The “normal” understanding is that food should be enjoyed for its taste and also utilized for nutritional / health purposes. My favorite example of this is taste buds and nutrition, in conjunction with eating. Human beings instinctively believe that certain things are unnatural and shouldn't be separated. We can better understand the Catholic prohibition of all forms of non-procreative sexuality by making an analogy to other organs and functions of the human body. I'd like to suggest one way that we can defend this viewpoint from natural law, in an entirely non-religious, non-biblical way. He could see the bad things on the horizon because he understood why contraception was wrong in the first place, and hence, would produce terrible fruits. Ideas and behaviors indeed have consequences. But it does insist on sufficiently serious reasons for not having more children.īlessed Pope Paul VI, in his landmark 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, predicted several dire consequences for society and individuals, should contraception be widely practiced. It acknowledges that a couple can plan sensibly regarding number of children and when to have them. Nor does the Church teach that every couple must have a dozen children. The difference is that the practicing Catholic abstains from sexuality during the woman’s fertile periods, if they have legitimate reasons not to conceive a child. This is what Natural Family Planning is about. The Church teaches that a couple can space births and decide to postpone children or have no more children, for appropriately serious reasons of health, emotional factors and finances. Sexual acts engaged in apart from this circumstance are wrong and sinful.Ĭontraception (deliberately thwarting a possible conception and engaging in sexuality under those circumstances) is wrong because it has an essentially “contralife will”: it insists on separating what ought not be separated (sexuality from possible conception, or being “open” to conception). In minimally graphic language, the Catholic view is that complete sexual fulfillment (including pleasure, which is not forbidden!) must occur in the act of love with one’s spouse of the opposite sex: that one is committed to for life, and that the couple must be open to life and possible conception. He described our relationship to Him as like a marriage. That’s how it's too often construed, because its nature or rationale isn't properly comprehended. To the extent that they do not follow the guidelines, the opposite will be the result.Ĭatholic sexuality is not anti-woman, anti-pleasure, anti-homosexual (persons), anti-natural desire. We believe that when people follow the design that God has for sexuality, that they are the happiest, and that families and society prosper and flourish as a result (and indeed, this is sociologically demonstrable). Whatever is prohibited by Him is meant to foster this fulfillment, not to make people miserable and “incomplete”, etc. He created it for the deep fulfillment of human beings. Within its proper sphere, marriage between a man and a woman, he also established that spouses should experience pleasure and enjoyment. God created sex for this purpose, and for unity. The Catholic Church teaches that it is a grave sin to deliberately separate sexuality from procreation, because the latter is its most essential purpose. Likewise, secularists and atheists and agnostics who ultimately don’t care what the Bible teaches, because they deny that it is revelation, and believe various myths about its nature and origins, want to hear non-biblical, non-religious secular, purely logical rationales for why we believe that certain sexual activities are wrong. Moreover, having never been taught, many do not even dimly understand the distinctive Catholic teachings on sex, such as the prohibition of contraception. They have no clue why certain things are prohibited, and other things required. Many Christians - who are fully willing to abide by what the Bible teaches - do not understand why the Bible teaches what it does about sex, even if they accept that it teaches certain things that have been normative in Christian cultures, to more-or-less degrees. Catholics believe that sexuality has a fundamental purpose, decreed by God: procreation.
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