From a letter I sent to a Synod Father: I remain confident that the Holy Spirit will lead the Synod to reaffirm the Church’s traditional teaching about love, marriage, and sexuality. The fact that these teachings are sometimes very difficult to follow is not a reason for rejection or weakening but rather for clarity about the demands of love and the affirmation of the daily cross as an essential part of the Gospel and daily discipleship.
The difficulty of these teachings is also a reason to make a serious effort to lift the burden (v. Lk 11:46). My concern has to do with the practical ways that are needed to help couples believe the teachings of the Church, understand them better, and live them.
The inherent difficulty of sexual self-control is made more difficult by the anti-Christian milieu in a culture that has accepted the Sexual Revolution—even sometimes right within the Church. Sexual weakness has been with us from the opening books of the Bible; what is revolutionary is the acceptance by Christians of behaviors called evil by both Scripture and Tradition. This started “officially” with the Anglican acceptance of marital contraception at Lambeth in August, 1930. It is noteworthy that “conservative” Anglican bishops warned that the acceptance of marital contraception would lead to the acceptance of sodomy. History has shown that they were correct.
The same thing has happened within our Catholic Church. Despite the words of Humanae Vitae, the negative leadership of some prominent clergy in favor of marital contraception has led the majority of married Catholics, at least in the West, to practice unnatural forms of birth control. Further, since couples using unnatural forms of birth control seek to make their sexual acts just as sterile as sodomy (and, indeed, some engage in marital sodomy—the same anatomical acts as homosexuals doing sodomy), many have accepted homosexual sodomy, and many have also accepted the idea of sodomy as “marriage.”
There is a crisis within the Church due to the dissent from Humanae Vitae. The current crisis is about the meaning of sexuality. Does it have a God-given intrinsic meaning? Is sexual intercourse intended by God to be exclusively a marriage act between heterosexual spouses? Within marriage, can the unitive and procreative aspects created by God be taken apart? Does the indissolubility of marriage itself, “What God has put together, let no one take apart,” apply also to the marriage act?” In my opinion, these are the issues that need to be addressed and clarified. Please forgive me for stating the obvious, but sometimes the obvious becomes obscured in the heat of controversy.
John F. Kippley
PS: ZIKA Babies: Due to the many health benefits to babies, mothers with Zika babies should be exclusively breastfeeding their babies and continue to breastfeed for at least a year. Breast milk is the best brain food during the first year of life.