I recently read Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae the way it was principally meant to be read: in Latin. There’s something illuminating, I find, about reading in the original a work that is familiar to you in translation. It becomes unfamiliar. You can’t catch the gist of a clause unless you pay unusually close attention to the words. You can’t dismiss something before you have quite determined what that something is.
What struck me this time was the final portion of the text, 40 percent of the whole, a gentle and heartfelt appeal to various groups of people in positions of responsibility. The pope knew that he was delivering a message that would dash some false hopes. He also knew that, in the newly seething sensualism of his times, it would be hard to move people even to understand what he was saying.
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