Despite Catholic teachings, women religiously take the pill

[the_phoenix]

Have you seen some literature that claims that the use of contraceptives leads to divorce, infidelity, and fornication/adultery???

Yep. Try reading the papal encyclical called “Humanae Vitae” written by Pope Paul VI.

papalencyclicals.net/Paul06/p6humana.htm

A summary of Humanae Vitae addressing your question can also be seen at EWTN.

ewtn.com/library/PROLIFE/PPAULPRO.TXT

Thanks for asking your question, Rich, and thus providing me a springboard from which to share information straight from the Magisterium of the Catholic Church with anyone on CAF who takes an interest in this thread discussion.

 

[JimG]

Dr. Janet Smith’s response:

catholicnewsagency.com/news/dr.-janet-smith-blasts-afp-for-stupid-contraception-article/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+catholicnewsagency/dailynews+(CNA+Daily+News

Dr. Smith makes some interesting points. The widespread acceptance and use of contraception has been a disaster for society.

Smith noted that “more than one out of three babies in the United States are born to a single mother, one out of four pregnancies are aborted,” and that “more than one out of two marriages end in divorce. . . . If people were living by the Church’s teaching on sexuality, those things wouldn’t be happening, and those things are a path to misery,” she underscored.

 

[buffalo]

In addition the World Health Organization lists the pill as a carcinogen.

 

[AnimalGal]

This is a well known fact among Catholic couples. Priests don’t discuss this silent secret, because they know women/couples will turn a deaf ear.

I know many Catholic women who had 2 or 3 kids and decided that was enough. They had their tubes tied with no regret. Two of these women teach in Catholic schools. They did it well over 20 years ago. It wasn’t talked about then, and definitely not now.

I have seven siblings and understand the “large family”. But it was different in my parents day. My mother “did not have to work”. But for health reasons, she did use the pill prior to having a hysterectomy.

Personally, I would never have eight kids. Two would be enough. I would be one of those women using the pill or some other (silent) form of birth control. And I would be using it religiously.

 

[edwest2]

I thank God for Janet Smith and for God’s people on Catholic Radio saying the same thing.

I did not find the title of this thread funny at all. The root of our current problems stem from a misuse of human sexuality.

Let’s look at how things began:

Vatican II is over and a small group of radicals decided to do things Vatican II never authorized. It has become a scapegoat.

In 1960, the FDA approved The Pill for sale.

By 1968, when Pope Paul VI had Humanae Vitae published, he warned people, We know The Pill will tempt you to to regard the love of your life less. And if his warning was not heeded, there would be an increase in promiscuity. Well, the companies that made The Pill certainly could not afford to lose sales from women listening to the Pope.

So, what happened? Some radicals inside the Church ran a full page ad in the New York Times writing against clear Church teaching! A priest posted here some months ago about a meeting he attended where he was asked to sign a letter against Humanae Vitae by another priest. He refused.

Send in the Hippies. Free love! Sex with anybody. Who needs marriage? Don’t trust anybody over 30! Mom, dad, priests, nuns, don’t listen to them.

Hollywood put out Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice, a movie about wife swapping, in 1969.

By the 1970s, Adult Bookstores selling images of prostitutes appeared everywhere, along with topless go-go bars. Everything and Anything Had To Be Done To GET MEN to think of women as sex objects. To publish SWINGER magazines to tempt men to infidelity or fornication. This was a By Any Means Necessary Attack on the family.

Seminaries were telling priests in training that using ABC was up to each person. That, thank God, has changed.

Throw in Abortion, and the right to dispose of a child, and things continued downhill from there. And the media was complicit in all of this. By the 1980s, when No-Fault Divorce was everywhere, they started putting out movies where a guy walks into a bar, announces his divorce, and his buddies encourage him – Oh, you’ll find someone better.

Too many women today, have fallen for the lie that they should allow men to treat them like sex objects before marriage. That is a big mistake. One in five people in this country are walking around with an STD. This is better?

Catholic teaching was not designed to take away your fun. True love is worth having but it will not happen whenever people substitute real love and real intimacy with ‘just sex.’

God bless,
Ed

 

[buffalo]

This is a well known fact among Catholic couples. Priests don’t discuss this silent secret, because they know women/couples will turn a deaf ear.

I know many Catholic women who had 2 or 3 kids and decided that was enough. They had their tubes tied with no regret. Two of these women teach in Catholic schools. They did it well over 20 years ago. It wasn’t talked about then, and definitely not now.

I have seven siblings and understand the “large family”. But it was different in my parents day. My mother “did not have to work”. But for health reasons, she did use the pill prior to having a hysterectomy.

Personally, I would never have eight kids. Two would be enough. I would be one of those women using the pill or some other (silent) form of birth control. And I would be using it religiously.

So by definition you are not open to life and consider your fertility an inconvenience rather than a gift?

 

[gnjsdad]

I thank God for Janet Smith and for God’s people on Catholic Radio saying the same thing.

I did not find the title of this thread funny at all. The root of our current problems stem from a misuse of human sexuality.

Let’s look at how things began:

Vatican II is over and a small group of radicals decided to do things Vatican II never authorized. It has become a scapegoat.

In 1960, the FDA approved The Pill for sale.

By 1968, when Pope Paul VI had Humanae Vitae published, he warned people, We know The Pill will tempt you to to regard the love of your life less. And if his warning was not heeded, there would be an increase in promiscuity. Well, the companies that made The Pill certainly could not afford to lose sales from women listening to the Pope.

So, what happened? Some radicals inside the Church ran a full page ad in the New York Times writing against clear Church teaching! A priest posted here some months ago about a meeting he attended where he was asked to sign a letter against Humanae Vitae by another priest. He refused.

Send in the Hippies. Free love! Sex with anybody. Who needs marriage? Don’t trust anybody over 30! Mom, dad, priests, nuns, don’t listen to them.

Hollywood put out Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice, a movie about wife swapping, in 1969.

By the 1970s, Adult Bookstores selling images of prostitutes appeared everywhere, along with topless go-go bars. Everything and Anything Had To Be Done To GET MEN to think of women as sex objects. To publish SWINGER magazines to tempt men to infidelity or fornication. This was a By Any Means Necessary Attack on the family.

Seminaries were telling priests in training that using ABC was up to each person. That, thank God, has changed.

Throw in Abortion, and the right to dispose of a child, and things continued downhill from there. And the media was complicit in all of this. By the 1980s, when No-Fault Divorce was everywhere, they started putting out movies where a guy walks into a bar, announces his divorce, and his buddies encourage him – Oh, you’ll find someone better.

Too many women today, have fallen for the lie that they should allow men to treat them like sex objects before marriage. That is a big mistake. One in five people in this country are walking around with an STD. This is better?

Catholic teaching was not designed to take away your fun. True love is worth having but it will not happen whenever people substitute real love and real intimacy with ‘just sex.’

God bless,
Ed

A pretty good synopsis.

I would add that at the time the pill was introduced through the efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation, the WASP establishment, which was much stronger then than it is now, had long regarded Catholic fertility as a threat to its national hegemony. It had earlier experimented with eugenics, but when eugenics became associated with Nazism, the foundations realized another weapon against Catholic fertility, a weapon more palatable to the public and which could be marketed as an instrument of “freedom”, was needed. Hence, after the war, the Rockefellers launched a veritable Manhattan Project to develop the pill.

Unfortunately, the prominent Catholic academics and clerics who should have led the fight against the pill, became some of its most effective promoters. Example #1 is Father Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, who held a conference of Catholic academics on contraception secretly sponsored by the Rockefellers on the campus of Notre Dame. Father “Land O’ Lakes Statement on Academic Freedom” Hesburgh, who in the name of academic freedom, told the Church it had no business telling Notre Dame what it could and could not teach, docilely agreed to every stipulation made by the Rockefellers as to what could be discussed at his “Catholic” conference.

Father Hesburgh wound up on the Board of Directors of the Rockefeller Foundation. As it says in the Bible, he has his reward.

All of the sordid details can be found in Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation as Political Control by E. Michael Jones.

 

[JimG]

A pretty good synopsis.

I would add that at the time the pill was introduced through the efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation, the WASP establishment, which was much stronger then than it is now, had long regarded Catholic fertility as a threat to its national hegemony. It had earlier experimented with eugenics, but when eugenics became associated with Nazism, the foundations realized another weapon against Catholic fertility, a weapon more palatable to the public and which could be marketed as an instrument of “freedom”, was needed. Hence, after the war, the Rockefellers launched a veritable Manhattan Project to develop the pill.

Unfortunately, the prominent Catholic academics and clerics who should have led the fight against the pill, became some of its most effective promoters. Example #1 is Father Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, who held a conference of Catholic academics on contraception secretly sponsored by the Rockefellers on the campus of Notre Dame. Father “Land O’ Lakes Statement on Academic Freedom” Hesburgh, who in the name of academic freedom, told the Church it had no business telling Notre Dame what it could and could not teach, docilely agreed to every stipulation made by the Rockefellers as to what could be discussed at his “Catholic” conference.

Father Hesburgh wound up on the Board of Directors of the Rockefeller Foundation. As it says in the Bible, he has his reward.

All of the sordid details can be found in Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation as Political Control by E. Michael Jones.

The “Land O’ Lakes” statement is still being used by some universities as an excuse for hiring dissenting theologians and not following “Ex Corde Ecclesiae.”

 

[manualman]

Rich, I think you were matching my sarcasm with your own, but tone is hard to read on the web. For the record, we do not agree.

Does contraception guarantee other forms of sexual immorality? No. Does refraining from contraception guarantee a healthy married sexuality? No.

But contraception DOES by its very nature tend to objectify sex into a selfish gratification instead of a mutual self giving. It is a push in that direction and a severence from a crucial check and balance that God, in His wisdom, installed within sexuality to reduce the potential for perversion.

NFP itself does nothing terribly much to improve the marriage. Having practised it for most of my 10 years of marriage I can say that it serves like a canary in a mineshaft as an early warning system. If have sexually objectified your spouse, you will find NFP intolerable to live with. The abstinance is excruciating and drives you to fits of frustration and near rage. If your sexual relationship is one of mutual self giving then over time, the 1/3 to 1/2 of the month that is lost to period and fertility just motivates you to use well the other 1/2 to 2/3 of the month.

Perhaps just as important, with NFP you monthly confront your allegedly serious reason to avoid more children. Amazing how that exposes rationalizations that seemed so solid when there is no price to be paid…

Church teaching on sexuality is so counter-cultural that it almost cannot be grasped via reason from the outside. Only when you start to perceive the damage done by our sexually objectified culture and choose to give God’s plan a genuine chance does the wisdom begin to shine out of it. I understand why people reject catholic sexuality, but I don’t think most catholics quite understand it. In the end, they are trusting their own wisdom instead of the Grace of God proven in great magnitude on the cross. Doesn’t that warrant giving the moral teaching of his apostles a fair hearing instead of the typical ignorant dismissal that is the attitude of most catholics today? That is the part I don’t understand. Betcha 99% of catholics out there who practice contraception have never read Humanae Vitae, have never listened to the testimony of catholic couples who have lived it, have never sought out and read JPII’s Theology of the Body or the introductory books on the subject. Sad.

 

[MercyMia]

I hope and pray all my sisters in this world will come out of the bondage of the contraceptive mentality! We Catholics all need to talk about it more! Priests to their flock, mothers to their children, fathers to their children and Catholics to their freinds. JPII set something in motion with Theology of the Body and I don’t believe the Holy Spirit has any intention of slowing it down.

Janet Smith is a brilliant women and a friend to all women.

 

[edwest2]

A pretty good synopsis.

I would add that at the time the pill was introduced through the efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation, the WASP establishment, which was much stronger then than it is now, had long regarded Catholic fertility as a threat to its national hegemony. It had earlier experimented with eugenics, but when eugenics became associated with Nazism, the foundations realized another weapon against Catholic fertility, a weapon more palatable to the public and which could be marketed as an instrument of “freedom”, was needed. Hence, after the war, the Rockefellers launched a veritable Manhattan Project to develop the pill.

Unfortunately, the prominent Catholic academics and clerics who should have led the fight against the pill, became some of its most effective promoters. Example #1 is Father Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, who held a conference of Catholic academics on contraception secretly sponsored by the Rockefellers on the campus of Notre Dame. Father “Land O’ Lakes Statement on Academic Freedom” Hesburgh, who in the name of academic freedom, told the Church it had no business telling Notre Dame what it could and could not teach, docilely agreed to every stipulation made by the Rockefellers as to what could be discussed at his “Catholic” conference.

Father Hesburgh wound up on the Board of Directors of the Rockefeller Foundation. As it says in the Bible, he has his reward.

All of the sordid details can be found in Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation as Political Control by E. Michael Jones.

Thank you very much. Population control, including those who fall into certain ‘undesireable’ categories, has been advocated for a long time, including here. I will definitely track down the reference you mentioned. The history of the Rockefeller Foundation is a bit chilling.

Thanks again,
Ed

 

[edwest2]

Rich, I think you were matching my sarcasm with your own, but tone is hard to read on the web. For the record, we do not agree.

Does contraception guarantee other forms of sexual immorality? No. Does refraining from contraception guarantee a healthy married sexuality? No.

But contraception DOES by its very nature tend to objectify sex into a selfish gratification instead of a mutual self giving. It is a push in that direction and a severence from a crucial check and balance that God, in His wisdom, installed within sexuality to reduce the potential for perversion.

NFP itself does nothing terribly much to improve the marriage. Having practised it for most of my 10 years of marriage I can say that it serves like a canary in a mineshaft as an early warning system. If have sexually objectified your spouse, you will find NFP intolerable to live with. The abstinance is excruciating and drives you to fits of frustration and near rage. If your sexual relationship is one of mutual self giving then over time, the 1/3 to 1/2 of the month that is lost to period and fertility just motivates you to use well the other 1/2 to 2/3 of the month.

Perhaps just as important, with NFP you monthly confront your allegedly serious reason to avoid more children. Amazing how that exposes rationalizations that seemed so solid when there is no price to be paid…

Church teaching on sexuality is so counter-cultural that it almost cannot be grasped via reason from the outside. Only when you start to perceive the damage done by our sexually objectified culture and choose to give God’s plan a genuine chance does the wisdom begin to shine out of it. I understand why people reject catholic sexuality, but I don’t think most catholics quite understand it. In the end, they are trusting their own wisdom instead of the Grace of God proven in great magnitude on the cross. Doesn’t that warrant giving the moral teaching of his apostles a fair hearing instead of the typical ignorant dismissal that is the attitude of most catholics today? That is the part I don’t understand. Betcha 99% of catholics out there who practice contraception have never read Humanae Vitae, have never listened to the testimony of catholic couples who have lived it, have never sought out and read JPII’s Theology of the Body or the introductory books on the subject. Sad.

What did Janet Smith write? If you only spend an hour in Church and hours and hours listening to the media, who’s got your attention? I was reading a Catholic magazine that published a study that showed Catholics who go to Church regularly are more in line with Church teaching.

I remember driving past Churches in the 1990s, with signs out front that read: “The only thing missing is U.” Many of the ME generation spent their worship time at the mall.

I watched over a 40 year period as Catholics gradually were led astray by a media that we all formerly trusted. Certain Catholics did not develop this attitude overnight. At first, we did and could trust “experts” to give us good advice, but as time passed, let’s just say that we were taken advantage of by some.

I cannot stress enough that my fellow Catholics were never taught how to manipulate people, how to use people or how to mislead people. Our trust was abused. I think some Catholics do not realize they are being lied to. Go ahead, ask any Catholic you know why he or she believes something is true. Odds are, they heard it from some expert who is against Church teaching.

God bless,
Ed

 

[Father_of_9]

The Church’s teachings on human sexuality remind me of Our Lord teaching His followers in the Gospel of John, chapter six about His flesh being real food. Many of His followers found that teaching too difficult to accept and stopped following Him. Likewise, many people find the Church’s teachings too difficult and stop following - if not outwardly, at least in their hearts.

 

[AnimalGal]

So by definition you are not open to life and consider your fertility an inconvenience rather than a gift?

Fertility would be a gift. But I would still stop at 2 children, with no regrets.
Right now, fertility is a non-issue. Technically I am not open to life, but I’m still Catholic.

 

[Rich_Olszewski]

Betcha 99% of catholics out there who practice contraception have never read Humanae Vitae, have never listened to the testimony of catholic couples who have lived it, have never sought out and read JPII’s Theology of the Body or the introductory books on the subject. Sad.

Betcha they can’t understand it, either. I’m educated up to the doctoral level and I gave up on those documents after a few pages. They’re not at all down to earth, but are written on a very lofty plane. Whom are the Popes addressing? Academicians, other Church hierarchy? You’d think that they’d write on a level that people without advanced academic degrees might understand.

And, as for Theology of the Body - it is very hard reading indeed. Again, I leave it to the hierarchy to digest. It’s not something young marrieds would want to have to wade through.

 

[Julianna]

My wife and I have five kids, and it was very difficult for us given our financial means.

Our situation was different from yours, and certainly different from that of others, but I will judge no couple for how many or how few children they have. As for the worth of the “rewards” of having many children, I leave that to the judgment of the couple to assess.

 

[Alan55]

They are called cafeteria Catholics and there are a lot of them.

About 95% of them according to the article. That seems accurate: Catholic use of the Pill is practically identical with non-Catholic use in the U.S. This teaching has been rejected – theologically speaking, it hasn’t been “received” – by lay Catholics on whom the burden of complying with this teaching rests. If the Holy Spirit is at work in the laity as well as in the Pope and bishops, I’d say that this teaching needs some rethinking. However, I’m not holding my breath.

 

[Alan55]

If you want literature, just google “NFP divorce”. You should find some stuff.

You supposed to *prove *that it causes those things. You can only show a correlation and come up with theories as to why that correlation exists. Perhaps a warped view of sexuality weakens marriages–sex which when healthy is supposed to strengthen the marital bond.

The correlation is especially salient when you compare divorce between those who practice artificial contraceptives and those who practice NFP. NFP’s divorce rate is less than 4%.

Putting the two side-by-side, its pretty easy to see that the correlation isn’t a coincidence.

Since most Catholics use birth control, the notion that birth control causes divorce is pretty ridiculous. That’s like saying that being Catholic or being married causes divorce.

 

[Rich_Olszewski]

Since most Catholics use birth control, the notion that birth control causes divorce is pretty ridiculous. That’s like saying that being Catholic or being married causes divorce.

Quite so. In some cases, though, it could be a contributing factor such as where the husband might want his wife to have a baby but she doesn’t, and so keeps using the Pill. But, like you, I don’t believe the statement.

 

[buffalo]

About 95% of them according to the article. That seems accurate: Catholic use of the Pill is practically identical with non-Catholic use in the U.S. This teaching has been rejected – theologically speaking, it hasn’t been “received” – by lay Catholics on whom the burden of complying with this teaching rests. If the Holy Spirit is at work in the laity as well as in the Pope and bishops, I’d say that this teaching needs some rethinking. However, I’m not holding my breath.

Rethinking? You are right not to hold your breath. Just because Catholics have chosen a conscience of convenience does not invalidate the truth of the matter.