FRONT ROYAL, VA — The Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, STL, president of Human Life International, (HLI) has announced the launching of a new email newsletter and website to assist priests, deacons and seminarians to be well informed and able to preach on Humanae Vitae.

The move is part of HLI’s Humanae Vitae Initiative celebrating 40 years since Pope Paul VI released the landmark papal encyclical on birth control.

In the first installment of the newsletter, sent March 6, Father Euteneuer said, “HLI was founded thirty-five years ago—even before Roe v. Wade—primarily to defend the sanctity of marriage from the degradation of birth control. HLI’s Founder, Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, studied contraception carefully and saw the abortion plague coming as an inevitable wave of death that follows in the train of the promiscuity generated by birth control. He predicted with deadly accuracy that the fruit of birth control would be legalized abortion.”

Father Euteneuer has placed the project under the direction of John Mallon, HLI’s PR Director and long-time champion of Humanae Vitae. In 1994, then-editor of the Sooner Catholic, the archdiocesan newspaper of Oklahoma City, Mallon put out an issue of the paper on the 26th anniversary featuring the document on the front page and a special pull-out supplement within. At the direction of Archbishop Eusebius J. Beltran the issue was sent to all American bishops. In 1998 Mallon was responsible for producing a special supplement for Inside the Vatican magazine for the 30th anniversary of the document.

Mallon will write many of the installments and invite world-renowned experts to contribute. Mallon said, “The widespread rejection of this encyclical is perhaps the most tragic error in the Church’s history, an error to which many still cling to this day. We hope to demonstrate how this error launched the culture of death, opening the gate to abortion and myriad other social ills. We also hope to show how, like all of Christ’s teachings, Humanae Vitae is a message of hope, which, once applied in an admittedly hostile culture, can heal our society. But it must be preached in a positive and hopeful way.”

The website and newsletter may be accessed at http://humanaevitaepriests.org.