It’s no secret that marriage and family have been under heavy attack in Western culture for quite some time. Not intelligent attacks, mind you, but brutish ones that trade on crippled desires. No one has taken these attacks on our social nature more seriously than the Catholic Church.

It’s quite remarkable that, despite her own serious struggles, the Church has managed to continually give aid to the embattled institutions of marriage and family. Just as the sexual revolution was roaring, Pope Paul VI dropped the bomb of Humanae Vitae. When most Catholic moral theologians were themselves becoming utilitarians more concerned to revise sexual ethics in dialogue with the sexual revolution than sexual reality, Pope John Paul II was hard at work: writing Familiaris Consortio in 1981, founding the Pontifical Institute for Marriage and Family in 1982, and almost single-handedly stemming the tide of proportionalism in fundamental moral theology with Veritatis Splendor in 1993.