I understand how it happens that Catholic couples turn to contraception. They don’t see themselves having the strength to practice abstinence, and they can’t get pregnant again for whatever reason, and so they choose the route that seems to them to be the lesser evil.

And their culpability might vary from case to case. They don’t want to be dissenters, or troublemakers, they are just trying to survive as couples or as families.

But there is an assumption that always lies under the surface of these kinds of threads. Another sort of myth.

It’s the assumption that contraceptive sex is exactly the same as non-contraceptive sex. By that I mean that it is assumed that the ‘unitive’ dimension of sex is possible even when using contraception. And I believe that is a serious mistake.

When the Church says that the unitive and the procreative are inseparable, what is meant is that the act can only be unitive in so far as it’s a procreative kind of act (not to be confused with procreative in fact).

This isn’t pulled out of a Cardinals hat somewhere in the Vatican, this is reality the way God made it.

The kind of unity that sex is supposed to be in the sacrament of marriage (and that the spouses long for) can not be had simply by putting your parts in the right place. That’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The logos of sex also plays a part. As Aristotle noted, there’s no real unity between friends without a ‘transcendent third’ that can mediate that unity. For unity can’t be manufactured, it must come “not from the flesh or the will of man, but of God.”

And God’s will for sex, expressed through the logos which he gave it, is that it is a procreative kind of act. And that spousal love, that unique love designed to image God like no other, is a procreative kind of love.

So when you contracept, your sexual activity is no more of a unity than mutual masturbation or homosexuality is unitive. You spurn the grammar which expresses the unity that you really long for.

Contraceptive sexual acts can no more express the unity of love than Judas’ kiss could express friendship after throwing thirty pieces of silver in front of the authorities. It’s just not objectively possible. Couples can understand this intuitively.

The sex is just not the same. It sucks.

So yes, by using contraception or sterilization, you can solve one problem on a practical level. But it would be a big mistake to imagine that you haven’t created other potentially serious problems and swept them under the rug to wreak havoc later.

There is no getting around the fact that love is the cross, and that this cross can’t be kept out of the bedroom.

Love can abstain. It’s worth it.

When it comes to family planning issues, there is a common and mistaken assumption that I will call the myth of middle ground. Between providentialism (God will provide whatever comes) on the one hand, and abstinence (NFP) on the other hand, there is a belief that between these two poles lies a middle ground, a ‘third way’.

This third way is contraception, sterilization, or alternative sexual practices.The myth is that you can have the best of both worlds. You can have both the care-free sex life of the providentialist, while having the same control over child spacing that you get with NFP at the same time. Under this ‘middle ground’ view, the NFP way seems to be an unnecessarily rigorous and overly strict way of going about family planning. Surely, most Catholics are not called to such idealism and sacrifice?

The assumption is that Catholics might actually enjoy the best of both worlds if it weren’t for the unreasonable rules of the Church. But no middle ground exists. The problem is not Church rules, the problem is reality. When it comes to making love, there is such a thing as a law of the excluded middle. As the book of Tobit put the two poles, there is union according to lust and union according to truth. Truth and lust have no common ground. Contraception doesn’t represent some golden ratio of lust to truth. If it’s not on the side of truth, it’s on the side of lust.

This is what Humanae Vitae was getting at with the idea that man must not separate what God has brought together (unitive and procreative purpose of sex). It wasn’t saying “I declare this rule and you shall all abide by it–or else”. It was saying “this is just reality folks, ignore it at your own peril”.

If we approach sex the wrong way, it’s going to bite us. And there are conditions that come with treating it the right way. That’s why Catholics are called to abstinence sometimes. That’s just the cost of loving in truth.

It’s nice to think there is a third way. An easier way. It’s comforting to imagine that contraception will open a door to a middle ground. But, there is no middle ground.

You’re either using sex the way God designed it, or you’re doing something that’s going to end in shame and emptiness. You’re either on the path that God made or your stepping off a cliff.

There’s nothing in between.

Fr. Angelo Mary Geiger, F.I. wrote an article in Inside the Vatican called The Pagan Temptation.

It was a good article but I had some reservations about some things. Fr. Angelo is concerned that TOB popularizers are borrowing concepts from the pagan category of ‘sacred sex’.

As an example, he criticizes Gregory Popcak who wrote that when mutual climax occurs:

a husband, a wife, and God climax together.

And:

To experience sacred sex is to experience that cataclysmic eruption of love that was the cosmological orgasm we call the Big Bang.

Now Fr. Geiger thinks these are pagan ideas. I’m not so sure about that. I haven’t read Popcak myself (I would like to) so I can’t comment about his ideas, but those quotes don’t strike me as necessarily being pagan.  I can understand not liking the metaphors here, but is the content really pagan? Is really not possible to interpret these metaphors in a legitimate Catholic sense?

The first quote seems to be taking the idea of Bishop Sheen (and not just Bishop Sheen of course) that it takes three to get married. That is, the love of spouses is rooted in Christ. It takes that theme and applies it to the marital act. The word ‘climax’ is not meant to be applied literally to God of course. The idea seems to be that if the couple’s climax is a climax of love and not just merely a sexual climax, then it is united in some sense wit h the love of God, for the sacrament of marriage is not merely a sign of the love of Christ and the Church, but is an efficacious sign as well.

An argument might be made about the prudence of using sexual metaphors this way, but I don’t know that these ideas resemble paganism. The thing is, everything that God created is related to God and related to each other. People are going to find theological and sexual analogies if they look for them. And why wouldn’t they? Sex is either a good part of creation or it isn’t. If it is, then those called to marriage will want to see how that aspect of their life fits theologically with the other aspects of their life as a whole. They will want to see the religious and theological context of their sexual life.

Is that wrong?

This is a portion of a translation of the book Sheep and Shepards by Cardinal Biffi as translated by Sandro Magister. There’s some great stuff here by Biffi on chastity, homosexuality, and early Christianity.

“The transcendent Christian vision of the male-female relationship – and in this, the precise and demanding proposal of a chaste life according each one’s individual condition – finds its foundation and inspiration in the conviction that this relationship is the image of the spousal connection that binds Christ to the Church.

It is a lesson in “anagogical theology” (meaning that it allows itself to be illuminated from above) imparted to us by St. Paul in the letter to the Ephesians. In the reciprocal donation of the spouses, there lives a “great mystery” [...] which the Father planned before all the ages: “This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the Church” (Ephesians 5:32). In the eyes of the Apostle, the husband’s love for his wife evokes Christ’s love for the Church: a love that saves, that purifies and sanctifies.

The later teaching of the Church would speak of marriage as a “sacrament”: a sacrament that, being an allusion and figure of a bond that makes the Redeemer and redeemed humanity “one flesh,” makes the spouses participate in a special way in that event, [...] within which the mutual acts of personal donation become the occasion and vehicle of continual grace.

No philosophy and no religion has ever succeeded in lifting sexual life so high; naturally, sexual life conducted according to the original plan of God. “[emphasis by me]

Trojan has a commercial for a ‘personal massager’ that is getting a lot of airplay on TV networks due to the fact that the commercial is not sexually explicit and never uses the word ‘vibrator’. The commercial is similar in marketing style to other pharmaceutical, medical or personal products advertising targeted at women. Take a look (it’s safe–there’s nothing sexually explicit in it).

In the Trojan commercial they try to tone down the narcissistic and anti-social aspect of their ‘massager’ by inviting women to ‘share’ their experience with a partner. But it’s not that simple.

Read More