The current debate over health insurance and contraception has raised interesting questions for people of faith, particularly Catholics. I’m past menopause, and so contraception is not an issue for me. Yet I’m interested in it—in the same way I remain interested in pregnancy or childbirth. Avoiding or embracing pregnancy is the stuff of real life—the vivid centerpiece of youth and middle age. As a woman, a mother, and a Catholic, I’m part of it. I remember the drama, the excitement, the fear. Pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding are intense experiences. For the sustained nature of the physical bond, nothing compares. But it begins with sex, and sex is never simple.
And so it is unsettling when men who may never have experienced sex feel qualified not just to speak about it but to pronounce on it with certainty. In an article in the New York Times (February 18), Fr. Roger Landry, a priest in my old diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, is quoted as saying, “What happens in the use of contraception, rather than embracing us totally as God made the other, with the masculine capacity to become a dad, or the feminine capacity to become a mom, we reject that paternal and maternal leaning.”
Well, no, Fr. Landry, we don’t. We don’t reject it. We make a decision about it. We recognize that pregnancy is a possibility, and we decide whether this is the right time for us to have a baby. We acknowledge that we are more than just potential (or actual) parents. One of the surest signs of youth—in any profession—is an unswerving adherence to literal interpretations. New teachers cling to the curriculum, whether or not the class is getting it. Young doctors focus on the clear x-ray, unable to see the patient in front of them writhing in pain. Parish priests preach the letter of the law, while their parishioners refuse to follow rules created without reference to the reality they know. But the rules aren’t just unrealistic. They are often irrelevant, based on incorrect or incomplete information.
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Fr. Landry goes on to say, “Contraception…make[s] pleasure the point of the act, and any time pleasure becomes the point rather than the fruit of the act, the other person becomes the means to that end. And we’re actually going to hurt the people we love.” At one level, this is insightful and nuanced. When he laments how frequently such objectification happens to women in sexual relationships, Fr. Landry sounds almost feminist. And he is right that a relationship that’s only about the pursuit of pleasure is demeaning and ultimately hurtful.
He is wrong, though, to assume that using contraception automatically makes “pleasure the point of the act.” This is how adolescents think. Teenagers dream of constantly available sex, uninhibited by any possibility of pregnancy. That priests would talk the same way about sex between a husband and wife who have chosen to use contraception reflects inexperience and adolescent projection.
Adults understand that good sex, with or without contraception, goes deeper than pleasure. It is complex and demanding. And pleasure isn’t necessarily a part of it. Any human encounter requiring honesty and surrender has the potential for both revelation and pain. The communication, healing, and strengthening that good sex ensures is foundational to a marriage. Pure pleasure the point of the act? What is Fr. Landry talking about?
Distrust of pleasure is one hallmark of the church’s teaching about sex. This is odd because, as Catholics, we also believe that “eye has not seen nor ear heard the wonders God has prepared for those who love Him.” But that aside, what is the church’s antidote to the dread prospect of people having too much fun in bed? Children.
The thing is, children are also a deep source of pleasure, joy, and fun. The bishops, while recognizing this truth, nonetheless focus on babies as natural results of the biological act, as consequences and responsibilities—not as persons who are sought after and gladly welcomed. (Indeed, people who seek too vigorously to have children are also criticized as trying to play God, to control what should be divinely ordained.)
I understand what is behind the bishops’ anxiety over designer parenthood—the demand for too much control over what kind of children we have. And I agree that sexual license is a serious threat to happiness, order, and the good of the human community.
But every human activity has the potential to become unbalanced. Having children mindlessly, year after year, as former generations of Catholics did, is just as harmful to the social good as the refusal to connect sex with pregnancy. Visit India, Fr. Landry. Talk with the women here who are treated purely as producers of sons.
To defend contraception within marriage is not to defend sexual license. Married couples who have pledged a lifetime of commitment to each other and their families have the right and the duty to make their own decisions about contraception. The church’s role is to help them arrive at the decision that is right for their lives. It is not to dictate one-size-fits-all rules that have no foundation in practical experience.
The church has made a spectacle of itself by promoting an immature version of sexuality that is missing the sinew of lived experience. It used to frighten people into submission. Now it simply makes them smile a little sadly. I’m a prolife Catholic who practiced only Natural Family Planning. But I’m smiling, too. Because I’m sad for my church.
implying that men and women are nothing but unthinking animals -- baby factories. jbruns
If humans are made in the image and likeness of God then nothing could be further from the truth.
Carolyn Disco, Thanks for elaborating.
Janet, as I agree with Jo McGowan's entry, I think I may have chosen a poor place to make the point that celibacy does not make one a stonehearted blockhead. I've heard stories of people explaining clearly, forcefully, agonizingly to priests where the condemnation of contraception leaves them. That no priest could learn anything there is contradicted by my own experience with what I'll call Vatican-II era priests. My experience with what I'll call JP2-era priests is extremely limited, but I fear it would be less happy, given the centralizing and authoritarian trends.
For the young who were not around in the 60s and want to know about some background noises about the BC controversy after Vat II, the Crowleys of Chicago and the Christian Family Movement leaders who were on the Papal commission, voted on the majority side of the BC Papal commission The majority side was rejected by Pope Paul VI. Our San Francisco parish pastor was so upset by the Crowleys' vote he chased CFM out of the parish by declaring at a homily that "as far as he was concerned CFM stood for Communist Front Movement" And these were the good ole days!
Beverly Balley:
The definition of contraception is "any voluntary human physical act that is performed before, during, or after marital sexual intercourse, that prevents such acts, foreseen to have procreative consequences, from having those consequences, and is a decision done for that reason."
The problem is that there is little difference between NFP-PC and Contraception, as follows:
Abstaining from marital sexual intercourse, at times foreseen to have procreative consequences, and the plotting of temperature and examination of cervical mucus to determine when sexual intercourse will be infertile are deliberately chosen, physical acts that result in rendering procreation impossible during sexual intercourse.
Contraception and PC are both programs of controlling fertility in order to avoid potentially fertile intercourse, and both are reliant upon activities that take place before marital intercourse. Thus, it is very difficult for the average person to see any difference between them.
Either both NFP-PC and Contraception violate Humanae Vitae or they do not.
There is also the Church argument that NFP-PC treats the person and his/her fertility as subject; while contraception treats the person and his/her fertility as an object to be manipulated. It is hard to imagine how PC , with physical acts such as the plotting of temperature and cervial mucus is not itself a form of manipulation.
Finally, one last reflection. The good reasons that Pius XII said spouses could use for avoiding procreation are the same reasons most couples have who practice PC and contraception. However, when it comes to birth regulation, NFP-PC is the only licit method based on the Church's claim that this is God's procreative plan. However, NFP-PC was only determined to be morally licit in 1951. If this was truly God's procreative plan, why did he wait thousands of years to tell us?
If Bishops paid as much attention to the real problems in the church like the abuse of power and the abuse of children as they do to preaching about sex, they might do a lot more good for the church and the people.
This is the best article on the subject of contraception I've ever read.
Sevral years ago I saw a survey conducted by Reginald Bibby (he teaches at the University of Lethbridge and specialises in surveys on religious topics) among those who consider, for reasons of faith, that procreation is the primary or sole purpose of having sex. He discovered that they had sex with the intention of conception on fewer than 5% of occasions. That is, 19 times out of 20, they had sex with some other intention. We have to be grateful, of course, that, whatever their other intention(s), it wasn't procreation, or the world would be vastly more overpopulated than it is.
Bruce, Exactly the point. And that is why we, as thinking human beings, should apply our intelligence in all our activities, including conception. Why would God expect us to exercise dominion over nature, except in this one instance?
Michael Barberi:
abstaining from and act is not an act.
In general, I can only offer my personal experience as a married man. I have been married almost 17 years, we only used NFP, we had the number of children we wanted, we never had any problem, we are very happy. Tell me again what's the big deal about Humanae Vitae?
Carlo: Easy peezy. God is perfection. We are not God. That we strive to be pleasing in God's eyes makes sense. At any moment to assume "pleasing" is synomous or even close to perfection does not make sense. It quite simply is not possible. To suggest guilt is at times appropriate even useful in moderation is defensible. To suggest we mere mortals parcel out damnation is ludicrous. Again, we are not God. Perhaps you heard the rumors. Mother Teresa had moments of profound doubt but not on the issue of her own intimate involvement with reproduction. She chose to marry far outside what I believe I can reasonably say is for most not an option. Just too challenging. Wise or not, for her questions specific to reproduction were never to be among the amazing challenges she faced so well. Short of all women following that remarkable women in her choice and short of demanding perfection, how exactly do we deal with this issue?
JOH: I understand and certainly I agree: there are many priests who can/do learn from others and are changed by those experiences. Of course. But priests like Roger (and I have had the great misfortune of encountering several of them in amazingly contentious situations) are not the ones of whom we speak. Could they develop the humility necessary to listen and learn from others who do know better than they about different areas of human/Christian life? Of course. But if the general tenor of their formation is that they already know everything and only need spout the ready-made formulae (no matter how defective), why would it ever occur to them that they might have something new to learn? Remember: this is a guy who openly preached that the ordained are transubstantiated. My, my! What COULD such an exalted being learn from those so far beneath him? Folks here might see this as unrelated to the contrqception issue, but I do not. This is the new "vanguard" of priests. It's what JPII wanted. The church is all the worse for it. Pick any topic at all; choose any difficult issue that burdens and vexes God's people and shames the Church's witness; the response will be the same: simply a new version of pray, pay and obey. It is miserable.