contraception/ links/ etc

http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/07/contraception/

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html


Concerning the top link, Bryan made a comment at 185

November 24th, 2013 10:57 am :
Paul Levy, a pastor in the “International Presbyterian Church,” writes,

Sex within marriage is God’s answer to [sexual] immorality, and so Christians need to work really hard at having good sex lives.

That reminds me of Kant’s notion that we have a duty to pursue happiness, so as to avoid the temptations to violate our duty under unhappy conditions. Contrast the Reformed notion of sex within marriage as the solution to sexual immortality, with the Catholic position. According to the Catholic position, the virtue of chastity, both within marriage and outside of marriage, strengthened by discipline, prayer and the sacraments, is God’s answer to sexual immorality. The Reformed position (as described by Levy) makes single people intrinsically unequipped to avoid falling into sexual immorality. Problems with pornography? Well, he isn’t married, and thus doesn’t have access to the essential antidote to sexual immorality. Hook-up lifestyle? Again, he’s not married, and thus doesn’t have God’s solution to sexual immorality. Date-rape? He just needs to get married. This position reduces the sexual act within marriage to a necessary means for resisting sexual temptation. But it also entails that the lack thereof (or the lack of some variation/permutation of sexual expression between married persons) is the convenient excuse when one fails to resist sexual temptation, both when unmarried, and when married. There is a sense in which what Levy says doesn’t accurately represent what Reformed leaders (Levy included) would say to single people, because they would urge unmarried persons to obey the divine law, and avoid fornication, through “Bible study, accountability groups, prayer, and attentiveness to solid preaching.” (See “Habitual Sin and the Grace of the Sacraments.”) But at the same time, what Levy says isn’t merely a slip of the Reformed tongue. The notion that sex-within-marriage is the solution to sexual immorality is a widely held position among Reformed persons. It treats gratifying and appeasing the sexual appetite as the solution, whereas the Catholic doctrine teaches that training and mastering the sexual appetite is the solution.

{I needed a bit more info so I asked him:

Could you explain the relationship of what you have stated with I Cor 7. This passage popped into my mind as I read your comment. It sounds like it is one factor in resisting temptation [not the only one, for sure]…..but I am not sure I am understanding things correctly. Here is the passage:

“It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. 3 The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5 Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

HE answered in comment 187:


In the Catholic understanding, the quieting of concupiscence is a secondary effect of marriage, and a secondary effect of the marital act within marriage. It is not the purpose of marriage, nor the purpose of the marital act. Rather it is one of the ways in which couples help each other, though necessarily only subordinate to higher ends, as Pope Pius XI teaches:

For in matrimony as well as in the use of the matrimonial rights there are also secondary ends, such as mutual aid, the cultivating of mutual love, and the quieting of concupiscence which husband and wife are not forbidden to consider so long as they are subordinated to the primary end and so long as the intrinsic nature of the act is preserved. (Casti Connubii, 59)