My husband and I recently got baptized into the Catholic faith. We realized that the use of contraception is a sin. But because we don’t want children, we decided not to have sex. Is this still wrong and sinful?
We are coping pretty well after a year of no-sex. My husband is very active at Church while I read the Bible daily, trying to know God better. We’ve talked about this lately and we agree that even if we want children later on, it seems quite impossible to be “lustful” with each other as we seem incapable of sexual or lustful thoughts now.
I guess I am just asking if there are others like us, who now find themselves incapable of sex and who live with their spouses like brothers and sisters? My husband and I love each other very much and often pray that we can leave together as we are quite inseparable.
From Address to Midwives, Pope Pius XII:
Today, besides, another grave problem has arisen, namely, if and how far the obligation of being ready for the service of maternity is reconcilable with the ever more general recourse to the periods of natural sterility the so-called “agenesic” periods in woman, which seems a clear expression of a will contrary to that precept.
…
The reason is that marriage obliges the partners to a state of life, which even as it confers certain rights so it also imposes the accomplishment of a positive work concerning the state itself. In such a case, the general principle may be applied that a positive action may be omitted if grave motives, independent of the good will of those who are obliged to perform it, show that its performance is inopportune, or prove that it may not be claimed with equal right by the petitioner—in this case, mankind.
The matrimonial contract, which confers on the married couple the right to satisfy the inclination of nature, constitutes them in a state of life, namely, the matrimonial state. Now, on married couples, who make use of the specific act of their state, nature and the Creator impose the function of providing for the preservation of mankind. This is the characteristic service which gives rise to the peculiar value of their state, the
bonum prolis. The individual and society, the people and the State, the Church itself, depend for their existence, in the order established by God, on fruitful marriages. Therefore, to embrace the matrimonial state, to use continually the faculty proper to such a state and lawful only therein, and, at the same time, to avoid its primary duty without a grave reason, would be a sin against the very nature of married life.
Serious motives, such as those which not rarely arise from medical, eugenic, economic and social so-called “indications,” may exempt husband and wife from the obligatory, positive debt for a long period or even for the entire period of matrimonial life. From this it follows that the observance of the natural sterile periods may be lawful, from the moral viewpoint: and it is lawful in the conditions mentioned. If, however, according to a reasonable and equitable judgment, there are no such grave reasons either personal or deriving from exterior circumstances, the will to avoid the fecundity of their union, while continuing to satisfy to the full their sensuality, can only be the result of a false appreciation of life and of motives foreign to sound ethical principles.
~
Address to Midwives, Given by His Holiness Pope Pius XII, 29 October 1951
