YEARNING4TRUTH #1
*People often justify their claim against certain moral teachings of the Church by stating that what she teaches is outdated and uses modernity as a means to discredit her. For instance, one of my relatives doesn’t believe that contraception is wrong and states that the things that we now know refutes the stance of the Church. How do we answer those who makes such claims? *
The false assumptions here are that
- The Church is wrong in teaching against contraception
- Christ is not God who, in building His Church on St Peter, emphasised that “He that hears you hears Me.”
Pope Pius XI in
Casti Connubii declared definitively that the teaching against
contraception was “doctrine handed down from the beginning without interruption”, and infallibly condemned
contraception (#56)
“as any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.” [My emphasis].
Vatican II in
Gaudium et Spes, 51, footnote 14 refers to
Casti Connubii and further teaching by Pius XI and Paul VI. So the bishops of the Church in Ecumenical Council, approved by the Pope, give this teaching also.
In country after country and in every country, bishops and councils forbid ‘contraceptive portions,’ ‘herbs or other agents so you will not have children,’ ‘spilling the seed in coitus,’ ‘coitus interruptus,’ ‘poisons of sterility,’ ‘avoiding children by evil acts,’ ‘putting material things in the vagina,’ and ‘causing temporary or permanent sterility.’ These and similar statements occur in ecclesiastical documents before the end of the thirteenth century.” (
The Catholic Catechism, Fr John A Hardon, S.J., Doubleday, 1975, p 370).
Answer by Fr.Stephen F. Torraco on June 19, 2006 (EWTN):
“If you want an objective reason as to why contraception is a serious evil and NFP is not only morally justifiable but also praiseworthy, that objective reason is this: with contraception, there is the deliberate rupture of the intimate link between the unitive and procreative meanings of the marital act. With NFP, there is no such rupture. Even in the case in which a couple, using NFP, resorts to the infertile period for marital relations so as to avoid pregnancy (assuming for the sake of argument, for serious reasons) there is no such objective rupture of that link precisely because there is nothing there to contracept. You need to understand that morality is not simply about results. It is also about our actions in and of themselves. The argument to which you refer (the results are the same with NFP and contraception) is purely utilitarian and does not take into consideration the entire human act. Furthermore, as I have pointed out several times, the condoning of contraception quite logically is also the condoning of genital activity with anyone or anything, as well as of in vitro fertilization and cloning. The Church’s teaching on contraception does not at all depend on faith. It is a clear and rational defense of the very essence of civilization.”
