Catholic Info
Traditional Catholic Faith => Crisis in the Church => Topic started by: Caminus on April 11, 2010, 09:41:28 PM
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Marital Love and Fidelity (http://www.sspx.org/against_sound_bites/marital_love_and_fidelity.htm). More good reading.
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Mike, these are for you by the way, good and catholic all the way through, makes for reading that forms the mind properly.
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Absolutely love this article. Thank you very much for posting it.
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Everyone agrees that if spouses were using ABC the same way they would use NFP, it would be wrong. NFP therefore is not intrinsically wrong, they say, otherwise it would always be a sin to have relations when the wife is infertile.
This is a straw man. My contention is that NFP is intrinsically wrong. It's all about the intention. Spouses who use the fertile and infertile days together may be using the infertile days like an NFP user, yes, but they do not intend to contracept. This is the difference.
It would be extremely hard to say that withdrawal is somehow "unnatural" while NFP is "natural" anyway. Who was the Merriam or the Webster that decided on the definition of "natural" as an act where the sperm is deposited where it is supposed to be deposited? I could just as easily define natural as "the absence of body-altering substances or chemicals." That means withdrawal is also natural -- does that mean it's okay?
Not only that, but many "unnatural" means are approved by the Church for good purposes, such as taking drugs to heal illnesses. If there were ever a good reason to have sex while premeditating how not to have children, the Church could allow artificial birth control for that too. But it doesn't.
The NFP defenders say that is because artificial birth control is intrinsically evil. But when forced to explain WHY artificial birth control is intrinsically evil and why NFP isn't, they resort to feeble excuses that artificial birth control prevents the man from giving himself entirely to the woman, or that he withholds part of himself when he uses a condom, or even that the condom is not respectful to the woman. I can't remember any such soppy sentimentality about sex in the entirety of Church history, I can't think of a single saint talking about the "giving of oneself intimately" and so on. It all reeks of the New Romantic pseudo-theology of Dietrich von Hildebrand, you know, where the shackles of clinical Catholic sex are thrown off and sex becomes a sacramental communion, where love between the spouses is placed above duty, where buzzwords like "giving," "sharing," and "togetherness" are the order of the day. This led to the error of Vatican II where the primary and secondary ends of marriage were reversed in all but name.
Many, many new Catholics or Protestants investigating Catholicism, if you read about NFP, are smacked upside the head by this, and they call it what it is -- hypocrisy. Those who believe in NFP can never really defend it without getting tangled up; so eventually the argument always comes down to the same thing: Blind faith.
It is good to have blind faith in the Church but not when the Church has been taken over. Blind faith in Pius XII, who I've shown in many ways speaking in a double-minded, communistic way, and a bunch of theologians who later became leading lights of Vatican II? No thanks.
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The SSPX article says:
The practice of contraception is unnatural, against nature, a perversion just as truly as ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity.
I also think NFP with its calendars and mucus testers is blatantly perverted.
St. Augustine, De Bono Conjugali --
"It is, however, one thing for married persons to have intercourse only for the wish to beget children, which is not sinful: it is another thing for them to desire carnal pleasure in cohabitation, but with the spouse only, which involves venial sin. For although propagation of offspring is not the motive of the intercourse, there is still no attempt to prevent such propagation, either by wrong desire or evil appliance. They who resort to these, although called by the name of spouses, are really not such; they retain no vestige of true matrimony, but pretend the honorable designation as a cloak for criminal conduct."
"Evil appliance" covers artificial birth control. But "wrong desire" covers ALL attempts, natural or unnatural, to have sex while stifling the birth of children. I don't need St. Augustine to tell me this either. It truly is a matter of the law on the heart, the natural law.
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My contention is that NFP is intrinsically wrong. It's all about the intention.
I basically agree with you about NFP, but what you wrote entails something of a contradiction. If it were truly intrinsically evil, the intention would have precious little to do with it (except in so far as it would aggravate or extenuate the degree of subjective guilt).
So, if a couple were to miss a fertile period or two due to circuмstances other than the intention to limit procreation, there would be no sin there.
HOWEVER ..., when a couple deliberately abstains during fertile periods only, the intention there is to separate procreation from marital union. To say that you can do this for grave reasons is fraught with theological difficulties in that
1) it appears to be ends justifies the means and
2) it leads to the slippery-slope problems identified in the article posted by Caminus -- When is a reason sufficiently grave to justify this practice?
IMO if the reasons to avoid conception are grave enough, then there must be total abstinence. People act as if they have some inalienable God-given right to sɛҳuąƖ gratification. What if one spouse becomes incapacitated? And if there's a serious threat to the life of the mother, it would be a grave sin to have any relations at all, since this method is not even close to being foolproof.
NFP fails every smell test and needs to be regarded as mortally sinful--but there is a distinction between it and ABC. Nevertheless, I call it NBC. Let's dispense with the euphemisms.
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People act as if they have some inalienable God-given right to sɛҳuąƖ gratification.
I'm working on a more in depth reply, but I want to address this comment which betrays an elitist attitude. You and Mike are attacking this concession and decrying people's weakness. But what you fail to understand is that a lesser good isn't evil and that this is nothing more than a condescension to weak people. It doesn't pass the "smell" test because it doesn't meet your rigorism. Some people just can't abstain. Yes, that's a problem. Yes, it's sad, but it's reality, not everyone has the same strong virtue. That's what you're dealing with and that's precisely where your problem lies. If you don't like that, then you need to find a different Church where all members are strong and perfect.
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People act as if they have some inalienable God-given right to sɛҳuąƖ gratification.
I'm working on a more in depth reply, but I want to address this comment which betrays an elitist attitude. You and Mike are attacking this concession and decrying people's weakness. But what you fail to understand is that a lesser good isn't evil and that this is nothing more than a condescension to weak people. It doesn't pass the "smell" test because it doesn't meet your rigorism. Some people just can't abstain. Yes, that's a problem. Yes, it's sad, but it's reality, not everyone has the same strong virtue. That's what you're dealing with and that's precisely where your problem lies. If you don't like that, then you need to find a different Church where all members are strong and perfect.
Funny, but I hear the exact same rhetoric to justify ABC. Human weakness doesn't come CLOSE to even resembling a theological argument.
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Funny how that's irrelevant given that ABC is intrinsically evil. It wasn't a theological argument at all. The point was to explain to you that this whole thing was originally judged to be a mere condescension to the weak, it wasn't some means to holiness or a divine truth fallen from heaven. If you're looking for that you're not in the right place. This pertains to the recognition of the lesser good for weaker people. It's not dealing in high virtue and it makes you suspicious because you've havn't grasped that yet. And you don't like it because you don't like condescending to morally weak people, it makes you look bad.
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It's not about being rigorous or unsympathetic to sinners, but about principles, about doing the will of God, and about striving to be holy as Our Father in heaven is holy. One can be sympathetic to human weakness without at the same time compromising principles.
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What principles are you compromising? It's been judged there is no sin involved, all else being equal. The only complaint Mike has is with intention, but then he condemns even those who abstain so he's got nowhere to go with that.
Is it better to deny and abstain? No one would deny it. But is the converse then evil? No, it's not, it's simply less good.
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Less good? Hardly. Intending to separate copulation from procreation is the principle involved. That's pretty cut and dry here. Question you need to argue is whether and to what extent NFP does this. You've turned completely about-face from the article in our OP. NFP is NOT a good by any stretch of the imagination.
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It's been judged there is no sin involved, all else being equal.
Now you're getting ridiculous. So there's no sin involved in practicing NFP for years at a time simply because you don't feel like having children? That's an absurd statement to make without clarifying the CONDITIONS under which there is and is not sin involved, and therefore clarifying the principles behind your statement. "all else being equal" -- to what?
Clearly the Father in your OP would state that in 99.9% of cases NFP is being used sinfully.
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Less good? Hardly. Intending to separate copulation from procreation is the principle involved. That's pretty cut and dry here. Question you need to argue is whether and to what extent NFP does this. You've turned completely about-face from the article in our OP. NFP is NOT a good by any stretch of the imagination.
Then you're left with it being intrinsically evil. It may be "separated" logically, but not in the real order. The integrity of the act is exactly the same as during "fertile" periods. The real question you need to deal with is whether an reason would justify NFP, because the matter is of positive law. If there is no grave reason, then such an act would not be justified and therefore sinful. The same holds for things like missing Mass on Sunday. If there is a sufficient reason, then one is excused from sin, if there is no good reason, then one sins.
When when I refer to the licit practice of this "NFP" I am referring to the licit practice, not its abuse or perversion, so your grandstanding sensational remarks are useless.
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It's been judged there is no sin involved, all else being equal.
Now you're getting ridiculous. So there's no sin involved in practicing NFP for years at a time simply because you don't feel like having children? That's an absurd statement to make without clarifying the CONDITIONS under which there is and is not sin involved, and therefore clarifying the principles behind your statement. "all else being equal" -- to what?
Clearly the Father in your OP would state that in 99.9% of cases NFP is being used sinfully.
Legitimate conditions are assumed for the sake of discussing the essence of the issue. Why do I need to say this?
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