… I’d say go ahead and lay that Pope info on me, my friend
Gaudium et Spes 48 § 1
48. The intimate partnership of married life and love has been established by the Creator and qualified by His laws, and is rooted in the conjugal covenant of irrevocable personal consent. Hence by that human act whereby spouses mutually bestow and accept each other a relationship arises which by divine will and in the eyes of society too is a lasting one. For the good of the spouses and their off-springs as well as of society, the existence of the sacred bond no longer depends on human decisions alone. For, God Himself is the author of matrimony, endowed as it is with various benefits and purposes.(1) All of these have a very decisive bearing on the continuation of the human race, on the personal development and eternal destiny of the individual members of a family, and on the dignity, stability, peace and prosperity of the family itself and of human society as a whole. By their very nature, the institution of matrimony itself and conjugal love are ordained for the procreation and education of children, and find in them their ultimate crown. Thus a man and a woman, who by their compact of conjugal love “are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matt. 19:ff), render mutual help and service to each other through an intimate union of their persons and of their actions. Through this union they experience the meaning of their oneness and attain to it with growing perfection day by day. As a mutual gift of two persons, this intimate union and the good of the children impose total fidelity on the spouses and argue for an unbreakable oneness between them.(2)
vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html
***Pope Pius XII, From Address to Midwives (1951): ***
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
Pope Pius XII, Morality and Eugenics (1960):
Code:
We have spoken on this subject in Our address of October 29, 1951, not to expound on the biological or medical point of view, but to allay the qualms of conscience of many Christians who used this method in their conjugal life. Moreover, in his Encyclical of December 3 1, 193 0, Pius XI had already formulated the position of principle: "*Neque contra naturae ordinem agere ii dicendi sunt coniuges, qui lure suo recte et naturali ratione utuntur, etsi ob naturales sive temporis sive quorundam defectaum causas nova inde vita oriri non possit*."[12 ](http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/doc/doc_32moralityeugenics.html#a12)
We stated in the discourse delivered in 1951 that married couples who make use of their conjugal rights have a positive obligation; in virtue of the natural law governing their state, not to exclude procreation. The Creator, in effect, wished human beings to propagate themselves precisely by the natural exercise of the sexual function. But to this positive law We applied the principle which holds for all the others: that these positive laws are not obligatory to the extent that their fulfillment involves great disadvantages which are neither inseparable from the law itself nor inherent in its accomplishment, but which come from another source and which the law-maker did not intend to impose on men when he promulgated the law.
lifeissues.net/writers/doc/doc_32moralityeugenics.html
