This is a fairly typical criticism of catholic teaching on contraception and, not surprisingly, is why many people who have rejected church teaching on the subject also fail to realize the serious constitutional peril caused by the Obama administration essentially requiring Catholicism to betray its own convictions in its daily operations.
This laicised priest (no such thing as an ex-priest) appears to have received no serious education in catholic sexual teaching. As this link explains, seminaries not only failed to teach authentic catholic morality on the subject from the 60’s through the 80’s, the professors there openly MOCKED it to their students.
rev-know-it-all.com/2012/2012—03-04.html No wonder guys like this learned nothing. (and no wonder so many priests also had no respect for OTHER catholic sexual/moral teachings. What goes around, comes around)
Especially telling is the way he apparently internalized the Monty Python satire tune “Every Sperm is Sacred” (I forget, is that from Life of Brian or Holy Grail?) and mistakes it for actual catholic teaching! Pretty sad that a catholic priest got his sexual values more from British satire than the actual catholic Magisterium.
What he and most dissenters fail to consider is the deep insight revelation gives us that sexuality, like many of God’s gifts, has surface visible components and deeper spiritual components. In other words, marriage, sex and babies are NOT three distinct topics, but one completely intwined moral ecosystem. The moment you forget that, you expose yourself to harmful abuses that degrade the fullness of what sexual intimacy IS. In our day, that isn’t just contraception, but fornication, abortion, divorce, IVF and gay marriage. These abuses ALL come about from failure to comprehend the totality of what sexuality IS and how each facet is inseparable from the others.
Because he has never learned this, he begins with the unexamined assumption that the procreative and unitive functions of marital sexual contact are two separate goods attached by only an incidental thread that God mistakenly left tying the two together and that we wise humans can freely snip without fundamentally altering the substance of what the gift of sexuality is. When starting from such a faulty assumption, it is no wonder that one quickly concludes that there is no moral harm in using technology to MAKE the act as sterile on fertile days as it naturally is at many points in every woman’s cycle. But this is extremely shallow thinking that fails to recognize that that action itself is lie spoken in the language of the body instead of the tongue. It is a physical statement that says that sex has nothing to do with making babies unless I WILL it to. (This is also why abstinance on fertile days for serious reasons is NOT a sinful behavior: it retains the respect that sex is about babies and suborns my will to God’s by giving up what would otherwise be a good and awsome thing for a serious reason I have not to bring a new child into being this month) THAT, folks, is why contraception is sinful. Remember, sins aren’t just actions on an arbitrary list. They are things that are genuinely harmful to your soul, to your ability to give and receive love. When sex no longer has anything to do with babies, it very tends to have less and less to do with self-giving at all and tends to become about the self.
Someone asked a great question. Why does the Church get so obsessed with sex? The answer is that it is the CULTURE that is obsessed with sex, and a warped vision thereof. It is the basic function of the church to teach the truth and correct error. Humans lie, cheat, steal and kill all too often. But our culture generally agrees that those things are wrong. Where our culture needs correction is when it declares evil things to be good things. The church takes special care to correct faulty assertions like that. “Mercy killings” will be one such thing in the near future you will see the church stand firm against. Greed, contrary to Ayn Rand fan assertions, is NOT good. Wherever there are movements by people to redefine an evil as a good, the church will be there telling the truth. In our day and age, sexual issues are where the culture is falling for big “evil is good” lies. No surprise that fighting those ideas is a priority.
