There was a time years ago when one might sometimes hear the complaint: "All they ever talk about from the pulpit is sex!" Today the chances are you would hear the opposite "When are we going to hear a sermon on sexual morality?" Well, be disappointed no longer. Here we go - specifically on the subject of contraception.
The first thing I want to say is that the Catholic Church is not against family planning! Does that surprise or shock you? It is true. She is for responsible family planning. The Church affirms that every child is a precious gift of God - more valuable than the entire material universe - to be welcomed as Jesus welcomed them. "Let the children come to me," He said, "and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these" (Mark 19:14). The Church recognizes, however, that there are at times serious reasons for married couples to avoid or postpone another pregnancy. Because of this, the Catholic Church around the world is the largest promoter of Natural Family Planning. Modern day Natural Family Planning has been perfected way beyond the old calendar Rhythm Method and is as effective as all the ongoing contraceptives and more effective than some. It does not require a regular menstrual cycle and is based on any one of a number of easily observable bodily signs that indicate the comparatively short period each month when a woman is fertlle. Once learned, it costs no money to use and has none of the side effects that are associated with almost all of the other methods - especially the chemical ones. A September 1993 article from the British Medical Journal reports on studies of NFP's effectiveness in various parts of the world. It cites one study from India where almost 20,000 women used the Billings Ovulation Method of Natural Family Planning. There were almost no pregnancies among these women. The doctor who authors the article proposes that Natural Family Planning is the way for the world to go.
A 1995 study, however, of U.S. Catholic women between 'the ages of fifteen and forty-four shows about sixty-eight percent using some form of contraception or sterilization. The chances are that many of them think that what they're doing is all right.
Twenty years ago, listening to and sympathizing with the struggles that many married couples faced, I was inclined to go along with their thinking. In any case, I would have told them, out of compassion, that it was up to them to make a conscientious decision, after considering everything.
Of course, every moral decision is meant to be made in the sanctuary of our consciences - but what is conscience? If not stifled by emotion, it moves us to seek the truth and follow it. Now, with all my heart, I urge couples to form their consciences in the light of reason and faith, of Christ and His Church. I tell them what the Catholic Church clearly teaches, has always taught, and what the official Catechism of the Church repeats God is the creator of man and woman, marriage and sex, and contraception is a serious misuse of His creation. I say this with no less compassion than before. True compassion and love, however, call us to proclaim the truth, the full good news of God's plan for our lives.
Many things have brought me to the point where I no longer hedge on this issue. One is a new appreciation of the urgent need for attention to the Church's teaching mission in a world that has lost a sense of any objective right or wrong or even of objective truth itself. Related to this are the disastrous consequences of the "make up your own mind" or the "form your own conscience" directive. It's been used to justify everything under the sun.
Did you know that before 1930 all the Christian denominations were in agreement about the evil and sin of contraception? Protestant denominations after the Reformation still stood shoulder to shoulder with the Catholic Church on the subject for about 400 years. It was only in 1930 that one denomination, the Anglican bishops at their Lambeth Conference in England, reluctantly made some exceptions in condemning contraception. This was the beginning of the collapse of other Christian denominations on this issue, and then on other aspects of sexual morality and abortion as well. A crack had been made in the dike of clear sexual moral teaching, and the whole wall began to crumble.
When the Pill first came out in the sixties, many, like myself, thought we had struck upon a great new invention. How wrong we were! The endless list of possible side effects, spelled out on the physicians' package insert with the Pills, should alarm anyone. A former president of Pharmacists for Life says he hasn't met one otherwise healthy woman on the Pill who has not experienced some ill effect from it. At least thirty pecent of women on the Pill discontinue its use after the first year. Later came Norplant, the five year under-the-skin contraceptive implant. Countless women have complained and even made legal claims of harm from the device. In Louisiana alone, as of October 2001, thousands of women are attempting a class action suit in court against the Norplant producers.
It was this kind of information that prompted me to rethink the whole birth control-issue. Specifically, it began to happen at a medical-ethics workshop with a presentation by a brilliant Latin American woman on the effectiveness and benefits of modern day Natural Family Planning contrasted with the harmful effects, physical, psychological and spiritual, of unnatural birth control. The most alarming part of this presentation, however, was the fact that not only the IUDs but all the chemical contraceptives (including all the Pills, Norplant, and contraceptive Depo Provera injections) have a possible abortive effect.
They normally stop ovulation but not always. They all allow for some breakthrough ovulation. Because of this, couples can sometimes conceive, that is, the egg can be occasionally fertilized. All of the DNA is present; human life begins. All of these chemicals, however, alter the lining of the uterus so that it is not prepared as it normally would be to receive this newly conceived human being. The chances are that these oneweek old, tiny new lives would be sloughed off and destroyed. Medical literature and the physicians' package insert for Pills will confirm this and other possible harmful effects, but most people never read them. That is what prompted over 200 doctors toward the end of the twentieth century to sign what is called "A Declaration of Life" affirming the abortive potential of all the above mentioned chemical contraceptives. There was also a report on contraception submitted at the 1990 International Congress of the World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life that included something about spermicides. It cited information presented at a graduate medical seminar about the chemical Nonoxynol 9 contained in spermicides (creams, sprays, sponges, etc.). By a different mechanism, it can also have an abortive effect. Condoms are often coated with spermicide.
For me, all this was like nature's red light warning: "Something's wrong with contraception; something's right with Natural Family Planning." It also showed me how, long before the Pill, the Church's ancient teaching was prophetically safeguarding not only marriage and sex but respect for women and human life itself. The Church isn't behind the times; she's way ahead of the times!
What is the main reason, however, why contraception is wrong? It is wrong because it is human interference in an area that is God's domain. "From the beginning," Jesus said, "the creator 'made them male and female.'" (Matthew 19 4) God made marriage. He made sex, and it needs to be respected and exercised in the way He intended. In sharing with us the power to give life, He joined it to an intimate expression of self giving love. To interject a barrier or chemical to separate the act of love from its possible life giving effect is to tamper with and seriously violate a sacred design of God.
Let me give an example. Suppose you sit down to eat a delicious meal, but before doing so, you put an obstruction in your throat to catch the food. You still get the taste of eating and the socializing that may go with it, but then you take the obstruction after you're finished and throw it in the garbage can. Sorry if it seems crude, but what's the difference between that and using condoms, Pills or doing anything that - one way or the other - blocks, destroys, or interferes with the natural life giving effect of the marriage act? When Natural Family Planning is used, however, the couple is not abusing but using nature. They do not interfere with a sacred God-designed process, but, by self-control, make use of the natural rhythm of fertile and non-fertile days as designed by the Creator. By choice they either use or don't use their marital rights on those days. To continue the eating analogy, periodically, you can either eat or fast, but when you choose to eat, you can't deliberately frustrate its life giving effect. The same is true of sex.
Another way of looking at it, less graphic and more subtle, is this Sexual intercourse is meant to express the total gift of oneself to another without anything being held back. As the Second Vatican Council put it, the marriage act should "by objective standards . . . preserve the full sense of mutual selfgiving and human procreation in the context of true love." It is intended by God to be an expression and renewal of the couple's marriage agreement and covenant. It is God's way for them to say to each other over and over again, "I take you and give myself to you for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, without reservation, until death." In the use of contraceptives of any kind, a couple is not saying this unreservedly. There is a hidden agenda, a holding back, a conditional consent: "I am giving myself to you but not completely." It is like putting a hood over your head before embracing and kissing your spouse!
The marital union, modeled on the union of Christ and His Church, is a call to total unselfish self-giving and holiness. St. Paul exhorts the Christians of Ephesus (Ephesians 5:2526), "Husbands love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her . . ." Unnaturally blocking fertility (an integral part of who a person is) in the marriage act itself always contradicts the complete self-donation and holiness (wholeness) of the act.
All this would also (and even more so) apply to permanent sterilization for the purpose of birth control, carrying with it the added evil of unjustified bodily mutilation. The more than one million sterilizations a year in the U.S. are not without their own harmful side effects, physical, psychological, and spiritual.
To sum up, God created the marriage act for two main purposes to bear children and to express and deepen the union of husband and wife - and He put these two purposes together. Contraception contradicts both purposes and pulls them apart. The reason that it is so wrong and in itself a serious evil is because it violates what otherwise in itself is so good and sacred. The Catholic Church is not down on sex. It is just the opposite. The Catholic Church is preserving and proclaiming the beauty, the rightness and true meaning of what God has created.
There is much more that could be said on this issue, but other sources are available. Among them, I strongly recommend Dr. Janet Smith's talk on cassette "Contraception: Why Not?" as one of the best presentations on the subject.
The most discussed document on the subject is Pope Paul VI's encyclical, Humanae Vitae, (Of Human Life), issued in 1968. It affirms a teaching that goes back in the Church to early ages, about the sacredness of the marriage act and the immorality of interference with it.
When I was first exposed to this encyclical, I was so influenced by the news commentators and the protesting theologians that I didn't think that much of it. Years later, when the smoke had cleared and I read it calmly, thoughtfully, and with an open mind and heart, I was deeply impressed with the profound wisdom and love in it. It is like the young guy who said, "You know, when I was eighteen, I thought my dad was pretty stupid. But when I got to be twenty-one I was amazed how much he had learned in three years!"
I realize now that if I have trouble accepting some solemn teaching of the Church, I should not presume that she just has not gotten "with it" or that I have some special insight that this Church of 2000 years has not yet considered. Instead, why not presume that I am the one who has not yet caught up with the teaching Church or plumbed the depth of her wisdom and insights? Make the effort to pray, to study, and to consult those who are with the Church on the issue. The witness of Natural Family Planning couples is powerful - especially of converts from contraception. With an overall divorce rate estimated at fifty percent in the United States, committed NFP couples rarely divorce. They often talk about relationships, including the sexual relationship, that are greatly improved, and about family life greatly blessed with a new peace and happiness. This is God's amazing grace at work in those who open their lives, especially their most intimate life, to Him.
Jesus Christ sent out His Church with the commission to "make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them . . ." and the promise, "I will be with you always . . ." (Matthew 28 19 20). He called the Church ". . . the light of the world . . . a city set on a mountain . . ."(Matthew 5 14.) Without that light of Christ and His Church, we could argue endlessly about what is right and what is wrong - what God wants us to believe and to do on the way to eternal salvation - and still walk in doubt and darkness. But as the bishops of the world proclaimed at the Second Vatican Council, "The Church is, by the will of Christ, the teacher of the truth. It is her duty to give utterance and authoritatively to teach that Truth which is Christ Himself and also to declare and confirm by her authority those principles of the moral order, which have their origin in human nature itsel£
What the Church teaches is not politically correct and goes against the current of public opinion, and many of us, the priests, have failed to clearly preach it. Thank God, however, that the Catholic Church officially down through the ages has remained faithful to the truth in opposing contraception.
Especially through the voice of the successors of St. Peter, she continues to call the world back to God's plan for man and woman, for life, for sex, and for marriage. Pray that we can all hear that call, live it, rejoice in it and share it with everyone.