In the mid-Sixties, a pro-contraception argument that appealed to some ivory-tower theorists was called the Argument from the Totality of the Marriage. In fact, its theological proponents raised this as a principal argument in a Note attached to the report of the Papal Birth Control Commission as follows: “Not every act which proceeds from man is a complete human act. The subject of morality for St. Thomas is always the human act whose master is man (determined from a knowledge of the object or end). But this human act which has one moral specification can be composed of several particular acts if these partial acts do not have some object in itself already morally specified. And this is the case for matrimonial acts which are composed of several fertile and infertile acts; they constitute one totality because they are referred to one deliberate choice” (emphasis added).
(The wording about the human act means this: Eating a meal is a human act, but each time you automatically pick up a fork during that meal would be only a partial human act.)
Pope Paul specifically rejected this argument in the encyclical, Humanae Vitae. After a difficult, 83-word sentence, he concluded: “Consequently it is an error to think that a conjugal act which is deliberately made infecund and so is intrinsically dishonest could be made honest and right by the ensemble of a fecund conjugal life.” (n. 14)
A more blunt reply would have been this: Some people are asking us to believe them that the marriage act is not a complete human act. They are asking us to believe that each and every marriage act does not have a divinely given purpose. But they err. In each marriage act, the married couple are called to reaffirm their original marriage covenant. Just as each act of receiving Holy Communion is a complete human act, so each marital communion is a complete human act.
The value of an argument is frequently illustrated by substituting a different act while using the same logic. In this case, use adultery. The argument would then read that the combination of faithful and adulterous acts make up one totality, and the adulterous acts subsume their morality by the overall fidelity of the spouses. This line of rationalization would question why adultery is wrong. And indeed, one of the leaders of dissent later went on record as saying that the biblical norms were simply out of date.
The proponents of this argument also conveniently ignore the world’s interest and even obsession with sex—and with rationalizing every departure from the God-given norms. This illustrates that it is written large in the heart of man that God has a plan for human sexuality. Every effort to rationalize perversions of his plan highlights the underlying reality that sex ought to be exclusively a marriage act and that every marriage act has a divinely given purpose to renew their marriage covenant for better and for worse. And “worse” includes the “imagined worse” of possible pregnancy.
It is hard to believe that such rationalization could actually be taken seriously, but it illustrates how badly the birth control controversy has affected the thinking of otherwise rational people.
John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant