Thanks for all your help. Hopefully you can see your contributions to the final result. Here was my reply to my friend: (broken into several comments to fit the 6000 character limit)
— Part 1/8 —
I’m so glad that you’re wrestling through this issue thoughtfully, prayerfully and deliberately. It’s a shame that this grave matter is so often left by pastors and elders as a decision “between you, your spouse, and your doctor” – as if God didn’t have anything to say about marriage and family.
Below is a list of resources I’ve gathered over the last two years or so. It’s been a good exercise to clean up the list and refresh my knowledge of the issue. As you know, the topic of contraception was a concern for my wife and I far before our journey to the Catholic Church. We knew that “the Pill” was out for abortifacient reasons (as its own insert claim as a feature!), but that left plenty of other options that all seemed more or less the same. But after studying the matter, it became clear why the Church has always condemned contraception. Thankfully through prayer, reading the Scriptures, and studying, we’ve come agree with the more traditional perspective that keeps the unitive and procreative purposes in tact.
As a passionate pro-lifer it was very disconcerting along the way to learn of the close relationship between pro-abortion and pro-contraception movements. Both can trace their US tipping point to Margaret Sanger, a racist supremacist atheist with eugenic and arguably Nazi philosophies. She also founded Planned Parenthood and fought to overturn the Comstock laws (the Protestant-initiated federal laws that made shipping and consequently selling contraceptives – even just information about them – illegal). Sanger’s creeping victory of contraceptive culture has won many Protestant denominations along the way, including many who followed her logic all the way through to become pro-abortion. Sanger’s philosophies exemplify what happens when you take Swift’s Modest Proposal literally. After all, only rich, educated whites can afford children and as such they should be the only ones to procreate without contraception or abortion. Right? Perhaps that’s why Planned Parenthood clinics are more prevalent in minority neighborhoods.
But aside from all of the shady politics behind the culture change, there are two questions I believe get to the heart of the issue for a pro-contraceptive Christian:
1) If your church was to overturn one of their long-held moral doctrines, what would it take to convince them that the Holy Spirit was going in the opposite direction now?
2) What new revelation overturned 2000 years (arguably 6000) of consistent teaching on contraception in 1930? (1930 at least for the Anglicans. It wasn’t till the 1960s that the last Protestant hold-outs joined rank.)
Admittedly age or popularity doesn’t ensure orthodoxy but the proof for overturning scripture and tradition better be of epic proportion (especially in moral issues). So, was the culture change really due to the Holy Spirit or someone else? Did archeologists uncover more accurate Biblical texts that year that disqualified other teaching? Did an angel from heaven appear repealing God’s first ever command to man - “be fruitful and multiply” due to Malthusian threats of over-population? Did modern biblical scholarship crack the “Bible Code”? Or was it something more sinister?
I’m reminded of St. Irenaeus who wrote against second century heretics. Here he recounts his experience with arguing with them… “But, again, when we refer [the heretics] to that tradition which originates from the apostles, [and] which is preserved by means of the succession of presbyters in the Churches, they object to tradition, saying that they themselves are wiser not merely than the presbyters, but even than the apostles, because they have discovered the unadulterated truth. For [they maintain] that the apostles intermingled the things of the law with the words of the Saviour; . . . It comes to this, therefore, that these men do now consent neither to Scripture nor to tradition.”
One that fights against Scripture and tradition is left only to conclude that they are wiser than the Christians who went before them, and that their interpretation of the Scriptures is more accurate and unadulterated. But try that on for size. Try reading this aloud: “I am wiser than the Christians who went before me and my interpretation of the Scriptures is more accurate and unadulterated. Perhaps I am more in touch with the unadulterated teachings of the Holy Spirit than all the saints before me.” How did that feel? Somewhere along your spiritual lineage, at least on the issue of contraception, someone had to say that (probably between 1940-1970). Are you willing to follow in their footsteps? Can you say it with them?
And how is this different from the arguments for condoning homosexual behavior or abortion? Sure the Church has always taught that these are grave sin, but passionate people often make the same case about their better knowledge and interpretations of the Scriptures all the time. They claim that same statement of unadulterated orthodoxy in their interpretations of Scripture. In fact, as you’ll learn, there’s even a relationship between the pro-gay and the pro-contraception movement as gay-marriage groups (and pro-gay denominations) point out that if the marital act isn’t about procreation, then homosexual relationships should not be disqualified from marriage. These pro-gay advocates started arguing as early as the 1970’s that there is no moral difference between a married couple using contraception and homosexuals engaging in their forms of sterile sex.
Good luck!
Not engaging in sexual activity destroys sperm? Sperm inside a the body is not some sacred substance. NFP destroys nothing. It does promote self-control.