Christianity And Sexuality

"[[w:Contraceptive|[C]ontraceptive]] intercourse is, in short, an instrumentalist or pragmatic devaluing of the great human good of fertility and of openness to the goodness of human life in its transmission. It is thus an anti-life sort of act, one incompatible with a love for all that is good and with a love for human life itself."

"[I]t is contrary to the teachings of the Church artificially to curtail or prevent the [birth]] of children. We believe that those who practice birth control will reap disappointment by and by."

"The prevention of pregnancy when feasible by birth control with pre-fertilization methods is acceptable."

"Though opposition to contraception is now widely thought to be a “Catholic thing,” the great Reformers rejected it as strongly as any modern Catholic. For earlier Christians, children were such a great gift from God and sterility such a curse that the evil of willed sterility was self-evident. As Martin Luther wrote in his Lectures on Genesis, in Genesis “fertility was regarded as an extraordinary blessing and a special gift of God,” but we do not regard this so highly today."

"It is clear that there is a major rethinking going on among Evangelicals on this issue, especially among young people. There is a real push back against the contraceptive culture now."

"Although every organized patriarchal religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic Church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity -- an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women."

"The prohibition of birth control assumes that the sexual function in human life must be limited to its function in nature, that of procreation. But it is the very character of human life that all animal functions are touched by freedom and released into more complex relationships. This freedom is the basis of both creativity and sin."

"[I]f anyone in sound health has castrated sterilized himself, it behooves that such a one, if enrolled among the clergy, should cease [from his ministry], and that from henceforth no such person should be promoted. But, as it is evident that this is said of those who willfully do the thing and presume to castrate themselves, so if any have been made eunuchs by barbarians, or by their masters, and should otherwise be found worthy, such men this canon admits to the clergy."

"The world is stricken with reform madness. To the reformers of our time nothing is so sacred that it must not be tampered with. Institutions that have grown old with the world and are of divine origin must needs submit to the activity of the “reformer”; nor can God expect anything else: where He Himself has been “reformed” out of existence. His institutions can hardly expect to be spared. One of the reformers of today makes the following statement: “It now seems to many people that the time has come to take childbirth out of the realm of chance, that the birth of human beings is too important to be left to irresponsible nature.” How wide-spread the reform movement referred to have become may be understood when the reformers assert: “Today men of high standing scientists of international reputation, physicians, [[psychologists]], political economists, sociologists, and literati advocate birth control as a counter-move against poverty and disease.” Every Christian will readily perceive that this “reform” is a curse to the individual and the state. Dwelling on this point, a Roman Catholic writer says: “Duty and conscientiousness are to throw their mantle of protection over practices that tamper with the very fountains of life and defy the will of the Creator to the destruction of individual, family, and State as exemplified in the fall of pagan Rome.” Church people are, however, not the only ones who are becoming alarmed at the activity of those reformers. The subject was discussed before a gathering of club-women at Chicago recently, and, addressing the club, Mr. Leonora ZZ. Meder said the following: Birth control is making us a retrogressive people returning to the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.” “Birth control is immoral, degrading, and stupid. It is a perversion of a natural faculty: it logically and inevitably leads to deliberate childless marriages; it does not attain its purpose of human welfare, and leads to luxurious vice, compared to which the suffering involved in rearing children is a blessing, indeed. “It is better to improve the economic conditions of the poor than to attempt to remedy matters by decreasing the numbers. “Statistics compiled in Chicago show that in almost every case where divorces were sought the applicants were either childless or had only one child. “Theodore Roosevelt complied these facts, showing that fertility and genius are compatible: Horace Walpole, one of nineteen children; Benjamin Franklin, one of seventeen; Peter the Great, one of fourteen; Napoleon Bonaparte, one of thirteen; Walter Scott, one of twelve; Cooper, one of twelve; Tennyson, one of twelve; Washington, one of ten; Webster, one of ten; Cleveland, one of nine; Dickens, one of eight; Longfellow, one of eight; Milton and Emmerson, one of six. “Genius is rarely found where there is one child. You have only to visit the asylums at Elgin, Kankakee, and Dunning to see the appalling ruins of mind and body brought on by the heinous practice of birth control. Eighty-five percent, of the women in Chicago hospitals are ill as a direct or indirect result of the same practice."

"The voluntary control of birth in marriage is only permissible, according to the essence of a spiritual life, when the birth of a child will bring danger and hardship. Those who are living the spiritual life will come to the decision not to bear children only with sorrow, and will do so before God, with prayers for guidance and mercy. It will not be a decision taken lightly or for self-indulgent reasons. According to the common teaching in the Orthodox Church, when such a decision is taken before God, the means of its implementation are arbitrary. There are, in the Orthodox opinion, no means of controlling birth in marriage which are better or more acceptable than others. All means are equally sad and distressing for those who truly love. For the Christian marriage is the one that abounds with as many new children as possible."

"Pope Francis, in a recent interview, pointed out that Pope w:Paul VI, in a difficult situation in Africa, “permitted nuns to use contraceptives in cases of rape. ”This use of contraceptives by a group of nuns occurred during an exceptional wartime situation in the Belgian Congo. Although no document has ever been found in the Vatican indicating that permission was actually given by the Pope, these women were given the Pill by their physicians because they appeared to be in imminent danger of sexual assault during the uprisings of 1960."

"[[w:Contraception|[C]ontraception]] deliberately deprives the conjugal act of its openness to procreation and in this way brings about a voluntary dissociation of the ends of marriage."

"With regard to intrinsically evil acts, and in reference to contraceptive practices whereby the conjugal act is intentionally rendered infertile, Pope Paul VI teaches: "Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good, it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it (cf. Rom 3:8) — in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general"."

"The Church's teaching about "responsible parenthood" is based on this essential anthropological and ethical foundation. Unfortunately, Catholic thought is often misunderstoo’ on this point, as if the Church supported an ideology of fertility at all costs, urging married couples to procreate indiscriminately and without thought for the future. But one need only study the pronouncements of the magisterium to know that this is not so. Truly, in begetting life the spouses fulfills one of the highest dimensions of their calling: they are God's co-workers."

"We assure you that we remain close to you, above all in these recent days when you have taken the good step of publishing the encyclical Humanae Vitae. We are in total agreement with you, and wish you all God's help to continue your mission in the world."

"The commission on Research and Social Action has authorized official use of a statement which reads in part: “4. To enable them the more thankfully to receive God’s blessing and reward, a married couple may so plan and govern their sexual relations that any child born to their union will be desired both for itself and in relation to the time of its birth. “5. In God’s providence, and as a result of the power He gave men to subdue the earth and have dominion over it (Gen. 1:28), man has developed various means by which a married couple may control the number and the spacing of the births of their children. The means which the married pair uses to determine the number and the spacing of the births of their children are a matter for them to decide with their own consciences, on the basis of competent medical advice, and in a sense of accountability to God. “6. So long as it causes no harm to those involved, either immediately or over an extended period, none of the methods for controlling the number and spacing of the births of children has any special moral merit or demerit. It is the spirit in which the means is used, rather than whether it is ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’, which defines its ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’. ‘What ever you do, do all to the glory of God’ (1 Cor 10:31) is a principle pertinent to the use of the God-given reproductive power."

"On the surface, Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists might seem unlikely bedfellows in opposing mandated coverage of contraceptives under Obamacare, but observers say it points to ongoing reconsideration of the morality of birth control among the Southern Baptist Convention’s leading thinkers. “Evangelical leaders are tripping over themselves in the rush to stand with Roman Catholic bishops against this perceived governmental overreach,” Jacob Lupfer, a doctoral candidate in political science at Georgetown University, said in a Religion News Service commentary in December. “At the same time, a growing number of white evangelical leaders are attempting to sow seeds of doubt about the morality of birth control itself.” Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., responded that on that point, Lupfer “understates his own case.” “A good many evangelicals hope to do far more than sow seeds of doubt about the morality of birth control,” Mohler replied. “Our concern is to raise an alarm about the entire edifice of modern sexual morality and to acknowledge that millions of evangelicals have unwittingly aided and abetted that moral revolution by an unreflective and unfaithful embrace of the contraceptive revolution.” In a 2012 column for the Christian Post, Mohler said most evangelical Protestants welcomed the development of artificial birth control as a medical advance just as they celebrated the discovery of penicillin. A shift occurred in the 1980s, with the rise of the Religious Right and opposition to abortion on demand."

"This proves that you [Manicheans] approve of having a wife, not for the procreation of children, but for the gratification of passion. In marriage, as the marriage law declares, the man and woman come together for the procreation of children. Therefore, whoever makes the procreation of children a greater sin than copulation, forbids marriage and makes the woman not a wife but a mistress, who for some gifts presented to her is joined to the man to gratify his passion."

"For necessary sexual intercourse for begetting [children] is alone worthy of marriage. But that which goes beyond this necessity no longer follows reason but lust. And yet it pertains to the character of marriage . . . to yield it to the partner lest by fornication the other sin damnably [through adultery].... [T]hey [must] not turn away from them the mercy of God . . . by changing the natural use into that which is against nature, which is more damnable when it is done in the case of husband or wife. For, whereas that natural use, when it pass beyond the compact of marriage, that is, beyond the necessity of begetting [children], is pardonable in the case of a wife, damnable in the case of a harlot; that which is against nature is execrable when done in the case of a harlot, but more execrable in the case of a wife. Of so great power is the ordinance of the Creator, and the order of creation, that . . . when the man shall wish to use a body part of the wife not allowed for this purpose [orally or anally consummated sex], the wife is more shameful, if she suffer it to take place in her own case, than if in the case of another woman."

"For thus the eternal law, that is, the will of God creator of all creatures, taking counsel for the conservation of natural order, not to serve lust, but to see to the preservation of the race, permits the delight of mortal flesh to be released from the control of reason in copulation only to propagate progeny."

"You [Manicheans] make your auditors adulterers of their wives when they take care lest the women with whom they copulate conceive. They take wives according to the laws of matrimony by tablets announcing that the marriage is contracted to procreate children; and then, fearing because of your [religious] law [against childbearing] . . . they copulate in a shameful union only to satisfy lust for their wives. They are unwilling to have children, on whose account alone marriages are made. How is it, then, that you are not those prohibiting marriage, as the apostle predicted of you so long ago [1 Tim. 4:1-4], when you try to take from marriage what marriage is? When this is taken away, husbands are shameful lovers, wives are harlots, bridal chambers are brothels, fathers-in-law are pimps."

"Intercourse even with one's legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked where the conception of the off-spring is prevented. Onan, the son of Judah, did this and the Lord killed him for it."

"There must be some leeway; the church operates across the world, including in totalitarian states where a fair criminal trial is unlikely for the accused. But some standards regarding inquiries and treatment of victims must surely be possible, as well as clear guidance on assessment of recruits to the priesthood. And the exit door for bishops needs to change. ... We Catholics deserve this. Especially the children the church failed to protect."

"The pope has been up against an intransigent church bureaucracy. Vatican officials have proved unwilling to cooperate with the commission; nor has it been furnished with enough resources. But above all, there has been cultural resistance within the church over abuse. The clerical caste is one shaped by obedience and a deep fear of sullying the reputation of the church. The relationship of bishop and priest is a paternal one; if the priest errs, the bishop may focus on forgiveness of the miscreant rather than punishment of an abuser, while his greatest focus is on avoiding publicity. But the church is now reaping what it sowed: like long-festering sores, the suppressed scandals are erupting everywhere."

"Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels went through all the standard Nazi gestures. He pointed, shook his fist, stretched his thin lips in a grim grin. He hurled his fiery oratory against the Swastika-festooned walls of Berlin's Deutschland Hall, and 20,000 loyal Nazis egged him on. Through Goebbels, the Reich last week pointed, grinned, and shook its fist at the Roman Catholic Church. The little Minister of Propaganda had taken the job of replying to the latest Catholic attack on Hitlerism — by George Cardinal Mundelein, Archbishop of Chicago (reported in News-Week, May 29). But Goebbels went beyond that issue to a defiant defense of the arrests of thousands of German priests and monks for so-called immorality and perversion. The Vatican received the most violent tongue-lashing ever uttered by a Nazi official: "Mundelein ... in the course of a public speech in which he insulted the Fuehrer . . . and referred to me as the crooked German Minister of Propaganda, said that these trials were staged only to harm the persecuted Catholic Church ... I speak in the name of thousands of German parents who think with fear and disgust that their own innocent children might some time be morally and physically corrupted in this way by unscrupulous seducers . . . This sex plague must and will be ruthlessly extirpated.""

"There is a recent photo of Pope Francis doing the rounds on social media that shows him walking alone, without security people or a private secretary, across a Vatican courtyard. In the early days of his pontificate, it would have been seen as Francis breaking through the stuffy conventions of the Vatican: being his own man. Five years on, it is instead viewed as symbolic of Francis’s loneliness. Here is a man struggling to find allies or support from the Catholic faithful in his stalled efforts to reform the church and failing attempts to tackle the abuse crisis."