All of the Scripture readings today spoke of the trials persecutions believers may encounter when living and proclaiming the Gospel. When the power of real truth and love encounter the evils of the world (including evils that are sometimes portrayed as good), conflict often arises. Sometimes, that conflict can come at great cost to the believer, up to and including his or her own death.
In the first reading, the prophet Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern (Jeremiah 38:6). In the second reading, believers are encouraged to resist evil to the "point of shedding blood." (Hebrews 12:4) In the Gospel selection (Luke 12:49-53), Jesus speaks of division, even within families, that can come when some believers accept and proclaim the truth, and some do not. Our Lord says,
Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth?
No, I tell you, but rather division.
From now on a household of five will be divided,
three against two and two against three;
a father will be divided against his son
and a son against his father,
a mother against her daughter
and a daughter against her mother,
a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”
This blog was inspired by today's readings to start a short series on some of the more challenging teachings of Our Lord and His Church that are indeed a cause of great division today, even within the Church. These three teachings that cause a lot of division are contraception, abortion, and same sex marriage. We will do a separate blog post for each of these three issues, starting today with contraception.
All three of these ideas (contraception, abortion, same sex marriage) begin with the premise that we can do whatever we want with our bodies, whenever we want. This is the mentality of modern man, especially after the sexual liberation of the twentieth century. We are told that we are the masters of our bodies, we can do with them whatever we please. We can have sex whenever we want, with whomever we want to. We can put whatever we want into our bodies. If something is in our bodies we can do whatever we want with it.
But is the truth? Reading Scripture, I think we would come to different conclusions. Right in the beginning of the Bible, we read this "God created man in his image, in the divine image he created him, male and female he created them." (Genesis 1:27) Therefore, we have to conclude that if we are made in the image of God, that are bodies are not designed to do things God wouldn't approve of. Would God approve of contraception, abortion, and/or same sex marriage?
Let's look at contraception.
If you break the word down, it means "against conception" (contra- ‘against’ + a shortened form of conception.) . So, the act is against conception. Well, there is the first clue God would not approve of it. It is against something He created, the act of conception. How do human beings come into the world? They do through conception. Therefore, conception is a good thing because human beings come into the world through it. Without conception, there is no birth, no baby, no beautiful child, and correspondingly, no further children. Something that goes against all that cannot be a good thing.
We often hear the phrase "actions speak louder than words". We speak more than with just words. Saint John Paul II spoke of the "nuptial meaning of the body". Through all the actions of our body, we speak something. As I have stated before, God spoke through the person of His Son. That person was not just a spirit, it was a body. Bottom line, our bodies speak! When we use contraception in the midst of the conjugal act, what are we saying? We are saying we love the other person, but not with our whole selves. Is this really the love we want to show the other person, especially in such a deep and profound moment? By using contraception, we indeed make it look like we are giving our whole selves to the other, but we really are not. Contraception makes us liars. God, who is truth, does not lie, and we who are created in his image, are made for truth, not for falsehood. Therefore, in addition to going against the good, it goes against truth, and that is another reason why God would not approve of contraception.
Again, close to the beginning of the Bible, God says "Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it." (Genesis 1:28). God wants to fill the earth with people made in his image! Contraception specifically, and all forms of population control in general, goes directly against this wish of God's. It is a serious offense. (For those of you who believe the world is overpopulated, consider this. You could fit everyone in the world today in the state of Texas, and each person would have a townhouse! )
There are serious affects when we lower birth rates. Lowering birth rates, this blog believes, are a major cause of the rise of terrorism, especially in Europe, where the traditional Christian population is using contraception and aborting itself to the brink of extinction, making it vulnerable to Islamic infiltration. Also, when a society practises birth control, the ratio of men and women becomes more uneven, and it makes it harder for a man to find a woman and vice versa. When that happens, there is no proper outlet to channel sexual impulses, and bad things like child abuse and rape are more prone to happen.
Finally, let us read the exact words of the Catechism on this matter, which quote the 1968 encyclical Humane Vitae. "Every action which, whether 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" is intrinsically evil." (p.2370) When we introduce something to thwart fecundity, into to an act that is designed by God to promote fecundity, we do grave evil. The conjugal act is oriented towards a certain good and a certain truth as we have seen. By interfering with these, contraception doesn't just do that, it fosters dire consequences for humanity as a whole, as we have seen. For all these reasons, the Church teaches that contraception is a sin, and if we have engaged in an act(s) of contraception , we need to repent, and receive the mercy of God, or else our salvation may be at risk.
For more details on this topic, you can read Humane Vitae as a whole. It is not a long encyclical, it can be read in under an hour. The Catechism speaks of sexuality in Part Three, Article 6, and has many beautiful things to say about it. This part, too, can be read in under an hour. John Paul II spoke extensively on his Wednesday audiences in the early 1980's on the Theology of the Body. (This cannot be read in an hour, lol.) This is deep material, and may be a little too heady for the average person not versed in theology. Reading through summaries of them would probably be easier.
The Catechism refers to chastity as "the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being (p.2337)." Chastity ensures our sexual behavior lines up with our deeper moral and spiritual behavior. One who practises chastity well is called "chaste". In the litany to Saint Joseph, we see that word come up twice. Joseph is referred to as "Chaste guardian of the virgin, and "most chaste". If we struggle with the sin of contraception, either because we do it, or we cannot understand why it is a sin, or both, we can pray to Saint Joseph to help us.
Joseph, most chaste, pray for us.
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