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| Photosource: Carribean360 |
The Public Discourse
August 10th, 2016
The Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception, common to all Christian denominations for 1900 years, is not arbitrary. It reflects a moral truth. And the Catholic Church can never revise it. Part one of two.
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Forty-eight years ago last month, our story reached a dramatic climax. But it began in the dawn of Christianity, with a document called the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (or Didache). Written thirty to fifty years after Christ’s death, it gives the earliest evidence of a Christian condemnation of contraception. For the next 1900 years, it was the view of every Christian body—East and West, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—that contraception by spouses was immoral. (Its use outside of marriage wasn’t much discussed since non-marital sex was deemed sinful anyway.) It was even denounced, vociferously, by Reformers such as Luther and Calvin. In 1930, but only then, a single Protestant denomination cracked open the door to spousal contraception—but only for serious reasons. Soon, however, that and almost every other denomination had flung it wide open.
And the Catholic Church held firm. As the sexual revolution spread and “population bomb” panic swept the West, there were rumors and fervent hopes that the Church would change. The birth control pill had just been invented, and some thought it different in kind from condoms and other barriers. Perhaps (they reasoned) it wasn’t really contraceptive. A commission established by Pope Paul VI to study the question tried to split the difference. Its 1966 report concluded that any effort to sterilize spouses’ sex acts would fall within the ancient teaching against contraception; but it urged abandoning that teaching.
Two years later, in 1968, Pope Paul VI stunned the world. His encyclical letter Humanae Vitae affirmed the historic Christian teaching against “any action which is done—either in anticipation of marital intercourse, or during it, or while its natural effects are unfolding—so as to impede procreation, whether that is intended as an end … or as a means.”
What he taught, in other words, is that it’s always immoral to act with the intent to sterilize spouses’ sexual acts, by any means and for any reason. And for good measure, he warned that a wide embrace of contraception would spell disaster for marital fidelity and public decency, for men’s respect for women and governments’ respect for the family. These words earned him the derision of Western cultural leaders in thrall to the ideology of sexual liberation, but they proved prophetic.
Paul VI also wrote—as John Paul II would reaffirm—that this principle was no mere regulation for the day-to-day life of the Catholic community, subject to change. It wasn’t like the requirement to give up meat on Fridays in Lent. It was required, they taught, by the “natural moral law.”
Why? Because a married couple’s choice to contracept goes against the human good. But there isn’t just one right account of why and how. The Church is in the business of preaching the Gospel, not running philosophy seminars. It doesn’t usually endorse particular philosophical arguments.
Nevertheless, drawing on thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Alex Pruss, and Germain Grisez, I’ll venture a few moral reasons for its teaching on contraception. I’ll show how rejecting it undermines other Christian teachings on sex ethics. And I’ll end on a more concrete note, suggesting that the use of contraception isn’t just wrong in principle; it can harm real-life marriages in tragically tangible ways.
Some dimensions of our lives are sacred, good for us in themselves. Morality requires treating these basic human goods—these core aspects of our well-being—as more than mere tools for other ends. It tells us to pursue them as we can, to honor them, and never to choose directly against them—which is simply to serve and honor human beings in these different dimensions of their lives. Thus, murder and mutilation are wrong because they involve choosing directly against the basic human goods of life and health. The inherent value of personal integrity and community makes lies and hypocrisy wrong. And so on.
In other words, the natural moral law—which Christian teaching reflects and extends—is about living well, which means loving well. It’s about serving the true good of everyone touched by our actions. It is a law of love. To act immorally, to sin, is always a failure of love, of full devotion to the human good.
Contraception Violates Marriage
The conjugal union of husband and wife—marriage—is one bedrock human good, one basic form of love. By its nature, it is deepened by the bearing and rearing of new people. But to thwart what so crowns a marriage is to choose against this good itself, against marital love. And choosing against a basic good or form of love is a sin.
