Natural Family Planning International

In the previous seven blogs, I showed that the so-called “arguments” that the Catholic Church should change its teaching to accept contraception are really not logical arguments at all.  They are simply smokescreens, lots of words, some of them quite seductive, expressing the lust driven wish that the Church shouldn’t stand in the way of maximum sexual pleasure within marriage, no matter how achieved.  The collateral effect, whether intended or not, has been the associated lust-driven wish that the Church and society shouldn’t stand in the way of maximum sexual pleasure for the unmarried as well.  That was the basis for the great Scandal that was revealed in 2002. 

In 1992 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey that abortion was too much a part of the American people’s social life and expectations to be stopped by law.  That decision says volumes about the grip the Sexual Revolution has upon our country with its disregard for honest marital love and its “need” for abortion to dispose of the human effects of sexual immorality. 

There is no shortage of bloggers, preachers, talk-show talkers, and writers who decry the current state of both the Church and the country.  Many of them agree that we need to overturn Roe v Wade and thus open the way to stop legalized abortion at least in some states.  Others say we need to have an anti-abortion amendment to the U. S. Constitution.  That would be wonderful, but it’s not going to happen tomorrow.  I think we need to look first at how we got to the present state and secondly at how to improve it.  You can see my account of that in two articles at this website.  The first deals with how we got here and the second deals with how to counter it.

I am keeping this blog short in the hopes that you will read the first of those two articles.  Thanks for reading this blog.

Next week: Where NFPI is as an organization and how you can help.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant

This is the last of seven blogs dealing with an email conversation between a Humanae Vitae dissenter and myself during July, 2009. 

In the middle-Sixties and up to the publication of Humanae Vitae, there was an effort to say that the Church could change its teaching about the immorality of contraceptive behaviors and explain it as a “development of doctrine.”  In the dissent movement led by a handful of dissenting priests and joined by hundreds more, there was an effort to say that Humanae Vitae was wrong because Pope Paul VI failed to understand the acceptance of contraception simply as a development of doctrine.  That is what’s behind my correspondent’s statement and my reply below.

Dissenter:  You think of the Church’s teaching as though it is a solid granite block, impermeable and unchangeable. On the contrary, it is more like a seed that grows, develops, sprouts, and is pruned by the forces of nature like any living plant. To get past this theological astigmatism, you need to study John Henry Newman on the development of doctrine.

I replied: 

Thank you for telling me how I think.  I too have read John Henry Cardinal Newman.  I suggest that you study his article “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.”  He wrote it in 1859 in The Rambler.  He used the example of the history of the Arian heresy after Nicea.  He noted that despite the confusion among bishops, some of whom were saints, the laity by and large remained faithful to what had been confirmed at Nicea.  That is, they held to the received teaching.  They rejected the innovators, the revisionists, and the heretical theologians.  And they suffered for their faith, as did Athanasius.  You can read more about this in my Sex and the Marriage Covenant.  In the post-Humanae Vitae debacle, it is once again the anawim who have helped to preserve the faith in the received teaching.  It may be noteworthy that most of the theological support, especially in the early years, came from the laity.  Dietrich von Hildebrand.  Germain Grisez.  Mary Joyce.  They were philosophers.  I may have been the only person in those very early years to write from a theological background [in support of Humanae Vitae].

That was the end of my reply to that point.  Clarification:  Anawim is a biblical term that stands for God’s little ones, those who are willing to believe rather than follow the false prophets.  The situation is very much the same today as after the Council of Nicea in 325.  Many of those who held to the Arian view before the Council also refused to accept the decision of Nicea—the profession of faith in the full divinity of Christ as homoousios, of One Being with the Father.  They became doctrinal heretics.  In the last 40 years, many of those who thought the Church could accept contraception also refused to accept the affirmation by Humanae Vitae—that contraceptive behaviors are intrinsically dishonest.  By such refusal they have become moral heretics. 

Today the original dissenters are growing old, dropping out of circulation, and dying off, just as are those who were the original defenders of Humanae Vitae.  Some think this means that the era of dissent is over, but I disagree.  The theological dissenters have occupied most of the centers of “Catholic” higher education in the West for 40 years.  Their students hold most of the teaching positions in nominally “Catholic” colleges, high schools and probably even grade schools.  The non-teaching of the fullness of Catholic doctrine and even the teaching of false doctrine continue almost unabated.  In my opinion, we face an uphill struggle for another 40 years to build a truly Catholic Church in this country, a Catholic people who will live and vote pro-chastity and pro-life, thus preserving the Church here and saving this country. 

Next week:  Humanae Vitae and authentic renewal in the Church

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant

This is the sixth of what will probably be a total of seven blogs dealing with an email conversation with a gentleman who dissents from the teaching reaffirmed by Humanae Vitae. 

My correspondent wrote:  I support natural birth control, just as I support the use of the pill, which I also consider natural.  God created man, and man created technology.  That’s natural.  The important thing is what works. 

Honest, I am not making this up.  I am quoting a man who has had at least some graduate education saying, “The important thing is what works.”  I replied as follows.

“With regard to your comments about technology and ‘the important thing is what works,’ please note that the ovens at Auschwitz worked.  The atomic bomb worked.  So does nerve gas.  The fact that something was invented by man and works says absolutely nothing about the morality of its use.”

Another version of the same argument seeks to place the blame on God.  “God gave us brains.  People using their brains figured out how to make the birth control Pill.  Therefore the Pill is good and we can use it for birth control.”  This sort of reasoning is so stupid that it is difficult to be patient with real live people who utter such things.  You don’t want to embarrass them, but you do have to point out that people use their God-given brains every day to figure out how to do evil things.  And some of these evildoers have great brainpower.  I’m thinking of white collar crime.  I’m thinking of how hackers can do what they do.  Just this morning I read about some high-tech crooks who got into the computer accounting systems of three big retailers.  Brilliant but wrong.  The prisons are full of people who used their God-given brains to do evil. 

We really do need the Commandments and the Magisterium to interpret them in the light of today to protect us from ourselves and to help keep us from doing harm to each other. 

Next week: Humanae Vitae dissent and Cardinal Newman’s development of doctrine

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant