.

And the reason I call it that is because I read about how a journalist who had managed to make his way into a hospital ward had found that all the patients in the ward who were over 65 had N-T-B-R on their medical cards. And when he pressed them to tell him what these initials stood for, he was told, "Not to be resuscitated."

Well, I've been in that belt for some ten years, so I know that as sure as I can possibly persuade you to believe, this is what is going to happen. Governments will find it impossible to resist the temptation with the increasing practice of euthanasia, though it is not yet officially legal, except in certain circumstances, I believe, for instance, in this state of California. The temptation will be to deliver themselves from this burden of looking after the sick and imbecile people or senile people by the simple expedient of killing them off.

Now this is in fact what the Nazis did. And they did it not, as is commonly suggested, through slaughter camps and things like that, but by a perfectly coherent decree with perfectly clear conditions. And in fact, it is true that the delay in creating public pressure for euthanasia has been due to the fact that it was one of the war crimes cited at Nuremberg. So for the Guinness Book of Records, you can submit this, that it takes just about 30 years in our humane society to transform a war crime into an act of compassion. That is exactly what happened.

from another interview, 

Time and Eternity: The Uncollected Writings of Malcolm Muggeridge, Malcolm Muggeridge (Author), and Nicholas Flynn (Editor).  This may be a better assessment of Muggeridge.  Whereas Britain’s Muggeridge was documenting the atrocities in the Soviet Union and the Ukraine, Walter Duranty was the New York Time’s Man in Moscow.