Many people don’t get it…including myself. I love to following arguments and logic, but I can’t follow this one. In fact, it would be simpler if is was left at “The Church said so” and leave it as a matter of faith. The line of reasoning used to justify NFP simply leaves everyone confused, and creates doubt.
Personally, NFP and contraception have no bearing on my own life, but the effect it causes on the otherwise faithful and their relationship with the Church has always been bothersome to me. And I don’t believe this can ever be reconciled.
I found Anscombe particularly helpful here. I’ve no idea if people still talk about her; she was quite the famous philosopher in many ways and wrote on intention. This is from an article she wrote on contraception and chastity many years ago (
orthodoxytoday.org/articles/AnscombeChastity.php). She died in 2001, I believe.
Natural law and sexual ethics is actually a pretty interesting field of study. It is not impossible to understand, though it takes effort and a great deal of thought. I’d like to perhaps note, though it’s hardly a direct response to your point, that the “what’s the difference?” line of argument gave birth to most modern sexual perversions. There’s no doubt it birthed the modern homosexual movement.
Natural law is based a great deal in complex metaphysics, which isn’t fully addressed here, but this section may address your initial “intent” concerns:
"Here, however, people still feel intensely confused, because the intention where oral contraceptives are taken seems to be just the same as when intercourse is deliberately restricted to infertile periods. In one way this is true, and its truth is actually pointed out by Humanae Vitae, in a passage I will quote in a moment. But in another way it’s not true.
The reason why people are confused about intention, and why they sometimes think there is no difference between contraceptive intercourse and the use of infertile times to avoid conception, is this: They don’t notice the difference between “intention” when it means the intentionalness of the thing you’re doing - that you’re doing this on purpose - and when it means a further or accompanying intention with which you do the thing. For example, I make a table: that’s an intentional action because I am doing just that on purpose. I have the further intention of, say, earning my living, doing my job by making the table. Contraceptive intercourse and intercourse using infertile times may be alike in respect of further intention, and these further intentions may be good, justified, excellent. This the Pope has noted. He sketched such a situation and said: “It cannot be denied that in both cases the married couple, for acceptable reasons,” (for that’s how he imagined the case) “are perfectly clear in their intention to avoid children and mean to secure that none will be born.” This is a comment on the two things: contraceptive intercourse on the one hand and intercourse using infertile times on the other, for the sake of the limitation of the family.
But contraceptive intercourse is faulted, not on account of this further intention, but because of the kind of intentional action you are doing. The action is not left by you as the kind of act by which life is transmitted, but is purposely rendered infertile, and so changed to another sort of act altogether.
In considering an action, we need always to judge several things about ourselves. First: is the sort of act we contemplate doing something that it’s all right to do? Second: are our further or surrounding intentions all right? Third: is the spirit in which we do it all right? Contraceptive intercourse fails on the first count; and to intend such an act is not to intend a marriage act at all, whether or no we’re married. An act of ordinary intercourse in marriage at an infertile time, though, is a perfectly ordinary act of married intercourse, and it will be bad, if it is bad, only on the second or third counts.
It may help you to see that the intentional act itself counts, as well as the further or accompanying intentions, if you think of an obvious example like forging a cheque to steal from somebody in order to get funds for a good purpose. The intentional action, presenting a cheque we’ve forged, is on the face of it a dishonest action, not be vindicated by the good further intention.
If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here - not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can’t be the mere pattern of bodily behaviour in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. I am not saying: if you think contraception all right you will do these other things; not at all. The habit of respectability persists and old prejudices die hard. But I am saying: you will have no solid reason against these things. You will have no answer to someone who proclaims as many do that they are good too. You cannot point to the known fact that Christianity drew people out of the pagan world, always saying no to these things. Because, if you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition."
