faithandworks:
My intellect wants to know how the Church can differentiate the two.
I think this is a laudable goal, and I’m reminded of Luke 11:9: “Seek, and ye shall find.” If you are seriously interested in learning how the Church can differentiate between the two, start reading. Read all of Humanae Vitae. Read Theology of the Body, or a commentary and explanation of it, such as those by Christopher West. Read anything by Janet Smith on sexual ethics. We all have an obligation to callibrate our consciences correctly.
For my part, I liked my original analogies, but since you found them unconvincing, let me try for a third. This one is actually from Janet Smith (and was also briefly explicated by manualman above). I think it’s helpful for understanding how contraception is understood to be disordered by the Church, so it deserves another moment in the spotlight.
What purpose does eating serve? Really think about it for a second. Why do we eat? Why did God design us with a stomach and intestines and then give us urges to eat? It benefits us in some way. Eating is pleasurable, yes. But its primary purpose is not to give pleasure. Eating can be sociable, yes, as when friends gather around a table to eat and talk. But again, the purpose of eating is not so that we can make and sustain friendships. The purpose of eating, which we can deduce by using our intellect and observing the natural law, is to fuel and nourish our bodies. The calories in food keep us healthy and moving. In other words, calories are good, and absorbing calories is the natural end result of eating.
But consider how it is possible that there might be good reasons for a person not to want to absorb too many calories. Perhaps two people are trying to maintain their weight for health reasons. They still want to eat, though. Eating is primarily for fueling the body, but it is also pleasurable and sociable. So they face a choice. One of the dieters decides to eat a lot, just as she did before she was trying to lose weight. She eats a huge meatball sub loaded with cheese and downs it with a piece of cake. Then, realizing that she might gain weight, she runs into the bathroom and makes herself throw up. The second dieter also wants the meatball sub and the cake, but instead, she chooses a salad. She knows that the salad will not cause her to gain weight, so she eats it and leaves. Is there no moral difference between the decisions that the two dieters made? I see a big difference. The first woman tried to divorce the natural consequences of eating from her choice of food. Even in secular society, we call that disordered. We would rightly say that that woman has an eating disorder. The second woman, in choosing to do something in which she could accept the consequences, did not do anything disordered. She ate like she was supposed to. She ate less than she might have liked. But she didn’t violate natural law at all.
Similarly, when a couple has sex using contraception, they are engaging in an action and then “vomiting up” the natural consequence of the sexual act, because they worry about what will happen if they don’t. They are thwarting how God designed their bodies to be, because they don’t like the primary purpose of they activity that they are engaging in. On the contrast, non-contracepting couples don’t violate the purpose of sex at all. They simply diet or abstain from sex when they can’t accept the consequences of it. When they have sex during an infertile period, they, like the dieter who ate the salad, don’t worry about the end result, because God has not made pregnancy the end result of sex during an infertile period (just as he had not made weight gain the natural result of eating low-caloric foods like lettuce). I think it’s a shame that secular society can identify the woman who purges her food as having a disorder, but cannot recognize that the woman who purges her fertility is doing the same.
faithandworks:
Many tell me that NFP is easy, and I would have to agree – for normal, advanced first-world societies. Try NFP in the third-world, starving, overpopulated countries in Africa and it is a much different story. God does not want us to ignore the tools his people have devised to help make the world a better place.
I’ve actually worked with couples using natural family planning in the Philippines. It is a different cultural context, for sure, and some of the techniques that we use in the US are not appropriate in developing countries. For example, I probably would not suggest that a woman buy a $200 fertility monitor when she makes less than that in a year. But poor or uneducated people can use NFP just as easily as you or I could, and all women can be taught to recognize fertility signs. Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta was very successful in teaching a mucus method to poor Indian women. I suspect she was especially persuasive because she was also living a holy life and exercising self-discipline apprpriate to her state of life. The Standard Days Method, which utilizes a set of colored plastic beads (and thus eliminates the need for paper and pen charts) is over 95% effective for women with regular cycles. It was tested in Bolivia, Peru, and the Philippines, and is currently being used throughout Africa. There’s also a simple and inexpensive “beads system” that is being used in Haiti to help women keep track of mucus observations. In other words, the practice of natural family planning is different in developing countries, but it can be just as effective, and is much more sustainable than contraception. I agree that God does not what us to ignore the tools his people have devised to help make the world a better place. I would argue that the tools you are thinking of, namely condoms, do not achieve your desired end.
God bless.
