Category Archives: Contraception

Looking with Lust

Anthropology, Contraception, Human Dignity, Incarnation, Sexual Ethics, The Life of Jesus, Theology of the Body, , , , , ,

Our Lord would most accurately be labeled, at least according to modern standards, a total prude.  He reached a puritanical pinnacle by inventing a totally new category of adultery which he dubs “adultery in the heart” that occurs when a man looks at a woman with lust.  This divine priggishness makes it practically impossible for men and women to even be around each other, or at least that is how it seems.  The modern mind, trapped in a world without virtue, can only see two options: puritanical or prurient.  But Our Lord is really offering a third option, one that ultimately leaves us with the power to love freely and not free love-ers.

Anyone encountering the Sermon on the Mount for the first time must immediately be struck by the unbelievable idealism of the mode of life Christ is putting forth.  He would be the world’s most moralistic man except for one important detail.  Whenever Our Lord issues a command, He never simply leaves us to our own devices, but also seeks to give us the power to fulfill His commands.  His coming to “fulfill the law” isn’t just a matter of prophecy but a matter of grace.  Through the power of His grace we are able to fulfill even the most idealistic of His commands, the command not to look upon a man or woman with lust included.

Christ the True Moralist

Herein lies a major point of misunderstanding about Christ the moralist.  His commandments are such that they both contain the path to freedom while simultaneously leading us to freedom.  He is the Truth and the Way.  What Christ is commanding is really an offer that will free us from looking upon another person with lust.  The power to see the other person as a person and not merely an object of pleasure.  This power then opens the gates of freedom that enable us to love purely as the only true path to happiness.

This pathway to love however also requires us to properly understand what it means, and more importantly what it doesn’t mean, to look at someone with lust.  Lust is not just looking at person of the opposite sex, but is a gaze that is filled desire to use the other person.  In this regard it is helpful to turn to Pope St. John Paul II’s teachings in Love and Responsibility.

Love and Responsibility and Lust

The former Fr. Wojtyla sought to explain how attraction is felt between members of the opposite sex.  In encountering a person of the opposite sex, a man or woman has a natural response to the sexual value of the other person.  These responses come in two forms: sensuality or the reaction to the sexual value in the other person’s body, and sentimentality or the reaction to their perceived masculinity or femininity.    This spontaneously felt response, without the governing of reason, finds its culmination in the desire to possess the value.  Notice that it is the value itself that we desire to possess regardless of the person who possesses that value.  The other person becomes an object of use, rather than a subject to love.  John Paul II labels this phenomenon subjective egoism because it is based completely on how the person feels in response to the other person.  Lust then is the expression of the desire to possess the value, it is the choice to use the other person.

This distinction between interest and expressing the desire is important because merely acknowledging the sexual value of the other person (we might call this interest) is not the same thing as lust.  Interest is perfectly natural and in a very real way something that happens to us rather than something chosen.  It is not just the seed of lust but also the seed of love.  Once the interest is piqued, desire is sparked.  Desire sees the person as an object to be enjoyed but still is not sinful as long as the will resists that desire to use the person.  This too is an important element of love, but it must always be purified such that it is directed to the whole person.

A few examples might help.  A man sees a woman and is drawn towards some perceived sexual value in her body.  His emotional response brings him pleasure and he must now make a decision.  Will he continue to linger on the fact that she is “hot” and the pleasure that looking at her brings or will he remind himself that it is a person and that using her (even though all he is doing is looking at her) is wrong?  If it is the former, then he has lusted.  If it is the latter then he has, even in a very primitive way, expressed love for her by willing her good in choosing not to treat her like an object for his own enjoyment. 

Notice that what is being suggested is not repression.  The attraction is natural and there can be no love without it.  What has to be “repressed” is the urge to use the person.  The man may feel the attraction and move to meet her, but in order not to be lust, he must go to her as a person and treat her as such.  The attraction is still there, but it must move the man towards its proper end—the woman who has stirred his heart and not just her body.  In being free from lust, he is now free to love the woman and not his own emotional response to the sexual value of the woman.

Adultery in the heart has everything to do with what is happening interiorly in the man and it is from this that Christ offers freedom.  How this happens can be shown by two further examples. 

Imagine a married man meets another woman with whom he has regular contact and she awakens sexual interest in him.  He begins to develop sexual desire for her and so now he chooses to avoid her because he fears that he may lust after her.  To avoid the near occasion of sin is a good thing, but it is not yet freedom.  Freedom comes when there is no threat of lust, that is, when the man is chaste. 

Like all virtues, chastity governs the spontaneous arising of the emotions attached to attraction.  The man is simply able to acknowledge the woman’s beauty without being stirred to lust.  He is free now to see her as a person who is beautiful without any desire to possess either her or her beauty.  He can simply appreciate it as beautiful and move on.  The truly chaste married man only feels attraction for his wife. 

Likewise, the chaste unmarried man will feel the emotions of attraction, but they will be moderated such that they do not move him to use the person.  Instead he is drawn towards the person and able to pursue her purely based on her personality and not solely on her attributes.  He can see her in truth and not be blinded by those attributes.  He is completely free in his love for her.

Our Lord’s prudery then is nothing less than an offer for authentic freedom.  Our Lord practiced chastity to the perfect degree and has offered us each a share in His virtue in order to free our hearts to love to the full.

The Rehabilitation of Chastity

Anthropology, Contraception, marriage, Moralilty, Sexual Ethics, Theology of the Body, Virtue, , , ,

In his book Love and Responsibility, the future Pope John Paul II lamented the demise of virtue, and in particular, the virtue of chastity.  A spirit of resentment has emerged in the modern psyche towards high moral standards and anyone who practices them.  What was once admirable, even if very few people could master it, is now met with scorn and rationalization.  Chastity is viewed as repression and psychologically harmful, especially in young people.  But in truth, without chastity there can never be any true love.  That is why John Paul II thought modernity needed a “rehabilitation of chastity” and set out a program in Love and Responsibility for accomplishing it.

An Elusive Definition of Chastity?

Part of the reason that such a rehabilitation is necessary is because chastity is rarely defined in positive terms.  St. Thomas Aquinas defined chastity as a sub-virtue of temperance, the virtue that controls the concupiscible appetite.  He points out that chastity “takes its name from the fact that reason ‘chastises’ concupiscence, which, like a child, needs curbing” (ST II-II, q.151, a.1).  Of course, modern sensibilities being what they are, any whiff of restraint, is seen as an assault against freedom. If chastity is to be revived then we must expand our view of it as “a purely negative virtue. Chastity, in this view, is one long ‘no’” (L&R, p.170).  What Fr. Wojtyla hoped to accomplish then is to see chastity as “above all the ‘yes’ of which certain ‘no’s’ are the consequence” (ibid).

Chastity’s alleged violation of freedom really seems like an assault on love.  But this is only because our view of love, especially between the sexes, is far too narrow.  When the love between a man and a woman is viewed as primarily based on the subjective emotional and sexual experiences of the individuals then chastity will always be something negative.  This is not love, but use.  The two people use each other in order to “feel” like they are in love.  They do not love the other person but they love the feeling of being in love.  And they will be “in love” with the other person only so long as they are able to cause the emotional response. 

As opposed to its counterfeit, love is something objective because it is based not upon on an emotional and sexual response that the other caused, but on the objective value of the other person.  Love must always be directed towards the person and the value that they have as persons.  As good and as powerful as the sexual value of a person is, it does not exhaust their value.  Love between the sexes incorporates that sexual value into the total value of the person as a person.

When use is substituted for love, then chastity “feels” like it is holding love back and keeping it from blossoming.  In truth, chastity is an indispensable ingredient for love because “its function is to free love from the utilitarian attitude” (p.169).  Chastity is not a ‘No’ to sexual pleasure but a ‘No’ to treating the other person as an object of sexual gratification.  It is a steady and habitual refusal to use the other person.  It is a habitual readiness to affirm the full value of the other person.  Returning to JPII’s words, “only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love. For chastity frees their association, including their marital intercourse, from that tendency to use a person” (L&R, p. 171).

Pleasure Freed by Chastity

The traditional definition of chastity, true as it is, does not exhaust its full meaning.  Chastity does not just moderate our sexual desire, but “liberates love from the attitude of use.”  It is then both a ‘No’ and a ‘Yes’—no to use, yes to love.  No longer under the sway of unbridled emotion, sexual desire is liberated to roam free and be directed towards the full value of the person.  Only the chaste man and woman experience true pleasure of sexual desire because it is governed by reason and directed towards its natural end. 

This is the great lie of those who would have us believe that chastity is mere repression.  Sinners always love company and seek a way to rationalize their own vices.  On the surface, and at least initially, it is easier to yield to sexual desire.  But pleasure is always fleeting and when chosen as an end always operates under the law of diminishing returns.  But John Paul II encourages his readers to persevere because virtue takes time and suffering because of our fallen nature.  Once it matures pleasure is restored to its natural place and, surprising to our untrained minds, actually increases.  The “in-between” time in which chastity feels like repression is certainly difficult, but once it grows, like a fully mature tree, it provides the sweet fruit of pleasure.  This reality only comes about however when chastity is seen as worthwhile.    

Fully rehabilitated chastity enables us to see that it is, like every decision that we make, both a no and a yes.  It is a no to a utilitarian relationship and a yes to the full blossoming of both spousal love and friendship.

On Prenatal Testing

Autism, Bioethics, Conscience, Contraception, Family, Moralilty, , , ,

Thanks to a noninvasive prenatal testing procedure called NIPD, a test which can predict Down Syndrome with 99% accuracy, the number of children born with Down Syndrome worldwide has greatly been reduced.  This is not because they can repair the defective condition, but because it fashions the DNA into a bullseye, systematically marking them for death.  Between 2/3 and 4/5 of children with Down Syndrome are aborted, reducing the overall rate by 30%.  In other countries such as Denmark and Sweden nearly 100% of the children are aborted.  This, of course, is an example in which pre-natal testing has been used under nefarious circumstances, but not all of them are bad.  In fact, as more and more data pours in from the work on the Human Genome Project we should expect the ability to make more accurate pre-natal diagnoses on any number of conditions to increase.  With knowledge always comes power, but this power can be seductive unless we are guided by solid moral principles.

What makes navigating the moral waters upon which pre-natal testing floats particularly perilous is the fact that most of the tests themselves do not carry any moral weight.  There are some, like amniocentesis, which present significant dangers for both mother and child.  These tests should be avoided unless there are serious medical reasons for doing so.  But tests like NIPD and ultrasounds are practically harmless to both mother and child and become part and parcel of the standard of care.  The moral issue comes in with the intention of the parents of the unborn child.  In other words, what are they going to do with the information?

Why You Want to Know Matters

If they desire to know so that they can abort the child then it becomes morally problematic, even if they don’t actually follow through with it.  Knowing that this might be a real temptation, then they shouldn’t have the test.  On the flip side, a couple may want to perform the test so that they are better prepared medically and emotionally for parenting a child with serious medical needs then the test can be safely (morally speaking) performed.  There continue to be many advances made to in utero diagnosis and surgical interventions that these tests can often be life-saving.  Just this week the Cleveland Clinic announced that they had performed successful in utero surgery to repair Spina Bifida.  This obviously was made possible through pre-natal testing. 

Summarizing, The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (1994) presents these principles succinctly:  “Prenatal diagnosis is permitted when the procedure does not threaten the life or physical integrity of the unborn child or the mother, and does not subject them to disproportionate risks; when the diagnosis can provide information to guide preventive care for the mother or pre- or postnatal care for the child; and when the parents, or at least the mother, give free and informed consent.  Prenatal diagnosis is not permitted when undertaken with the intention of aborting an unborn child with a serious defect” (50).

With abortion off the table, what are the guidelines we can use if the unthinkable happens and a child is diagnosed with a medical problem.  The Church speaks of avoiding “disproportionate risks”.  This assumes a sort of calculus on the part of the parents by which they weigh the seriousness of the disease against the risk of surgery.  This might include experimental procedures.  Provided that there is an acceptable amount of risk involved and the surgery is done for therapeutic, rather than experimental reasons, then it would be morally permissible to do so.  As the Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin, Donum Vitae, puts it,  “[N]o objective, even though noble in itself, such as a foreseeable advantage to science, to other human beings or to society, can in any way justify experimentation on living human embryos or fetuses, whether viable or not, either inside or outside the mother’s womb” (DV I, 4). 

Not only is abortion not an option, but also those procedures which are not inherently therapeutic. Procedures designed to influence the genetic inheritance of a child, which are not therapeutic, are morally wrong.  “Certain attempts to influence chromosomic or genetic inheritance are not therapeutic but are aimed at producing human beings selected according to sex or other predetermined qualities. These manipulations are contrary to the personal dignity of the human being and his or her integrity and identity. Therefore in no way can they be justified on the grounds of possible beneficial consequences for future humanity. Every person must be respected for himself: in this consists the dignity and right of every human being from his or her beginning” (DV, I, 6).

Genetic Counseling

Genetic counseling before a couple actually conceives is growing in use and popularity.   The man and the woman each submit to genetic screening that gives a genetic profile enabling them to predict how likely it is that they have a child with a serious genetic defect.  Like the pre-natal testing discussed previously there is nothing inherently wrong with doing it.  What matters is what you are going to do with the information that is gleaned from it.  For example, suppose a couple finds one or both of them are carriers for some genetic condition such as cystic fibrosis or Tay Sachs, both of which pose serious risks to viability and lifespan of the child.  They may come to learn that there is a 50% chance that their child develops the condition.  Is this a good enough reason to forego having children and adopt instead?

This is one of those cases where the Church does not say one way or the other, although we can certainly apply Catholic principles to come up with a set of guidelines.  First, we must never forget that the goal of parenting is to raise children for heaven.  The most severely mentally handicapped child will only be so temporarily if they are baptized.  I say this not to over-spiritualize the issue, but to put it in perspective.  As a father of a special needs child this thought has brought me much comfort and has stifled my fears.  Having a child with something wrong with them is among the worst things a parent can deal with, but it is not the worst.  Having your child go to hell would be the worst.  Knowing that you raised your child and got them to heaven means that you have done all God asked of you.  “Well done my good and faithful servant.”  

This may not be a reason then to avoid having any children, but it might be counted as a so-called “serious” reason to postpone, even indefinitely, having more children.  If a couple has a child with many medical needs and knowing that they are at an increased likelihood to have another like them, they may legitimately decide to not have any more children, provided the means they use to avoid pregnancy are morally licit. 

The True Christian History of Abortion

Abortion, Apologetics, Contraception, Culture, Culture of Life, History, , , , , ,

As the battle over legalized abortion continues rage as specific states more clearly draw their battle lines, there is a growing number of Christians who are attempting to make a Christian argument in favor of abortion.  In truth, there is no Christian defense of abortion and there never has been.  Not surprisingly, the abortion apologist’s arguments fall flat, even though they continually recycle the same talking points irrespective of truth.  Even if there are different variations on the propagandistic talking points, they seem never to grow weary of repeating them.  Given the increased frequency in which we are seeing them, it is important that we have a ready defense.

In order to avoid toppling over a straw man,  we will refer to an example that was printed in the Huffington Post last year entitled “The Truth About Christianity and Abortion”.  We use this one not because it was a particularly convincing argument, but because it invokes almost all the common arguments for Christian support of abortion in one place. 

Before diving into the exact arguments, it is a helpful to remember that there are plenty of arguments against abortion that don’t rely solely upon religious convictions.  Instead you can use philosophical reasoning and science.  Since that ground has already been covered, we will stick to the Christian-based arguments since that is terrain over which these abortion advocates like to stomp.

“There are no specific references to abortion in the Bible, either within Old Testament law or in Jesus’ teachings or the writings of Paul and other writers in the New Testament.”

This first argument, namely that the Bible doesn’t say anything about abortion is a bit of a red herring, at least as far as Catholics are concerned.  Not everything we believe need to be mentioned in the Bible explicitly.  If Scripture tells us that the pre-born being in the womb of Elizabeth (somewhere between 20-24 weeks) and the pre-born being in the womb of Mary (somewhere between 0-4 weeks) are both persons (Luke 1:26,41) and that directly killing an innocent person is always wrong (Exodus 20:13) then we could conclude that abortion, that is the direct and intentional  killing of an infant in the womb of the mother, is wrong.  The Bible need not, nor could it list out all the ways that a person might be murdered but can simply articulate the principle in what amounts to a blanket condemnation. 

That being said, the premise that the Bible does not mention abortion is also false.  In the ancient world, they were not nimble enough to play verbal gymnastics like us.  We are fall more sophisticated in the true sense of the word.  Even amongst the pagans, abortion was considered to be baby killing.  In fact, the device that they used to perform the abortion was called embruosqakths, which means “the slayer of the infant, which was of course alive.” (Tertullian, On the Soul, Ch. 25). 

They also used chemical potions to cause abortions, although they were far more dangerous to the mother than using the “slayer of the infant.”  This type of abortion is mentioned in Scripture, even if only implicitly.  We shall expound on this in a moment, but these potions fell under the broad Greek term pharmakeia, the same term St. Paul uses in Galatians 5:20 and we translate as “sorcery”.

“Likewise, throughout the history of the early church into the middle-ages, there is little to no mention of abortion as a topic of great alarm – from the days of the Old Testament until modern history. Hence, there is no case to be made for a definitive Christian stance throughout history on the spiritual or moral aspects of abortion.”

While it may have been convenient in supporting the point, the connection of pharmakeia to abortifacient drugs was not an exercise in originality, but something that the early Church did when they spoke against abortion.  The Didache, written during the Apostolic Age (probably around 70 AD) of the Apostles in expounding on the commandment of love of neighbor it said, “You shall not practice magic. You shall not use potions [pharmakeia). You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child” (Didache 2:1–2).  Likewise, the Letter of Barnabas (74 AD), which is a commentary on the Didache says, “thou shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shalt thou destroy it after it is born” (19).

We already heard from Tertullian in the 2nd Century, but the list of Fathers who spoke against abortion down to the beginning of the 5th Century reads like a who’s who of Patristic teachers: Athenagoras of Athens, Hippolytus, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, and St. Jerome.  It is also included in the twenty-first canon of the Council of Ancyra and among the Apostolic Constitutions.  In other words, it is hard not to stumble upon a condemnation of abortion among the Early Church Fathers, unless of course you don’t actually look.

Given the unbroken teaching to Apostolic times, abortion was a settled issue and we should not expect to hear about it much unless it is challenged (that is why St. John Paul II included the infallible statement of the Ordinary Magisterium in Evangelium Vitae).  The relative silence of the Middle Ages is a non-sequitur for that reason—it was a settled issue within Christendom and thus did not need to be defended or expounded upon much.

The Augustinian Exception?

Among those Church Fathers listed above there is one notable exception: St. Augustine.  He is notable not because of his silence but because of the fact that he is often quoted out of context.  The Huffington Post author does the same thing quoting him as saying:  “The law does not provide that the act (abortion) pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation.”  Not surprising she doesn’t cite the source of the quote which would enable us to establish context, but it comes from a commentary on Exodus 21.  Taken in context Augustine is asking whether, given the primitive embryology of his time, whether abortion before the 40th day after conception could be classified as homicide or not.  In his mind abortion was still a grave evil no matter how old the infant, but he wasn’t sure whether it should be classified as murder.

To cite this is really disingenuous, for the author knows it is based upon an ancient understanding of human development.  She knows that modern embryology has established that there is sensation long before the 40th day after conception.  Anyone who has seen an ultrasound image (or has watched the movie Silent Scream) can easily attest to that truth.  Unless the author of the article is willing to accept the primitive thinking of the 5th Century, then this is actually an argument against abortion.  If Augustine has access to modern technology, then he would have concluded that it was murder at any stage.

“I’m not saying abortion cannot be an important issue to a Christian, but there is no scriptural or historical backing for it to be the number one issue, at the expense of the ‘least of these’ who are suffering now.”

This line of reasoning really sets up a false dichotomy that pits poverty against abortion.  This is recycled secular thinking.  There are those who suffer because of destitution, and we ought to do what we can to alleviate that, but that does not mean you may alleviate it by reducing the number of mouths that need to be fed.  Why couldn’t the same argument be applied to the already born children of the poor, or even the poor themselves?  One definite way to end poverty would be to kill all the poor people.

As far as it being the “number one issue” is concerned, first we must admit that history is not a repeating cycle in which social ills always occur with the same frequency and intensity.  Perhaps destitution was a greater threat to human thriving than abortion was in ancient Rome or in the Middle Ages, but that does not mean it is still a greater threat.  In fact, we could argue that destitution (“poor” is a relative term and actually a Christian value, destitution is an objective measure) is at an all-time low.  What is not at an all-time low however is the number of innocent lives being snuffed out through abortion every day to the tune of about 125,000 per day worldwide (and this doesn’t include the number of abortions caused by birth control pills which could double or even triple that total).  Abortion, because it involves so many, all of which are the most vulnerable and voiceless, is by far the greatest injustice in the world today.  They are “’the least of these’ who are suffering now.”

Master of Your Domain

Anthropology, Conscience, Contraception, Freedom, Homosexuality, Moralilty, Sexual Ethics, , , ,

A couple of months back there was an anti-vaping meme that circulating in social media that encouraged teens to masturbate rather than to vape: “Pleasuring yourself with Vape?  Try masturbation instead.  Masturbating alone or with a friend is a great safe alternative to vaping.”    Vaping may be bad, especially for teens, but the solution of masturbation is not a real moral alternative either.  The meme creators reasoned that when pleasure is the goal, it is better to choose masturbation because it is a relatively harmless activity when done in private (or even with a “friend”).  Unfortunately, anyone who contests this is puritanically shouting into the hyper-libidinous wind that keeps our culture sailing along.  Nevertheless, one could, and more importantly should, argue that masturbation is far more harmful to the person than vaping and therefore something that should also be avoided.

Because we are oversexed any conversation on this topic will naturally require some backing up of sorts.  Our culture may be obsessed with sex, but so are the apparent puritans who are always moralizing about it.  We will back up in order to first understand why sex is such a big deal. 

Sex and Desire

Our human desires all seem to point to some personal need that we have.  Hunger and thirst point to the need to eat and drink for example.  While quelling the hunger pains and slaking the thirst may bring us pleasure, that cannot be enough to decide what and how we should eat and drink.  We must always keep the purpose of the desire and its fulfillment in mind.  The pleasure is meant to be a motor that moves us towards something that is good for us.  In other words, those things we choose to eat and drink must actually meet the needs of nutrition and hydration.  Those that do not, we label as perverted.  Eating plastic coated with strawberry jelly and drinking antifreeze both might bring us pleasure, but ultimately they fail to meet the need or purpose of the desire.  In short, there are right and wrong things to eat, even if some of the wrong things are pleasurable.  Every desire must be submitted to our reason that judges right and wrong according to the purpose of the desire.

Sexual desire is similar to hunger and thirst in that it is an innate human desire, but it differs because it is more complex.  It is more complex not just because it points to the “need” to reproduce, but because it also points to two other important distinctly human aspects.  First, sexual desire points to sexual fulfillment.  By sexual fulfillment I don’t mean an orgasm, but to our fulfillment of what it means to be made as men and women.  Our sexual desire points to our personal fulfillment in women becoming wives and mothers and men becoming husbands and fathers.  I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of people finding fulfillment in other ways, but just to emphasize that we are talking about sexual fulfillment, that is, what the meaning or telos of being made as a man or woman is.  Even the most ardent LGBT activist admits this truth when they preach gender identity.  In any regard, because our sexual fulfillment is so vital to our personal identity, it is our strongest desire.

The vehemence of the desire is the second aspect.  Not only is its tie to personal identity the reason for its strength but the fact that it is the biological motor by which we come out of ourselves.  It is a social desire in that it finds its true fulfillment in uniting with another person.  But its relative strength also means that it is the one which is mostly likely to become perverted, making it prone to abuse and rationalizing Therefore, it is also the one, in our fallen state, that we need the most need of instruction by which reason might govern its use. 

It would be hard to dispute the fact that it is other-directed.  Even the person masturbating invokes their imagination to call to mind another person.  Sexual pleasure is not just a passive response to being touched, but an intentional pleasure caused by another person to whom one is attracted to.  It can never be like scratching an itch where one only receives relief from some tension, but a desire directed towards another person.  Kinsey and Freud might have duped us moderns into thinking is was just some physiological response that causes the arousal of the person, but we all know that it is the bodily contact in conjunction with the presence (real or imagined) of another person that one finds attractive.  The object of our attraction and our arousal must be a subject.    

What’s the Harm?

This other-directedness of sexual desire seems obvious so that we can see why we might label masturbation as wrong.  But it seems to be little more than a “guilty pleasure” causing no real harm.  The harm may be hidden, or, more accurately, we might say we are blinded to it, but it is a real harm nonetheless.  The harm comes into view when we call to mind that human beings are creatures of habit, or virtues and vice.  No act occurs in a vacuum but always moves us towards virtue or vice.  Because sexual desire is so strong, there is perhaps no field of human activity where the law of habit is more obvious.

Masturbation by its very nature is a self-directing of sexual desire.  The aim is not to unite to another person, but to gain pleasure.  The turning to the self is no mere guilty pleasure but forms a habit of thinking and acting in that way.  It isn’t just a self-indulgent act, but makes someone selfish.  The person becomes habituated to seeking their own pleasure first and their partner’s pleasure becomes only a calculated concern.  They want their pleasure only so that they will come back around. 

Because sexual arousal is an intentional act, the person develops the habit of mind that makes arousal by a real person increasingly difficult.  A real person does not always do what the other person wants in the way that they want.  Masturbation becomes in a very real sense a gateway perversion to ever-greater perversions.  Nearly all sexual deviants began with masturbation.  This is not to say that everyone who masturbates will become a depraved sexual predator, but that it sets a person on that path because of what we will call the law of diminishing pleasure.

As we have said, pleasure is like the motor that moves the human engine towards truly good things.  But when pleasure becomes the finish line and not the motor, it always diminishes.  One then has to find new and more exciting ways in order to increase pleasure or re-direct the pleasure back to its intended end.  The point is that the chaste man derives far more pleasure from the marital embrace than the “stud” who traverses from woman to woman, just as the temperate man enjoys a scotch more than a drunk or the temperate woman enjoys a fine steak more than a glutton.  When we moderate our pleasures to only the right use of those things that cause the pleasure, pleasure always increases. 

Returning back to the anti-vape campaign mentioned at the beginning, we can now see why masturbation is a horrible alternative.  Indulging the strongest of our desires may reduce the desire for a lesser one, but it only further ensnares the teenager in a loop of pleasure seeking.

The Danger of Playing House

Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Homosexuality, Moralilty, , , ,

“Playing house” is a common children’s make believe game where the children take on adult roles usually centering around family life.  What happens when adults, armed with enough technology to make believe believable still like to play the game?  Something along the lines of what happened in Nebraska recently where a “61-year-old Nebraska mom has become a grandmom after giving birth herself — acting as the surrogate for her adult son and his husband.”   Even Aldous Huxley would find this truth stranger than fiction, despite being only half-way down the slippery slope into which our culture is descending.

Imagine little baby Uma, when she is much older Uma, looking at her birth certificate, the one that “looks really creepy for us.”  On it, she will find the name of one of her fathers, Matthew Eledge.  Under the heading of Mother, she will find the name of her grandmother.  Now this permanent public record will look like a case of incest.  Uma may know better, but is it better that she knows better?  In truth she will know that she was pieced together in a laboratory from various interrelated parts.  She will know she was a “product” of conception that originated with her father’s sperm and her other father’s sister’s egg.

Straight Out of A Brave New World?

As the origins of life grow to more closely resemble Huxley’s decanter than nature, it is increasingly difficult to point out this injustice.  Justice requires that equals be treated as equals.  When a child is conceived in a manner such as this, the relationship between parent and child is not truly a communion of persons but one of producer and product.  In essence this is, as Donum Vitae points out, “equivalent to reducing the child to an object of scientific technology.”   

No one can measure the psychological effects of knowing this upon the person, and, interestingly enough, no one has attempted to study it.  Children of divorce often face an identity crisis even though they are told that their parents “love them very much.”  That is because it is not enough to know you are loved, but you must also know that you came from love, that is, you are not an accident.  Likewise children conceived in a laboratory could face a similar identity crisis.

If you doubt the person-product connection, re-read the linked article and notice the description of the process they went through, including a quality control measure called “preimplantation genetic testing which would help determine the embryos most likely to develop into a healthy baby.”  If you are going to spend all the money (again described in detail in the interview) then you want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck.  Meanwhile six other children, Uma’s brothers and sisters, were set aside as byproducts of conception.  The article doesn’t say what happened to these six children but they were likely frozen or test subjects for human experimentation.  At least there was some semblance of a human decency when the men decided that choosing the sex of the child was too much “like playing God.” 

Procreation and the “Right to Make Life”

Perhaps the clearest indication of where this slippery slope leads is revealed in the form of a question.  After laying out all of the specific costs of the procedure and a complaint from the two men that IVF is cost prohibitive for most “couples”, the author asks, “should citizens have a right to make life?”  And this is, the battleground over which must fight if we are to rectify this injustice.

Humans do not reproduce, they procreate.  This is more than a mere semantical distinction.  Reproduction is a closed activity.  It simply requires two material creatures to exchange their genetic matter to produce offspring.  Human procreation is different however.  Like other material creatures, humans exchange genetic matter.  But they lack the capacity to exchange or create the spiritual element within their offspring.  This must be created by Someone else and requires His intervention.  Because procreation requires the intervention of a Third, the child must always be received as a gift and not as something that the couple is owed.  Couples receive children rather than grasp at them. 

The biological limitations that God has written into nature are there for our own good and for our own thriving.  Seizing what should otherwise be a gift, perhaps the greatest gift that God can bestow on us in the natural realm, leads to spiritual ruin for the parents.  But it need not be so for the children.   Even though the children conceived in this manner face an existential crisis and appear to be a mere product of technology, in truth they are not.  They are still persons of inestimable value because despite their immoral beginnings, God, as the ignored Third, still chose for this child to exist.  He still loved them into existence, even if their parents chose to hide that love behind scientific techniques.

One way to put a halt to the skid down this slippery slope is to change our rights language.  Even if the State grants them, there are no such thing as “reproductive rights” and not just because humans don’t, properly speaking, reproduce.  As proof of this, notice how they have little connection to actual duties towards other people connected to these rights.  In fact, they render children’s rights obsolete.  What people do have are procreative rights.  These natural rights are always in reference to their duties to children and ensure the dignity of children both born and unborn.   

In closing, there is one more thing that needs to be said regarding giving up on gay marriage as a battle already lost.  This is no mere “playing house” precisely because of stories like this.  In order to keep the game up, six children had to be condemned to death or a frozen existence.  This couple may be the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last.  The demand for procedures like this (as well as the demand to develop lower cost alternatives) will continue to increase unless we do something to protect these children.

The NFP Lifestyle

Bioethics, Conscience, Contraception, Culture of Life, , ,

In recent years there have been a number of sociological studies linking marital happiness/success with methods of birth regulation.   Most of them show positive differences between those couples who practice NFP and those who use other methods of birth control, although not always to the degree that NFP Catholics like to advertise.  This is mostly due to the fact that couples practicing NFP fall into two categories—those who do so with a contraceptive mentality and those who live an NFP lifestyle.  It is the latter group which would likely show a significantly higher marital satisfaction.

I called it a “lifestyle” because it is about so much more than just family planning.  NFP reinforces the one flesh union of marriage even when the couple is not engaged in the marital embrace.  At the risk of pointing out the obvious, I will mention that, unlike woman, man’s fertility is non-cyclical.  He is fertile all the time.  This means that the burden of self-mastery often falls upon him.  In fact one could say self-mastery is at the heart of being a man.  The man, as he finds stamped into his body, is made to make a gift of himself.  But to give oneself away, you must first own yourself, that is, have total self-mastery.  Your yes only means something when you are free to say no.  Without this requisite self-mastery comes the constant temptation to “lord it over the woman” (c.f. Gen 3:16).  When you do not have control over yourself, you will attempt to control other people, especially those that are close to you.

The Burden of Fertility

While man does not experience his fertility as a burden per se, the woman does.  This doesn’t mean that it is a bad thing, only that it carries with it “labor” even if that labor is joyfully and willfully endured.  She is the one who, ultimately, must bear the consequences of fertility.  Family planning and birth control often fall upon her.  As proof of this, despite all the nasty side effects, a woman is willing to take a birth control pill.  This is also the arena in which NFP can facilitate a true one flesh union by enabling the man to help carry the load of her fertility with her.

The most obvious time of her cycle is during menstruation.  The man experiences his constant fertility as a burden so as to be united bodily with his wife during a particularly painful period of time.  The burden of fertility that she is feeling can also be felt, albeit in a different way, in his body too.  He literally is practicing compassion, that is suffering with.  When borne with love and patience he is making a bodily gift of himself to his wife.

Most men already do this, although perhaps in not such a deliberate way.  But for those men who practice NFP and have experienced the “disappointment” of the arrival of an early period, this can enable them to see how the one flesh giving might continue.  Likewise, when for “just reasons” the couple is using NFP to avoid pregnancy the man puts aside the drive of his constant fertility so as to share in and through his body her fertility.  This is where real manhood, that is manhood founded upon self-mastery, is particularly felt because he feels an increase in the burden of his fertility because of the inviting presence of her pheromones signaling her fertility.  Even in abstaining from the marital embrace the couple is experiencing a type of one-flesh union when they join their wills together in postponing pregnancy.

NFP’s Effect on Family Life

An NFP lifestyle also makes for a happier home life in general in the relationship between the parents and children.  Schooled in self-mastery by NFP the parents are better able to love their children in a disinterested fashion.  As John Paul II, in a defense of Humanae Vitae once said:

“[parents that are contracepting] cannot sacrifice their egoism to the good of their spouse, will likewise lack generosity, patience, serenity and calm assurance in their relations with their children.  They will love their children to the degree to which their children bring them joy—that is selfishly and not for their own sakes; they will cajole them and teach them self-indulgence and self-love.  Instead of the peace given by self-mastery, unrest will reign in the family, because the state of tension created by a truncated sexual act surrounded by precautions, an act that is to be an unreserved gift of self, must in the long term be communicated to the children.  It seems that the increasing prevalence of anxiety and even certain neuroses results in large part from contraceptive practices.”

For the better part of the last half-century, the teaching Church has been (at best) silent promoting her teachings on birth control.  It is time that the rest of the Church step out into the void and preach the freedom that comes from ditching contraception.  The one flesh union within marriage is a daily lived experience.

 

Power Play

Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Human Dignity, Magisterium, Theology of the Body, , ,

As the Church marks the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, much has been said regarding the prophetic character of Blessed Paul VI’s controversial encyclical.  In particular, the Pope predicted that four things would happen as contraceptive use spread throughout a society.  There would be an increase in marital infidelity, a general lowering of moral standards, a loss of reverence for woman as she is reduced to an instrument for the satisfaction of a man’s desires and governments would use coercive power to implement “family planning” policies.  In reading the signs of the times, the Pope saw the consequences clearly, but why he was so easily able to see this is just important.  For these consequences were just symptoms of a deeper mindset that the Holy Father feared would ultimately conquer the hearts and minds of men, a mindset that was just as soul-killing as the contraceptive mentality to which it was linked.  After uttering his prophecy of consequences, the Holy Father tells us the root cause is man’s unwillingness to “accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go” (HV , 17).

On the one hand this is nothing new.  One can even say that Original Sin itself is the mark of man’s unwillingness to accept his creaturely limits.  Man in his Edenic bliss can eat from every tree in the Garden, save one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (GN 2:16-17).  Made in the likeness of God, he is confronted with the choice to be “like gods who know good and evil” (Gn 3:5).  That is, he has a choice between conforming himself to the limits of reality, or shaping reality to his liking.  He quickly finds out that his decision was never a real option.  He passes his confusion on to his progeny along with a proclivity for choosing likewise.

Confusing Limits

Because man is now in a state of confusion, he must set out to discover reality as it really is.  To enter into a relationship with reality he must also (re-)discover himself as he really is (including his limits) as well.  At first, because of his confusion reality appears rock solid and he discovers many limitations in himself.  But as the field of discovery expands, he finds that he has the power to manipulate reality more and more.  His limitations become blurred except when he asks a simple question: does this new power over reality include power over myself?  If so, then it is actually a power within reality, which is the only true power.  Otherwise it is a grasping and remaking of reality.

In many ways chemical contraception represents a paramount example of this principle in play.  In the past contraception usually involved changing the act, but with the Pill and the like came the power to alter the reality of a woman’s reproductive system.  But this is no mere biological alteration, but an alteration to a person’s biology.  Therefore it has to be viewed through a personalistic lens.  Does the power the Pill gives over a woman’s cycle carry with it the power of the woman to master herself?  And, because a woman’s reproductive system is a relational system, does the Pill give the man in whom she enters into a reproductive relationship with a power to master himself?

Power

The wisdom of Blessed Paul VI’s condemnation of contraception begins to emerge, especially when we add a second principle.  With the emergence of new technology comes new power over reality.  This power is given at the service of controlling men.  The question is which men will be controlled.  Will the new power be used to control man himself?  Or will the power be used to control other men?  Or as CS Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means…the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

Blessed Paul VI was so accurate in his predictions because he knew that the Pill wasn’t really a medicine to control births, but a poison to control other people.  His forecasts are really about the power of one person over another.  More to the point, the Pill is about men exercising their power over women.  It tells women in order to gain her rightful share in society she must act like one of the big boys.  But because woman is a “misbegotten male” she must take a pill to do this.  But in truth it is a ploy in which man, who is fertile all the time, can find partners who are infertile all the time.  It absolves him of all responsibility and creates an injustice in which women are treated as inferiors.  What is so puzzling is that many of them, in the name of equality, swallow the pill anyway.  Shouldn’t society have to change and adapt to the feminine genius and not woman herself?  As then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (the future St. John Paul II) said ,

“Contraception makes no contribution to the woman’s personal rights.  Since it is a process that makes it possible to satisfy the ‘needs of the sexual instinct’ without taking on any of the responsibility for the consequences of sexual activity, it primarily benefits the man.  This is why, once accepted contraception leads to sanctioning his erotic hedonist behavior.  In this situation, inevitably, the man benefits at the expense of the woman.  He ceases to regard the woman in the context of transmitting life.  She becomes for him simply the occasion for enjoying pleasure.  If one adds to this the fact that it is inscribed in the very structure of man to take initiative in the sexual realm and that the danger of being violated is a threat primarily to the woman, then one must admit that the more constitution of the woman appears grim indeed.  Therefore, when contraception is used, the woman faces not only inequality but also sexual slavery.”

In his opening paragraph of Humanae Vitae, Blessed Paul VI recognized that technology, especially reproductive technologies, were a force that the Church was going to need to confront.  Unfortunately she has not been up to the task and many women have suffered because of it.  As the Church continues to celebrate this Golden Anniversary of Humane Vitae, let’s work towards a rediscovery of the golden wisdom contained within this prophetic document.

Our Lady of Fatima and Gay Marriage

Church and State, Contraception, Homosexuality, marriage, , ,

When Our Lady appeared to the children of Fatima, she warned that without conversion, Russia would continue to spreads its errors throughout the world.  The “errors” to which she was referring were mainly those of Communism, rooted in the philosophy of Karl Marx.  More than an economic theory, Marxism views all of history as the conflict between oppressors and oppressed and seeks to do away with all division, natural or not.  Marx himself presented it as a conflict between capital and labor, but those categories can readily be adapted to any two groups including gender, race or sexual orientation.  While the fruit of the Marxist tree that is Communism may be dying, the Marxist roots are alive and thriving within our own liberal democracy, a society that is deeply (and deliberately) divided.  This makes Our Lady’s words all the more prescient and ought to give us pause as we mark the 100th anniversary of her appearance at Fatima.

All of the prior Marxist attempts to remake human nature and society have met one almost insurmountable obstacle—the Family.  Marx himself envisioned this obstacle and called for the abolition of the family in the Communist Manifesto saying, “Abolition of the family!  Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”

As long as the foundation of society remained strong and in place, any attempt to change society as a whole would ultimately fail.  But weaken the foundation and society will fall with it.

Not surprisingly, the Communist Party USA has been one of the most vocal supporters of the push for gay marriage.  They knew that by subverting marriage, the Family would ultimately be laid waste.  Ultimately this is why those who oppose Gay Marriage cannot give up the fight.  By removing one of the means by which the Marxist spread their errors, we are hastening the reign of the Immaculate Heart.

Thinking Clearly about Marriage

Pascal said that our first moral obligation is to think clearly so that before we do anything we must understand why Marriage and the Family are intrinsically linked.  Without marriage, the Family ceases to exist.

Amidst all the debate in the past decade about redefining marriage, neither side could actually define either the classical definition or the revisionist version.  In order to see why the family and marriage are linked, we must begin by offering a definition of marriage.  Marriage is the complete union of two persons.  It is the total union of their persons at every level of their temporal being—spiritual, emotional and bodily.  The conjugal bond is what makes marriage unique in comparison to any other relationship or community of persons.

What revisionists have tried to do is to remove one of the elements.  They would almost certainly call it an emotional and spiritual bond.  Although it may seem surprising it is the bodily union that they must remove; not because it isn’t a sexual relationship but because it is not a conjugal relationship.

Men and women are capable of performing all biological processes on their own, save one, procreation.  To perform this process they need a complementary other.  In other words, in performing acts that may lead to procreation, they become a single “organism.”  It is not just any sexual activity that unites them, but only sexual activity that is intrinsically ordered to procreation.  In order to be unitive, sexual activity must also be the kind that is procreative.  Any other sexual activity (including contracepted) simply becomes the exchange of pleasure and does not unite the two people physically any more than a handshake, a back rub, or putting one’s finger in another’s ear.  Only in the marital embrace can two spouses be physically united, an act that same-sex couples cannot perform.  Marriage, under the revisionists’ definition must therefore no longer be a complete union of two persons since the couple is unable to become one flesh.

A word of explanation as to why I have been careful about calling them acts that are “ordered to procreation.”  As a biological process, procreation has aspects that are under control of the person and aspects that are not.  One may choose to breathe, but one cannot choose to get oxygen into the blood.  Provided the conditions are right, that happens “automatically” and is outside the direct control of the person.  So too with acts ordered to procreation.  A couple can engage in the marital embrace, but whether conception occurs or not, happens after the fact and is outside of their direct control.  In other words, it is not the actual conception of the child that causes the act to be unitive.  It is unitive because it is a procreative act.  Grasping this helps us to see why an infertile couple may still be married (because they are capable of procreative acts even if they do not lead to conception) and a same-sex couple may not.

Marriage and the Family

It also helps us to understand what it means when we say that children are the end of marriage.  They are not the purpose of marriage—the purpose is the total union or communion of the persons—but they are the fruit of marriage.  In short, they are a natural result of the communion of persons in marriage.

With all that has been said, we can understand that the Church is not being old-fashioned when she defines the family as “born of the intimate communion of life and love founded on the marriage between one man and one woman” (Gaudium et Spes, 48).  The family as the first society a person belongs to forms that person in his vision of reality.  Each child learns that he or she was generated from an act of love and was quite literally loved into existence.  It is the school of love where the child learns both how to love and be loved.  In short, “a society built on a family scale is the best guarantee against drifting off course into individualism or collectivism, because within the family the person is always at the center of attention as an end and never as a means” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 213).

Joining the Battle

If the goal is to destroy the family, then get rid of marriage.  Erotic love is too powerful to destroy it altogether, but modifying it to the point that it becomes unrecognizable is sufficient to destroy the family.  Not surprisingly with a change in marriage we are seeing a change in what people call a family.  A “family” that is not founded upon marriage as the communion of persons is built on sand.  It is only the complete bond of the spouses to each other that keeps the family together.

Since the Obergefell decision almost two years ago, many Catholics have disengaged from the battle for marriage.  It is time to pick up the battle once again, especially considering what Sr. Lucia, the Fatima visionary once said.  “The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid because anyone who operates for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be contended and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. However, Our Lady has already crushed its head.”  Let us re-engage and fight for marriage and the family!

The Church, Contraception and the UN

Contraception

Today, the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, will present a report at a UN-hosted meeting calling upon “the Catholic hierarchy to reverse their stance against so called ‘artificial’ contraceptives.”  While they have not yet made the full report available, a Summary report is presented on their web site.  Although a cursory glance shows that none of their arguments are particularly new, their platform is.  To present the report in such a prominent setting is sure to garner attention, especially in our culture of sexual liberation.

In examining their arguments, one can see that they readily acknowledge the reason Humanae Vitae presents such a strong defense against anyone who would seek to reverse the Church’s teachings.  It is because it relies on both reason and faith.  Because very few people accept arguments from authority any longer, it is instructive to examine their “Assessment of the Objections to the Natural Law.”

  • 3.1. HV’s argument is that because the biological “laws of conception” reveal that sexual intercourse has a “capacity to transmit life” (HV §13), each and every act of sexual intercourse has a “procreative significance” (HV §12) and “finality” (HV §3), and an “intrinsic relationship” to procreation (HV §11).

This misinterprets the biological evidence. The causal relationship between insemination and, on the other hand, fertilization, implantation, and ultimately procreation, is statistical, not necessary. The vast majority of acts of sexual intercourse do not have the biological “capacity” for procreation, and therefore they cannot have procreation as their “finality” or “significance.”

Blessed Paul VI may have been an old, celibate man locked away in the Vatican, but he knew enough that not to say that every sexual act necessarily ends in pregnancy.  If he did then there would not have made any mention to having “Recourse to Infertile Periods” (HV 16).  They are twisting his words in an attempt to make the Church seem behind the times.

It is still worthwhile addressing the fact that “procreation is statistical, not necessary.”  On a biological level, the purpose of sexual intercourse is pregnancy.  Two organisms come together for the purpose of becoming a single reproducing organism.  Whether pregnancy actually occurs is outside the control of the two organisms. Because man has an animal nature the end of sexual activity in nature is reproduction (its finality).  But because man also has reason that enables him to discover the laws of God from within the laws of nature, he knows that he ought not to interfere with the natural end of the marital embrace.  There are other factors outside the direct control of the man and woman that determine pregnancy (timing, fertility, etc.), but the basis of the natural law argument is that we ought never to interfere with those things which by nature cause us to flourish (for a more thorough argument against Contraception using the Natural Law, see this entry).

  • 3.2. Secondly, it is mistaken to derive a moral prescription directly from a factual description, i.e. a judgment of value (about what morally ought to be) directly from a judgment of fact (about what is).

However, this is what HV does when it infers that people engaging in sexual intercourse must always be open to the possibility of procreation from the (incorrect) fact that each and every act of sexual intercourse has a procreative finality.

For the same reason, it is also incorrect to deduce a divine command directly from the existence of a law of nature, contrary to what HV does when asserting that the above mentioned moral prescription is God’s will.

It is interesting that they chose to hide this argument here since it would be sufficient (if it were true) to dismiss all of Humanae Vitae’s appeal to reason based on natural law.  By invoking the Humean principle that you cannot derive an “ought from an is”, the authors are hoping the entire argument crumbles.  In essence they are saying that there is no connection between what a thing is and how it ought to be treated.  The problem with this is that it leads to a rejection of all morality and reduces everything to merely subjective wishes.  From the fact that a creature is a human being, we derive that they ought to be treated in a certain way.  This is the very basis of human dignity, something I am not sure that the even UN would be willing to deny since it is at the foundation of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

francis-at-the-un

  • 3.3. The affirmation that human beings may not interfere with the biological laws regulating human reproduction because they have been established by God is in contradiction with observational evidence on how human beings interact with the created order.

As agents of reason, human beings have a unique capacity to intentionally alter the schedule of probabilities inherent in the physical, chemical and biological laws of nature. This is a reality of daily life: for instance, any sort of medical intervention, from something as insignificant as taking pain-killers to something as consequential as performing cardiovascular surgery, affects probabilities – of healing, survival, death, etc. Furthermore, the decision not to intervene in natural processes also affects those probabilities, just as choosing to intervene does.

The moral question is not whether to alter the schedule of probabilities within natural processes, but rather whether, when, and how doing so is conducive to human flourishing and the flourishing of all creation.

The pill (or any other act that renders us sterile) is unique among all medical interventions.  It actually stops a process that is considered to be healthy from occurring.  All of the examples that they gave actually restore healthy functioning to various organs.  In other words, this argument is one of a false analogy.

Furthermore, no doubt, as “agents of reason, human beings have a unique capacity to intentionally alter the schedule of probabilities inherent in the physical, chemical and biological laws of nature,” but that does not mean that they should.  Just because it is technologically possible doesn’t mean it is morally permissible.  This is precisely what is at question here, whether we ought to.

  • 4. Furthermore, it is contradictory to affirm, on the one hand, that as a general principle “sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive [is] intrinsically wrong,” and on the other that it is morally legitimate to practice NFP with the “intention to avoid children and [the] wish to make sure that none will result” (HV §16).

Although he did not sign the document, Machiavelli is there in spirit.  This is a common argument that falls under the principle that the end justifies the means.  In the case of the couple using contraception and the couple practicing NFP, the end is the same—avoiding pregnancy.  But it matters how this end is brought about.  I may have a million dollars that I stole or that I worked for.  The end is the same, but the means in the first case are immoral while in the second they are praiseworthy.

This mistake flows from something that appears further down in the document:

  • 7.The morality of any human action is determined by the motives and intentions of the agent, the circumstances of the situation, and the consequences of that action.

They left out an important moral determinant, mainly the object itself.  The object of the act would be how one would define it if they were to witness the act.  There are some objects that regardless of the intention or circumstances, can never be made good (like killing an innocent person).  We call these actions intrinsically evil, a term they rejected because they conveniently left out the moral object itself.

When the famous Spanish fencer Inigo Montoya read the statement, he commented “Open.  I don’t think that word means what they think it means.”  The authors refer to the marital act being “open” but show a confusion as to what it means.  The Latin term per se destinatus refers to the marital act itself that must remain open (the object).  It does not refer to the couples’ subjective openness to procreation (intention).  There are just reasons why they may not want to be pregnant.  The authors themselves mention that there are morally good “motives for sexual intercourse include pleasure, love, comfort, celebration and companionship.”  Setting aside pleasure (because of its attachment to use), this is true and can even be the primary subjective reason for engaging in the marital act.  The point though is that those intentions must always accord with a moral object that can be ordered to the Good.

Before closing, an important subtlety bears mention as well because it shows how the two acts are different.  The contracepting couple acts so as to render the sexual act infertile.  The couple practicing NFP does not act at all, they simply abstain from the marital embrace during those days in which they may be fertile.  It is like the woman who maintains her weight by not eating as much versus the one who has an eating disorder—one respects the natural human process of digestion and weight gain, the other is dis-ordered because it acts against it.

Once word leaked that the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research was going to release a document, Professor Janet Smith set out to release a countering document in an attempt “to piggy-back on the extensive publicity they are likely to get.”  This is one of the few times the Faithful have had a response prepared at the same time a harmful document has been released.  Please support Professor Smith in any way you can, including distributing her document as widely as possible.

 

On Zika and the Lesser of Two Evils

Contraception, Natural Law, Pope Francis

For most Catholics, Pope Francis and plane-ride interview has become a time ripe for confusion.  His return home to the Vatican from his pastoral visit in Mexico was no different.  A reporter from Spain asked the Holy Father the following question:

Holy Father, for several weeks there’s been a lot of concern in many Latin American countries but also in Europe regarding the Zika virus. The greatest risk would be for pregnant women. There is anguish. Some authorities have proposed abortion, or else to avoiding pregnancy. As regards avoiding pregnancy, on this issue, can the Church take into consideration the concept of “the lesser of two evils?”

And Pope Francis replied that:

Abortion is not the lesser of two evils. It is a crime. It is to throw someone out in order to save another. That’s what the Mafia does. It is a crime, an absolute evil. On the ‘lesser evil,’ avoiding pregnancy, we are speaking in terms of the conflict between the fifth and sixth commandment. Paul VI, a great man, in a difficult situation in Africa, permitted nuns to use contraceptives in cases of rape.

Don’t confuse the evil of avoiding pregnancy by itself, with abortion. Abortion is not a theological problem, it is a human problem, it is a medical problem. You kill one person to save another, in the best case scenario. Or to live comfortably, no?  It’s against the Hippocratic oaths doctors must take. It is an evil in and of itself, but it is not a religious evil in the beginning, no, it’s a human evil. Then obviously, as with every human evil, each killing is condemned.

On the other hand, avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil. In certain cases, as in this one, or in the one I mentioned of Blessed Paul VI, it was clear. I would also urge doctors to do their utmost to find vaccines against these two mosquitoes that carry this disease. This needs to be worked on.

Unfortunately, these “off-the cuff” remarks were picked up by the media and led to headlines like “Pope suggests contraceptives could be used to slow spread of Zika” (CNN), “Zika Shows It’s Time For The Catholic Church To Rethink Its Stance On Birth Control” (Forbes), and “Pope Francis Condones Contraception With Zika Virus” (NPR).  An attempt by Fr. Lombardi, the Vatican Spokesman to clarify the Pope’s comments only served to further muddy the waters:

The contraceptive or condom, in particular cases of emergency or gravity, could be the object of discernment in a serious case of conscience. This is what the Pope said…the possibility of taking recourse to contraception or condoms in cases of emergency or special situations. He is not saying that this possibility is accepted without discernment, indeed, he said clearly that it can be considered in cases of special urgency.

These flying papal encounters often leave the faithful with an uncomfortable feeling that the question has not been adequately addressed or even incorrectly so.  Thanks be to God that because we have the great gift of Sacred Tradition we can often fill in the ellipsis that the Holy Father tends to insert in his responses.  While I will not be so bold as to speculate what the Holy Father meant, I can confidently offer what he could not mean.

Some preliminary background is necessary for understand a full response to the question.  The question itself really is “Is it permissible to use contraception to combat the effects of the Zika virus on children in the womb?”  In truth, to frame the question in terms of “the lesser of two evils” is to frame it incorrectly.  Nowhere within the Catholic moral tradition has it ever been believed that one may choose between the lesser of two evils.  In the case of two objectively evil actions, neither may be chosen for its own sake.  It may very well be that in choosing a good, we will have to tolerate an evil that is both a “side effect” of our decision and of less moral gravity than the good itself (see here for a discussion of the Principle of Double Effect which governs this idea).

There is also the danger when you speak in terms of evils of seeing the child that is conceived with a birth defect as an evil.  As any parent with a special needs child will emphatically tell you, the child is an inconceivable good, even if the condition that plagues them is an evil.

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If we reframe the question of the goods involved a clear answer emerges that is both consistent with Tradition, Natural Law and even practical sense.  The good to be attained is the avoidance of the birth defects that are (or in truth only “maybe”) associated with the Zika virus.  One of the possible means of attaining this good would be to avoid pregnancy altogether.  Certainly to avoid becoming pregnant with a child who is likely to carry a serious birth defect is among the “grave reasons” for postponing (even indefinitely) pregnancy that Pope Paul VI spoke of in Humanae Vitae.  At this point it is not clear what the chances are of both contracting Zika and having a baby with microcephaly are, but let’s assume that they are significant enough to make it grave.

Pope Francis was clear in his condemnation of abortion as a solution to the issue.  A person is an objective good to which the only adequate response is love as St. John Paul II said.  This means that to do harm to the person so as to avoid their suffering with a birth defect is always a great evil and can never be a moral solution.  St. John Paul II affirmed this by invoking the Church’s charism of Infallibility through the Ordinary Magisterium in Evangelium Vitae saying “I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written Word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium” (EV 62).

The Saintly Pontiff also conceded that there are “differences of nature and moral gravity, contraception and abortion” (EV 13) but this does not mean that contraception too does not constitute an objective evil that cannot be chosen as an ends or a means.  In fact we know that Fr. Lombardi’s interpretation what the Pope said is wrong.  Assuming that when he made the distinction between “contraceptives and condoms” he was considering chemical contraception, then this falls into the first category of direct abortion.

According to the PDR (and the package inserts on birth control pills), “[C]ombination oral contraceptives act by suppression of gonadotropins. Although the primary mechanism of this action is inhibition of ovulation, other alterations include changes in the cervical mucus, which increase the difficulty of sperm entry into the uterus, and changes in the endometrium which reduce the likelihood of implantation.”  The third mechanism that prevents implantation of the fertilized egg (i.e the child) renders the Pill as an abortifacient.  In truth because all three mechanisms are at work, there is no way to know whether pregnancy has been avoided or an abortion has taken place.  Therefore because of their abortifacient nature, chemical contraceptives would not be an option.

What about condoms as a solution?  I have written elsewhere about why any contraceptive measure is always a grave evil, but there is a practical reason why condom usage should not be considered as a solution.  Although it often gets lumped into other “calendar methods” in efficacy studies, Natural Family Planning is at least as effective as most chemical methods and more effective than condom usage (one such study supports this can be found here).  In any regard it is disappointing to say the least that neither the Pope nor his representative mentioned this as an option.  Imagine the power of a response similar to “Yes, there might be reason to avoid pregnancy in the regions afflicted with Zika.  We must get those people trained in NFP and we will have the good of strengthening marriages as well.”

A comment also needs to be made about the exception that the Holy Father mentioned regarding the nuns who were in danger of being raped.  This is a red herring of sorts because there is no moral equivalency here at all.  Birth control as the Church has always taught is related to the conjugal act. By definition this act assumes not only the physical act but also the consent of both parties. Rape may have the same physical act, but lacks the consent. These are fundamentally different things and therefore it is morally licit to do everything that you can to avoid pregnancy after the act (or even during the act). However once pregnancy (i.e fertilization) occurs it is a different thing.

The ability of the Holy Father to act as Universal Pastor of the Church is truly enhanced by the speed at which he is able to travel.  What would be good though is if the Flying Magisterium could be avoided.  While the Pope himself only alluded to “birth control” in his comments, there was no real indication that he was making any distinction between morally licit means and those that are not.  Fr. Lombardi may or may not have accurately conveyed the Pope’s meaning but the fact of the matter is that ambiguity has plagued the papacy of Francis.  While Pope Francis is certainly not the only Papal “victim” of the media in this regard, the questions themselves tend to repeat themselves and truly call for a well thought out and nuanced response.  Let us all pray that when condoms and the next health crisis come up, the Holy Father will act as a clear prophet.

 

 

Through the Looking Glass

Contraception, marriage

In his highly prophetic classic Brave New World, Aldous Huxley tells of a world in which all women are forced to turn their eggs over to the state. The eggs are then placed into a manufactured environment which serves as a mother’s womb. Selected sperm is withdrawn from a sperm bank to fertilize the eggs and a new life is grown under supervision. This new process is called “decanting,” rather than birth.  While most people in the 1930s would have thought this impossible, today this possibility looms ever closer.  Much of what he described has become commonplace in our world today through the use of reproductive technologies such as IVF and artificial insemination.  It is so common that one of Time Magazine’s “100 Hundred Questions for the New Century” was whether we will still need sex to procreate.  One would think that because the Church is “pro-child” and opposes such things as artificial contraception that she too would be promoting these reproductive technologies.  This is because they aid in bringing about the great good of human life.  However, because the Church is concerned with “the dignity of the human person and his integral vocation,” she teaches that many of these techniques are morally wrong (Donum Vitae (DV), Introduction, 1).

There are a variety of these techniques available today.  The Church opposes the use of some of these means and not others.  The basic principle at play in the use of these reproductive technologies is whether a given technique assists or substitutes for the conjugal act.  If it assists the conjugal act then it is morally licit and if it replaces the conjugal act it is illicit (DV, Section II, 6).  In general the Church refers to the latter as “artificial fertilization” procedures.  Among the most common of these procedures are in vitro (literally means “in a glass”) fertilization and artificial insemination.

With this distinction made, it is instructive to look at the foundation the Church uses for making her moral judgment.  In 1987, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released the Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation—called Donum Vitae in Latin—that formally addressed the moral issues associated with these new reproductive technologies.  In it, the CDF put forth three reasons to support the Church’s position.  They are the dignity of the child, the inseparable link between the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act, and the “language of the body” (DV, II, B 4-5).

IVF Dish

All persons from the moment of conception have equal dignity because they are made by God in His own image.  This means that every relationship is one of equality between persons.  However with the use of artificial fertilization, the relationship between parent and child is not truly a communion of persons but one of producer and product.  In essence this is “equivalent to reducing the child to an object of scientific technology” (DV, II, B 4c).

Furthermore, once the child is viewed as a product rather than a person, the temptation to subject him to quality control measures becomes great.  In practice it also leads to other evils that are associated with the production of “excess” human lives that are either subject to abortion (referred to benignly as “selective reduction”), frozen for later use or made subject to medical experimentation.  One study estimated that on average only 1 out of 30 children conceived outside the womb actually survive.

The personalistic norm of then Karol Cardinal Wojtyla illuminates what is at the heart of the push for reproductive technologies.  The norm in its negative form states that a person is “a kind of good which does not admit use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end.”  The foundation of the acceptance of these reproductive technologies then is a utilitarian ethic.  This can also play out in that many couples who struggle with infertility (or even single women and same sex couples) think that a child will make them happy and they therefore should have one at all costs.

The second reason that is put forward by the Church is the inseparability of the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act.  To see why this is the case, we must look at the nature of marriage itself.  Part of the nature of marriage is that there are four fundamental goods: fidelity, permanence, openness to children and friendship between the spouses (c.f. CCC 1643-1654).  For any act then to be marital, it must be perfective of these goods in some way.  Therefore in order for the conjugal act to be truly marital there must not be a “break between the unitive significance and the procreative significance” of the marital embrace (Humanae Vitae, 10).

If the marital embrace is a participation in the goods of marriage then procreation “cannot be likened to those existing in lower forms of life” (DV, Introduction 3). What this means is that there is a fundamental difference between procreation and reproduction.  Procreation is a personal act.  “Pro-create” literally means to create for.  This means that the spouses create for God in that it is God who gives life while the spouses transmit it.   Practically speaking this means that we may not create human life in the same manner (such as in test tubes) that we manipulate animals.

The difference between procreation and reproduction is one that is very often missed because of the failure to see children as a gift and not a right (DV, II, B, 8).  Although one of the sacred duties of marriage is to “accept children lovingly from God,” this does not mean that the spouses have a right to have children by any means necessary.  They must have “respect for the fundamental criteria of the moral law” (DV, Intro).  It truly means that the spouses have a willingness to accept children should God bestow that gift on them.  Janet Smith has a great analogy that she uses to explain this.  She says that infertile couples are like soldiers who go through years of training and never actually fight in a war.  They do not have the right to start a war to fulfill their assignment.  The assignment is not so much to fight as a willingness to fight.

The final reason that the Church offers is that these reproductive technologies violate the “language of the body.”  As we will see, this notion is closely linked to the inseparability principle that was discussed above. This is a notion that is central to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.  It is essential for developing what he called an “adequate anthropology.”

Man, made in the image of God (Gn 1:26), is a body person.  This means that the body is not just something accidental or a mere house for the soul.  The body is not just part of the person but instead is the person as expressed in the physical world.  If the body is the way a person expresses himself, then in some way man must image God, who is a communion of persons pouring themselves out in an eternal exchange of self-giving love, in his body.

John Paul II puts it,

“(T)he body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus be a sign of it” (John Paul II, General Audience, Feb 20,1980).

In revealing something of the mystery of God, the body in its sexual complentarity has a spousal meaning.  The spousal meaning of the body is the body’s “capacity of expressing love, that love in which the person becomes a gift” (John Paul II, General Audience, Jan 16,1980).  The spousal meaning of the body is expressed most especially in the conjugal union of spouses.  In order for this union to be an authentic sign of the Trinity it must be a true communion of persons (unitive) and lead to the possibility of a third person (procreative).  The child’s origin then must be directly based upon an act of bodily self-giving by the spouses and not as the result of a laboratory procedure.

Aldous Huxley may have been prophetic in seeing many of the reproductive technologies that have come about, but it was perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest prophet who saw the ethical consequences.  We would all be well advised to heed the warning of John Paul II when he said that once “the human body, considered apart from spirit and thought, comes to be used as raw material in the same way that the bodies of animals are used…we will inevitably arrive at a dreadful ethical defeat” (Letter to Families, 19).

 

History is Bunk

Abortion, Church and State, Contraception

Henry Ford once said, “History is more or less bunk.  It’s tradition.  We don’t want tradition.  We want to live in the present.  The only history that’s worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”  Apparently, former Secretary of State and now Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, believes exactly the same thing as Henry Ford did nearly 100 years ago.  Back in 2009, then-Secretary Clinton received the “highest honor” from Planned Parenthood of America, the Margaret Sanger Award.

In her acceptance speech, Mrs. Clinton said the following:

Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision. Another of my great friends, Ellen Chesler, is here, who wrote a magnificent biography of Margaret Sanger called Woman of Valor. And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her.

And there are a lot of lessons that we can learn from her life and from the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed so bravely. One in particular, though, has always stood out for me almost a hundred years later. It’s the lesson that women’s empowerment is always, always about more than bettering the lives of individual women. It is part of a movement. It’s about economic and political progress for all women and girls. It’s about making sure that every woman and girl everywhere has the opportunities that she deserves to fulfill her potential, a potential as a mother, as a worker, as a human being.

“I admire Margaret Sanger enormously … her vision.”  Wait.  Did she say she admired Margaret Sanger’s vision?  I wonder which part of her vision she admired specifically.  Because what most people know of her vision is quite scary.

One of her visions was to create a new religion.  The religion would be based on eugenics.  Sanger thought that eugenics was the most adequate avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems.  She said, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members… Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”

Sanger thought that she had solved the problem that vexed most eugenicists from Charles Darwin and Francis Galton on down. In her eyes, natural selection was no longer able to remove the unfit because civilization had softened much of the severity of nature by its misguided compassion and medical advances.  She also said the problem was compounded by the high fecundity of the “feeble minded”.

Although this is probably obvious given that they have named an award for her, but Planned Parenthood has never disavowed her or apologized for her comments.  In fact they continue her mission today.  They build many of their facilities in poorer, African-American neighborhoods to help in primarily targeting African-Americans.  In fact, according to the CDC in the year 2000, (the last year for which they have reported these statistics), over 50% (503 per 1000) of pregnancies in the African American community end in abortion.  The CDC also reports that 35% of all abortions are performed on African-Americans.  Given that they only comprise a little over 10% of the American population that is a startling statistic.  It doesn’t take much to connect the dots on this.  If you want to know more of the specifics on this, check out blackgenocide.com.  That is why I was never sure whether the signs of our first African American president standing in front of t of the Planned Parenthood sign promising FOCA were photo-shopped.  How this completely flies under the radar in our racially oversensitive culture can only be diabolically explained.  Either way, it’s sad that a leader in the African American community can be promoting this and certainly Sanger’s vision is not one we should admire.

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Given that Mrs. Clinton’s “great friend” wrote a magnificent biography, none of this can be news to Mrs. Clinton.  It is easy to confront attitudes and accusations when they are true and you are completely unapologetic for them.  Certainly, this is nothing that we should be “in awe” of.  I think what she meant to say is that it is truly “awe-full” what she did.

What about how Sanger was “making sure that every woman and girl everywhere has the opportunities that she deserves to fulfill her potential, a potential as a mother, as a worker, as a human being.”? Of course I assume that is not including the nearly 635,000 women who will die in the womb this year because of abortion in our country. What about the fact that in places like China, abortion is used to selectively kill women in the womb? Hard to make the argument based on this alone that it is “making sure that every woman and girl everywhere has the opportunities that she deserves”. To say later, as she does, that it has changed the lives of tens of millions of women is an understatement to say the very least. I think that she means that it has changed them for the better, but anyone who actually lives (or dies) with the reality of abortion would totally disagree. Have the 65% of post-abortive women who suffer symptoms of trauma had all the opportunities they deserve? What about the women who battle suicidal thoughts and tendencies because of abortion?

Let me be absolutely clear on this. These are horrible things that happen to women because they have bought the lies about abortion. But abortion itself is morally wrong primarily because it takes the life of an innocent person. That being said, the fact of the matter is that anyone who says they are pro-women cannot at the same time be pro-abortion.

There is another section of her speech that I think bears commenting upon.  Secretary Clinton said that

It has changed attitudes and perceptions about women and our roles in society. It ushered in demographic and social changes that have brought us closer to gender equality than at any time.

I can’t believe that I am actually saying this, but I agree with her about the attitudes and perceptions about women.  This is the god of equality rearing its head again.  And of course this means first like any false god, it must have its sacrificial victims in the millions of unborn children who have been killed in the name of equality.  Rather than actually meeting the needs of women, Mrs. Clinton and those of her ilk want to make it possible for them to act like men through chemical alteration of their fertility and abortion.  What if we really treated a woman’s fertility as something sacred and helped them to participate more fully in society?

This is why we need to study history accurately.  We can learn from the wisdom of our predecessors.  If we did then we would find that Alice Paul, who was the author of the Equal Rights Amendment, said that, “abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”  What abortion does is give society an easy way out of meeting the real needs of women.  In making women as close to men, they do not need to do anything that meets the needs unique to women.  Society no longer has to take pregnancy seriously.  The early feminists such as Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton recognized this and fought against abortion by seeking legal protection from abortion for women and children.

For all the uproar that Humanae Vitae caused both inside the Church and out, Pope Paul VI’s prophetic warning about men easily forgetting the reverence due to woman and reducing her to a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires appears to have been dead spot on.  What he couldn’t have seen though is how powerful women like Mrs. Clinton would also forget the reverence due to women.  “Gender equality” created in this fashion does not mean equality in dignity.  Gender equality as a goal only serves to lessen the dignity of women.  That is what women and men should be fighting for.

 

Idols and the Supreme Court

Contraception, Culture of Life, marriage, Scripture

In the minds of many people, the SCOTUS decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was inevitable. What comes next in many Christians’ minds is the four horseman of the apocalypse as God pours His chastisement upon our country.  But what if the decision itself is the chastisement?  While this may sound strange initially, anyone who reads the first chapter of St. Paul’s letter to Romans will find that God often chastises mankind for their sins by turning them over to them.

Here is what St. Paul says specifically,

“The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness. For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them.  Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened. While claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man or of birds or of four-legged animals or of snakes. Therefore, God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. Therefore, God handed them over to degrading passions. Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God handed them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper. They are filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are gossips and scandalmongers and they hate God. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know the just decree of God that all who practice such things deserve death, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” (Romans 1:18-32)

If we follow what St. Paul is saying, we can trace four steps in the degradation of man.

Step One: Idolatry

He says that it all begins with idolatry—“They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator.” The turn is away from God to material reality in some way.

Pope Francis has spoken often about the danger of idolatry in today’s world and has challenged all of us to examine ourselves regularly to see the idols in our lives.  Anything that we put in the place of God is an idol.  However, I think there is an idolatry that is unique to Americans of which we are now reaping the fruit—equality.

When Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America he found that for Americans, “equality is their idol.” While this drive for equality “excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored” and “tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great” there is always a danger lurking, namely that “there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom” (Democracy in America, Book 1, Chapter 3).

But isn’t equality a good thing?  How can Tocqueville call it an idol?  Aren’t we all equal in the eyes of God?  Certainly we are all equal in dignity, but the fact of the matter is that equality is a man-made legal fiction.  God, for His part, has made everything with varying degrees of perfection.  We are not all equal in God’s eyes.  He has made each of us to be perfect in one particular way, but not in all ways, much less for us to be equally perfect in all things.  We bring glory to God by achieving this perfection.  Whether we achieve this perfection or not does not change our value in God’s eyes—we are all still individually worth dying for.  But to try and change this important aspect of reality is to set ourselves up as God.  In other words, the fixation to create equality where there isn’t one is an attempt on man’s part to usurp God.  The gross manner in which it has been enforced from above in our country in particular has forged it into an idol.  Tocqueville identified it almost 200 years ago and it is no less true today.

CS Lewis encapsulates the idolatrous nature of equality in his book That Hideous Strength in a dialogue between Jane and the Director.

Jane: “I thought love meant equality.”

Director: “Ah, equality! Yes; we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”

Jane: “I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”

Director: “You were mistaken; that is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes- that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.”

Think of all the ways in which we attempt to create equality where there isn’t.  We try to make men and women identical.  We award trophies to everyone.  We attempt to make the rich poorer and the poor richer by governmental fiat.  Now we have said all loves are equal—“love is love”—and has been recognized as such by the highest court in the Land.

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Step Two: Sexual Immorality

What follows from idolatry according to St. Paul?  It is sexual immorality, namely “God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies.”

The move from God to material reality as its god leads a God-sized void in man’s heart. He turns to the closest thing that offers what he longs for with God (interpersonal communion), namely sex. It starts as the “old fashioned” kind, namely fornication. But for Americans it is pays homage to the idol of equality. Based on the false notion of equality of men and women, we have attempted to make women into men through the wholesale promotion of contraception.

Men could always, for the most part, have sex without consequences. If men and women are equal then women should be able to do that as well. To make this possible, chemical contraception came on the scene. Now men and women could engage freely in all the sexual activity they wanted. To make this even more possible, we should have our government provide the means to securing these pills. But there is a hidden assumption in the promotion of chemical contraception.  The assumption is this.  Women are inferior to men and so in order to be seen as equal they must either have a surgery or take a pill.  Now I personally don’t believe this for one minute, but I grieve for the millions of women who have never questioned this assumption that they are making.

Step Three: Sexual Perversion

In step three in the descent of man, God hands them over to even “more degraded passions.”  Not satisfied with unlimited sex, we must turn up the volume and get more disordered and depraved.  Thus homosexuality becomes more widespread.  In the name of equality, society must “give approval to those who practice them” through its laws. After all if a heterosexual couple can engage in an act they have deliberately rendered unfruitful, why can’t two people engage in an act that is by nature unfruitful? They are equal, especially when they love each other.

Step Four: Societal Chaos

Once it has been given the governmental seal of approval, God’s final punishment is to “hand them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper.” What follows is societal chaos, “[T]hey are filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are gossips and scandalmongers and they hate God. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” God may not have forced Americans to drink this chalice to the dregs, but we can see signs of it all around.

The purpose of writing all this however is not to be a prophet of gloom, but to suggest a path out of this. If one listens to the arguments surrounding Gay marriage you find that they are irrational. This is only more obvious when one reads the Obergefell v. Hodges majority opinion. This is because one of the punishments is that “their minds are darkened”, as in not able to reason clearly. Sin makes us all stupid. To continue to engage in argument as the main point of attack is fruitless, especially if we view all of this as God handing us over to the idol of equality.

If we want to be free from the punishments of the sin of idolatry we must repent of that sin. What I am proposing is for Christians across the United States to fast on July 4th as an act of Penance for the sin of idolatry. Only by repenting of that sin can we break the cycle of chastisement. Just as Our Master did, we as the Body of Christ, have the role to perform acts of Reparation to God for the sins of mankind. We can voluntarily fast now, or we can offer reparation later when the effects of the legalization of Gay marriage are felt keenly by all Christians. It might require both

Will you join me? If so, I would like you each to invite five other people to offer a fast of some sort this Saturday. Imagine the effect on our culture we could have by offering our “bodies as a spiritual sacrifice” (Romans 12:1), especially on Independence Day and First Saturday. Our Lady, Queen of the Americas, pray for us.

Catholics Saying Yes to Birth Control?

Contraception, marriage

As the debate continues to rage on regarding the HHS mandate requiring religious institutions provide access to contraception as part of their health coverage, there has been renewed discussion regarding the Church’s teaching on birth control. Since there has been no single issue that has been more controversial and caused more widespread dissent and confusion than the Church’s teaching on artificial birth control, it is instructive to look at the reasons why she teaches as she does.

To begin, it is necessary to define precisely what we mean when we speak of artificial birth control.  In Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI defines it as “every action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible” (HV 14).

Because there is much confusion on the issue, it is equally important that the Church be precise in her language.  The Church is not opposed to birth control per se, but instead she is opposed to artificial birth control.  This is an important distinction and one that is often not understood.    The Church does not call married couples to “breed like Catholic Rabbits.”  Instead she calls upon spouses to exercise “responsible parenthood” by prudently and generously deciding to have more children or for serious reasons, deciding not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time.     It is important then to establish that there is nothing necessarily wrong with the intention of spouses not to have a child when engaging in the marital act.  The Church is merely proposing to spouses that they respect the nature of the sexual act itself.

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This brings us to a second important distinction and that is what the Church means when she uses the terms “nature” and “natural.”  For many people what is natural is what is normal and nature refers to what happens in the world of nature.  Some might refer to certain drugs and devices such as a chart of one’s fertility cycle as unnatural. But the Church uses these terms in a more philosophically precise way.  Nature refers to the essence of a thing and that which is in accord with nature is said to be natural.  Drugs and devices are said to be natural if they work in accord with nature or restore something to its natural condition.

In examining human nature, one finds that man has a natural inclination to the good.  As I have mentioned before,  there are four intrinsic goods in which man is naturally inclined.  First, all men have an inclination to conserve their being.  From this inclination every man naturally does those things which preserve and enhance his life and avoid those things which would be harmful to it.  Secondly, man possesses the natural inclination to marriage and procreation (including the raising and education of children).  Thirdly, because man is a rational creature he has a natural inclination to know the truth, especially about God and finally to live in society.  Whatever pertains to each of these inclinations belongs to the natural law.  In other words, whatever promotes these goods leads to true human thriving and ought to be promoted and whatever is contrary to one of these goods is wrong and ought to be avoided.  It is also important to note that something is wrong not simply because God said so, but because ultimately because it is harmful to us.  That is why Aquinas insisted that we offend God only by acting contrary to our own good.

Notice further that in the list of intrinsic goods, marriage and procreation appear as a single good.  That is because they are linked and anything that harms either of the two aspects harms both.  Contraception is intrinsically wrong because it harms the good of marriage and procreation.

Many question how these two aspects constitute a single, inseparable good.  If we understand marriage in the traditional sense to mean the one-flesh, communion of persons in which the spouses unite on all levels of their personhood (body and soul) and we examine the conjugal act on a biological level we can illuminate the inseparability principle (i.e must be both unitive and procreative).  Professor Germain Grisez articulates this well when he carefully explains this based on the following principle:

“Though a male and female are complete individuals with respect to other functions — for example, nutrition, sensation, and locomotion — with respect to reproduction they are only potential parts of a mated pair, which is the complete organism capable of reproducing sexually. Even if the mated pair is sterile, intercourse, provided it is the reproductive behavior characteristic of the species, makes the copulating male and female one organism.”

Professor Grisez’s point is that destroying the reproductive function of the act, also destroys its ability to unite the spouses.  The couple is only one “organism” when they engage in natural intercourse.  His argument also shows that it is not a bunch of celibate men in Rome who came up with the Church’s teaching against contraception, but human reason.

While I said above that the laws of nature are not the same as the Natural Law, these laws can serve as a reliable guide in discovering the good.  Because nature is intelligible, to act in accord with nature is to act in accord with reason and therefore to act morally.   Conversely we can say that which is not natural is not in accord with reason and therefore is immoral.  One can readily see based on this principle why there is an insistence against “artificial” methods of birth control and something like Natural Family Planning is in accord with the Natural Law.  It is not because they are artificial per se but because they are unnatural.  They do not restore the reproductive facilities to their natural state but instead render them defective.

There are many who question why contraception is morally wrong and practices such as Natural Family planning are deemed morally licit.  They reason that because both the contracepting and the NFP couples have the same intention—to avoid pregnancy—that they are simply using different means to make this happen.  But as we have seen it is not the intention that necessarily makes birth control morally illicit, it is the means by which this is done that can be problematic.

This also betrays a certain misunderstanding of what is actually being done (or in this case not done) when couples practice NFP.  By abstaining from the marital act during periods of fertility, the couple is not falsifying the act in the way a contracepting couple does.

A straightforward way of seeing why NFP is morally permissible is through a simple three step argument.  If there is nothing wrong with spouses’ choosing to avoid pregnancy for just reasons and there is nothing necessarily wrong with a couple choosing not to engage in the marital embrace then there can be nothing wrong with not having sexual intercourse with the intent of not getting pregnant.