Need real canon lawyer to answer a difficult question about exclusio boni prolis

[1ke]

They’ve discerned that they need to avoid indefinitely for a just reason, they use the infertile time of their cycle to have intercourse, they do not intend to procreate that night.

Are you telling me that is immoral?

 

[1ke]

What you propose here is not consistent with the Church’s actual teaching on the matter. A couple does NOT have to intend to procreate to have sexual intercourse. From Humanae Vitae:

If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained.

Neither the Church nor her doctrine is inconsistent when she considers it lawful for married people to take advantage of the infertile period

 

[I_trust]

I do not know the answers, but I am curious, when would NFP be licit …

Say a couple for a just cause wants to delay pregnancy (the woman is temporarily on medication that could cause birth defects).
They are fully aware that NFP is never 100% effective and each act contains the slight possibility of pregnancy.

1- They are open to having children later in the marriage, but intend to abort the child using the morning after pill if they get pregnant…Was the act of intercourse itself during the infertile time and/or using NFP illicit or not?

2-The woman plans on using the morning after pill if pregnancy occurs but her husband is unaware of her intention and would not agree to abort.

3-The couple risks the pregnancy and will abort only if tests show an abnormality in the baby.

4-They are open to having children later in the marriage, but intend not to have children when on the meds. They are aware of the slight chance of pregnancy and would not abort. What if the meds are permanent?

On a separate note…
5- What if a couple never wants more children for selfish reasons (may cramp their opulent lifestyle and no other reason), but uses NFP to try to avoid pregnancy. They don’t use another method to avoid pregnancy. They were open to having kids at the beginning of the marriage but have become selfish,. Would their individual marital acts or use of NFP be sinful? Would the acts themselves not be sinful but their intention not to become pregnant be sinful? What if they even intend to use the morning after pill if pregnancy happens, would it change the licit/illicit nature of the act?.

 

[I_trust]

What if a couple before getting married is only planning on having 2 kids. This is their intention at the time of the vows. They have plenty of money, no health concerns etc. but just want 2 kids and no more. Is the marriage valid? Would the validity of the marriage change if they used NFP vs contraception after the 2 kids?

What if 6 months after exchanging vows they decide they will be open to as many kids as God wants for them? Does it change the original validity of the vows?

Sorry if I hijacked this thread.
No need to answer my questions…
Just thought the questions might tease out the finer points of contention.

 

[chevalier]

Hey, Dan. Thank you for chiming in. I don’t know why, but for some reason I can’t find or use the quote button, so I’ll have to quote manually:

Anyway, in a marriage, it’s not that the other Party “is allowed the right to withdraw.” When a person (validly) marries, he/she automatically and necessarily has the right to withdraw from any such agreement regarding the postponement of children, even an indefinite postponement undertaken for weighty reasons. That’s what exchanging this right means.

Yes, that’s my point. The right is exchanged automatically as part of accepting the whole package. But here’s the trick: if you exclude the right with a positive act of you will, you are necessarily refusing to accept the whole package, and the law makes it impossible to accept just part of it. Hence I was analysing the couple’s frame of mind at the point. If they are dead on barring the right to withdraw, which in real-life terms means they’re entering into a rigid arrangement that is not subject to change, then it looks to me like they’re withholding the ius itself, not just the usus of it.

If the other Party responds with “no, you can’t go back on our plan–we had an agreement”, the withdrawing Party could say “actually, our agreement was to marry.” If the response comes back “No, I’m not changing my mind”, then we’ve got simulation.

Also the way I see it, yes.

What is difficult in this case is that:
‘No I’m not changing my mind, because it could kill me.’
‘I don’t care. We’re married, and I’ve got a right to this, you have to comply.’

Then strictly speaking the asker is not in a position to claim the ‘debt’, the ‘askee’ has a moral right to refuse, and so on. So we would basically be asking ourselves whether the ‘askee’ theoretically recognizes the existence of the asker’s right. Which is not the sort of distinction non-lawyers ever ponder. Maybe philosophers, but they get lost in it. And obviously they’d say ‘yeah, I recognize it, I just can’t comply with it,’ and we’d be down to psychological divinations.

 

[chevalier]

And this time just hitting the Reply button supplied the contents of the quote, sigh. Miracles of technology… Eh.

Wife has congenital heart defect for which she’s had multiple heart surgeries from childhood. So doctor’s orders are no pregnancies. She and her DH have approached their marriage with the reality of avoiding for the whole of their marriage and the hope that her doctor might one day clear her to become pegnant. Almost 15 years into their marriage (and after contracting Hep C from a blood transfusion a few years ago which she didn’t have when they married) it is clear the doctor is never going to give that Ok. They’ve adopted two kids during their marriage.

Well, there was hope. Hope provides for psychological openness of the person herself or himself, but hope doesn’t make the marital act ordered toward procreation (I believe too many priests and even lawyers focus too much on ‘openness’ instead of going for the real thing, i.e. ordination toward). The act is technically open since there are no barriers. However, the intention to make sure the barrier-less act is never going to actually bring about the offspring, which is, strictly speaking, not required.

But to me this all sounds like using the ‘offspring is not required in se’ argument to justify the alleged existence of ‘openness’ even when the offspring is specifically excluded by positive intention.

They would say they do not have a permanent intention against children because they always hoped her doctor would clear her one day. Others in her support group have gone on to have children so it was always a possibility no matter how small.

I would say their intention was conditional, and here it proves that the condition ultimately wasn’t met. So this looks like the right was not exchanged, unless perhaps the wife recognizes the husband has the legal if not moral right to ask, even though she’d have a moral right to refuse.

And a future condition attached to just one part of the essence of matrimony (the 3/4 bona) seems to me like a future condition therefore attached by logical necessity to the ‘be or not be’ of the matrimony itself; in other words given how some necessary & indispensable part of the matrimony was made conditional, the whole thing was necessarily made conditional. And future conditions are impossible per canon 1103.

 

[chevalier]

Her husband would never seek to exercise his right to ask for children if her doctor hasn’t cleared her.

Yes, of course. But here it looks to me like one can just hind behind the ‘wouldn’t be moral to ask anyway’ and go ahead to contract a union that is not in fact marriage because it objectively lacks essential elements, based on excuses. And excuses, by their own nature, are only capable of removing culpability but never of changing objective reality (objective incompleteness of the essence of matrimony, for example).

In plainer words, the arguments seem to come to come down to: ‘we’re excluding, but we wish we didn’t have to,’ where the ‘have to’ is a moral choice / so-called moral impossibility.

And people who have diseases preventing them from being capable of marrying because they are psychically not capable of e.g. going off ABC and giving up the control, they can’t use the ‘we’re still open because we wish we could overcome the disease and it’s not our fault we never can’ line. So it would seem inconsistent to prevent people who really can’t but let through people who can but don’t want to (strictly speaking: want not to).

 

[chevalier]

Your opinion is not consistent with Church teaching nor their own pastor’s spiritual direction.

A married couple is free to engage in intercourse any time they choose.

That’s the legal side of things, (name removed by moderator)'s opinion touched on the moral. There’s no law-law (as in canon law or whatever) preventing a married couple from engaging in intercourse where the resulting pregnancy could kill one of them or cause both of them to die, or whatever. Or where a lethal disease could be transmitted. But that doesn’t make it right for someone with a lethal STD to ask for marital intercourse, and deciding to give it is not always the moral choice (for example it could lead to both parents dying and the children becoming full orphans). There is also a difference between sacrificing one’s life (for charity, for love, for something else like that) and throwing it away by an injudicious decision (e.g. sentimental but not truly deep).

Of course, a mutual decision is different from just one party demanding it.

 

[chevalier]

The less one trusts in God’s kindness and mercy, the harder it becomes to imagine another who has sinned being its recipient. Doubting such forgiveness, the tendency then becomes to turn to law, to label, to judge, to scold, and to wish punishment upon the sinner. But Jesus came to show us mercy and to tell us to "stop judging. “love and do what you will.”

What we’re discussing here is not punishment for a sin, however, or culpability in a sin, but the objective reality of whether the proposed union meets the objective definition of marriage.

True mercy would not use unnecessarily harsh definitions or interpretations, of course, but it would not lend itself as an excuse to distort the truth — such as the dates of historical events, or results of mathematical operations or geological surveys, or medical diagnoses, or anything else that is a matter of fact and not moral judgment.

In other words, mercy can temper justice, but it can’t temper e.g. maths (e.g. make it so 2 + 2 = 3 or 5 because of compassion).

The definition of marriage and whether something meets it or not is such a matter of fact, and only sometimes does the question of ‘should this be allowed or not’ (a moral one, with room for mercy) pops up.

 

[chevalier]

Yeah, well, it looks to me that when doctor’s orders are no procreation, then one is not off the hook but actually incapable of marrying.

Kind of like someone with a condition listed in the DSM and diagnosed by a qualified psychiatrist has the ‘medical excuse’ certifying impossibility through no fault of the individual, but that leads to incapability of marital consent, not to waiver of requirements.

 

[chevalier]

The same is true of ABC. NFP is permitted, not because of the chance of procreation, but because it does not change the conjugal act.

Even positively and absolutely intended permanent NFP doesn’t change the nature of the act, but then the intention of totally avoiding bio offspring while not avoiding sex is something I can’t reconcile with the ordination of matrimony and not just the ‘act’ toward the generation of offspring.

It basically looks to me like an excused exclusion as opposed to non-exclusion.

 

[chevalier]

Selfish intentions or lack thereof cover the moral implications of NFP use, as in sin or not. However, to me, they seem to have no bearing on the objective existence of a minimum essence of marriage (including bonum prolis) or not.

The contrast here is such: at some point a normally married couple could experience a change of circumstances driving them to the decision to postpone further pregnancies indefinitely, which is what the Church’s teaching in the Catechism deals with. But ‘indefinitely’ is not the same as ‘forever, and right from start, by design’, and in any case the morality of NFP use is a different issue from the existence or non-existence of the essence (or exclusion or non-exclusion of bonum prolis).

 

[chevalier]

And here’s the problem: no additional children vs no children ever, null, zero.

And in Pius XII’s position, the ‘debt’ obviously refers to intercourse itself, not to intercourse on non-fertile days. Still, it seems to refer to the ‘use of right’ more than the ‘right’ itself.

 

[chevalier]

What you propose here is not consistent with the Church’s actual teaching on the matter. A couple does NOT have to intend to procreate to have sexual intercourse. From Humanae Vitae:

The miracle of negations in the beautiful English language… let’s try it this way:

They don’t have to intend to procreate. They may lack the specific intention to procreate through that individual instance of having marital intercourse (however, I’ve seen good arguments that a general intention to procreate and educate offspring should be present throughout the marriage, which is what even makes it okay to lack the specific/positive intention in some of the individual acts).

Intending to not procreate, that would be a different animal, though.

In our example the couple appear to retain the ‘constructive’ intention/openness/whatever (clumsy shortcut for ‘ordination toward generation’ anyway), simply because they engage in unprotected sex, but they have the specific intention of not procreating.

They have no intention of divorcing the act from its orientation via technical means, but they intend to use it in such a way as to totally omit its natural result anyway (which is obviously different from infertility).

This makes it look to me like trying to justify the simultaneous presence of two contrary intentions or like arguing that two contrary intentions can be less than mutually exclusive.

The couple’s advocate could perhaps defend the theory that the marital acts retain the ‘ordination’, but then what about the entire matrimony, which is more than the sum total of the marital acts?

 

[Mi_Rose]

decide not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time.” (Humanae Vitae
How does indefinite here apply?

 

[TheOldColonel]

Looks like you’ve got it all figured out.

 

[yankeesouth]

A man and a woman both Catholic want to get married. They want children eventually but want to advance their careers, get financially stable and travel before they have children. They plan on using NFP to hold off on having children to do this. Should they get married under this thought process?

 

[yankeesouth]

Should they marry though?

 

[Elf01]

I certainly see the potential of nullity un the case where a couple enters marriage with a need to avoid indefinitely.

What I don’t see though under the world view of you and @(name removed by moderator) is how using NFP to avoid can be moral?

 

[Xantippe]

And people who have diseases preventing them from being capable of marrying because they are psychically not capable of e.g. going off ABC and giving up the control, they can’t use the ‘we’re still open because we wish we could overcome the disease and it’s not our fault we never can’ line. So it would seem inconsistent to prevent people who really can’t but let through people who can but don’t want to (strictly speaking: want not to).

I haven’t caught up with the thread (so apologies for repetition), but here’s a question that may clarify the problem: If medical treatment became available that would allow for a safe and healthy pregnancy, would the couple still refuse to have children?

If the couple is willing to have children with effective medical treatment, they are open to having children.

But if the couple is not willing to have children, even with the new medical treatment, they are not open to having children at all.