Natural Family Planning International

The importance of Humanae Vitae section 14 cannot be overstated.  First, here’s the text from the Vatican website:

“14. Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. (14) Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. (15)

“Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. (16)

“Neither is it valid to argue, as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one, or that such intercourse would merge with procreative acts of past and future to form a single entity, and so be qualified by exactly the same moral goodness as these. 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 (18)—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. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.”

The Latin for those last two words is intrinsece inhonestum,

Here’s the context:  The pro-contraceptive party had presented the Pope with a big-picture morality that is referred to in the first boldfaced phrase above.  They argued that the contraceptive acts took their morality from the non-contraceptive acts in the marriage.  It is still difficult for me to understand how Father Jozef Fuchs, S.J. and the others could put forth such an argument.  It seems to me that anyone with common sense could see that on that principle almost anything could be “justified” by the big-picture.  The traveling spouse tempted to adultery could “justify” it by saying the non-marital act would take its morality from the spouses’ mutual fidelity when neither one of them was traveling.  Why wasn’t this pointed out by the dissenters?  Surely they were not stupid.  Their subsequent writings make it clear that they DID know what they were doing.  Some are now dead; I hope they repented.

There is absolutely no way in which St. Pope Paul VI could have accepted their argument.  So in the second boldfaced text, he affirmed the basic moral principle that it is never right to do wrong even for a good purpose.  The end does not justify the means.  Thus he reaffirmed what he had previously taught in sections 11, 12, and 13.

In the third boldfaced text, he clearly teaches that each and every contraceptive act is intrinsically dishonest, as the earlier official text translated intrinsece inhonestum. The word “dishonest” implies that there must be an intrinsically honest marriage act, and there is.  That occurs when the spouses engage in the marriage act that is at least implicitly a renewal of their marriage covenant, an act that implicitly reaffirms the faith and love and for-better-and-for-worse commitment they pledged when they married—including the sometimes imagined “worse” of possible pregnancy.  “Implicitly” means that the spouses do not have to be thinking explicitly in these terms, good as that might be.  What is required is that they not be contradicting the divinely built-in meaning of the marriage act.

Tomorrow: a close look at Humanae Vitae 17 and sodomy

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant

Text from the Vatican.va translation:

13. Men rightly observe that a conjugal act imposed on one’s partner without regard to his or her condition or personal and reasonable wishes in the matter, is no true act of love, and therefore offends the moral order in its particular application to the intimate relationship of husband and wife. If they further reflect, they must also recognize that an act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life. Hence to use this divine gift while depriving it, even if only partially, of its meaning and purpose, is equally repugnant to the nature of man and of woman, and is consequently in opposition to the plan of God and His holy will. But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source. “Human life is sacred—all men must recognize that fact,” Our predecessor Pope John XXIII recalled. “From its very inception it reveals the creating hand of God” (13).

In section 13, St. Paul VI  makes two appeals to a common moral sense.  First he points to a common recognition, at least among Christians, that marital rape and other imposed sexual acts are not true acts of love.  That is, the marriage act is not automatically a good thing.  There are conditions.  The marriage act ought to be a true marriage act, one which reflects the love and commitment of their marriage covenant.  If someone admits that there are conditions for moral goodness, they cannot rule out the condition of the act being open to the transmission of life.

The second appeal builds on the first.  Once we recognize that there are conditions for the marriage act to be morally good, we ought to recognize that these conditions come from our Creator and that we are called to respect His order of creation.  Our bodies are not our own playthings; we are called to be stewards of creation, and that includes our sexual powers.

The famous statement of St. Augustine when his conscience finally forced him to admit that he was not his own god certainly applies here:  “You have made us for Yourself alone, O Lord, and our heart is restless till it finds it rest in you.”

The recognition that we should be looking for and following God’s plan runs against the spirit of secularism that has been so strong in Western culture for the last 60 years.  Thus it is all the more important for parents and educators to teach the basic lessons of being a creature of God and being a disciple of the Lord Jesus.

Tomorrow: a close look at Humanae Vitae, section 14.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant

I want to draw attention to two points in section 11 of Humanae Vitae, so here’s the text from the Vatican.va website.  The translation is slightly different from the one published in 1968.

11. The sexual activity, in which husband and wife are intimately and chastely united with one another, through which human life is transmitted, is, as the recent Council recalled, “noble and worthy.” (11) It does not, moreover, cease to be legitimate even when, for reasons independent of their will, it is foreseen to be infertile. For its natural adaptation to the expression and strengthening of the union of husband and wife is not thereby suppressed. The fact is, as experience shows, that new life is not the result of each and every act of sexual intercourse. God has wisely ordered laws of nature and the incidence of fertility in such a way that successive births are already naturally spaced through the inherent operation of these laws. The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life. (12) (Boldface added.)

The first boldfaced sentence clearly refers to the basis of Natural Family Planning.  This natural spacing has two forms.  Readers of this blogsite may be inclined to think first of systematic natural family planning which is based on knowledge of the fertile time of individual cycles.  True enough.  But there is also another natural cycle and spacing—that of Ecological Breastfeeding which is an effort to replicate the pattern of baby care that spaced babies in past centuries but which was lost in the first half of the 20^th century.

The key words in the second boldfaced are each and every marital act. 

As we will see in Section 14, the pro-contraception party wanted the Pope to accept a big-picture morality in which contraceptive acts would take their morality from the non-contraceptive act.  More on that in the next blog in this weeklong series.  The “each and every” terminology is part of his response to that argument.

Tomorrow: a close look at Humanae Vitae, section #13.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant