Protestant women and contraceptives, my weird jealousy?

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MarthaSo said:
watched, I don’t like their flashy personality to be honest, it’s the protestant ones that seem humble and I’m drawn to, ofcourse this media is just a tiny corner of the population I understand but I like finding inspiring women and those Catholic mommy yourubers do not inspire me, many are all about giveaways and how many subscribers, very worldly.
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Maybe it’s because being Catholic for a living and trying to brand yourself when you have no special credentials can be quite the turn off. You believe Catholicism is the fullness of truth so you don’t enjoy seeing people make it a gimmick to make a name for themselves on the internet.
 
Perfect explanation. Thank you. They’re such a small presence on youtube that I should be grateful they’re there but I don’t know, I guess I was hoping there would be like a St Therese personality but St Therese wouldn’t want the spotlight on herself. Sadly a lot of the personalities on these channels are eerily similar including their introduction and closing remarks. “Don’t forget to subscribe to my channel and like this video!”
 
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I guess I understand where you’re coming from. Ignorance is bliss, after all. Sometimes I wish I have never come across catholic sources, unfortunately.
 
powerandglory said:
At the risk of being judged, condemned, and flagged I will say: I truly do not understand the church’s stance against birth control. I have had one child and I love her very much. However, I do NOT want anymore. I am not overly maternal, to the point where I had a nanny help for the first four years. My own parents were abusive and negligent, and I just found that I didn’t know how to “mother” very well, if that makes sense. I feel that if I had another I would have a mental breakdown. How is it just of the church to demand that I have more children? Being forced into breeding and contributing to the rising world population does not seem like a just or good stance to me.
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Have you studied why the Church teaches what she does?

Or what the protestant reformers thought of Contraception?

The issue of contraception and the Catholic Converts Scott and Kimberly Hahn might be something you can check out. ❤️
 
MarthaSo said:
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Yikes!

Catechism
1860 Unintentional ignorance can diminish or even remove the imputability of a grave offense. But no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are written in the conscience of every man. The promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary and free character of the offense, as can external pressures or pathological disorders. Sin committed through malice, by deliberate choice of evil, is the gravest.
 
I’m not sure how accurate this is with the 1930 ‘fact’:

Kimberly Hahn (née Kirk ; born 1957) is a Catholicapologist and author, and member of the SteubenvilleCity Council. She is the eldest child of Jerry and Patricia Kirk, and is married to apologist and author Scott Hahn.

Hahn was born into a Presbyterian family and her father was a minister. She studied Communication Arts at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1979. She married fellow student Scott Hahn on 18 August that year. She then worked as a secretary for a year while her husband began studies for a Master of Divinity degree at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. She enrolled the following year and earned a Master of Arts in Theology in 1982.

While studying for her M.A., Hahn carried out research into the history of Christian attitudes towards contraception. She discovered that every Christian Church without exception had condemned the practice until 1930, and that some of the most famous Protestant reformers — Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox — had condemned it strongly. She also read Catholic author John Kippley, who likened contraception to the practice of feasting and deliberately vomiting. At that stage, Scott and Kimberly both had strong objections to many Catholic teachings, but, after prayer, Bible study, and reflection, they both became convinced that on that issue, at least, the Catholic position was biblical. They changed to Natural Family Planning for a while, then decided to leave the timing of pregnancies entirely to God. Their first son was born on December 4, 1982.

 
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You know, kids, that it is really modern for Christians to think that married couples should be having sex all the time. In the early Church, and in the West until the last few centuries, every married couple was supposed to remain continent (ie, fast from sex to focus on prayer) during all of Lent and Advent,on every Friday and Saturday (and often on Wednesdays also), and on any Ember Day or fastday. They still do this in the various Eastern rites and in other Christian communities.

Also, if you truly feel terrible physically or mentally, possibly you should talk to your doctor.
 
Mintaka said:
In the early Church, and in the West until the last few centuries, every married couple was supposed to remain continent (ie, fast from sex to focus on prayer) during all of Lent and Advent,on every Friday and Saturday (and often on Wednesdays also), and on any Ember Day or fastday. They still do this in the various Eastern rites and in other Christian communities.
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That would leave CONSIDERABLY fewer days on my charts. Thanks for the perspective! 🙂
 
hmm… this is interesting. It sounds like it is saying the protestant women are not culpable just like I thought but also that if “I” as a Catholic have strong feelings towards protecting my life to care for my other children (with birth control) I’m not as bad as the person just willy nilly not caring about Gods law and I may not be “as” culpable either. Is this my baby brain interpretation I wonder. Thanks for this post.
 
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Yes, that is what I mean. Their ignorance pardons them while my fullness of truth may risk my life leaving my other children orphans.
 
MarthaSo said:
a choice to be faithful to Gods laws even while having to hand my children over to strangers to raise while I work.
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MarthaSo, as I’m reading your posts, what I’m hearing is that you really want to be a stay home Mom.

If I’m hearing you correctly, may I suggest that you find a time to really re-discuss this with your husband. Perhaps, together you may decide that you staying home with this new baby (& any future children God might have in-store for your family) is more important than whatever it is causing you to have to work outside your home?

Our society is definitely set up in such a way that both parents typically have to work just to make ends meet financially, but there are sacrifices that can realistically be made to allow one of the parents to remain home. Some sacrifices, I’ve witnessed in families that allow Mom to stay home include one or more of these: moving to a less expensive cost of living area of the country or world, downsize in regards to home birthdays holidays travel, move to an older home neighborhood where the house can be paid in full so no more mortgage, install solar panels to eliminate electric bill, change careers to become an in-home Daycare Provider, Foster Children who need a temporary stable home environment until their Parents can care for them, rent out a bedroom to an International Exchange College Student, only have one car for the entire family, sell old stuff online.

Hopefully, you & your husband can brain storm even better ideas that would work for your family, if I’m hearing you correctly that you want to be a stay at home Mom.
 
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Thank you so much for your beautiful and thoughtful post, staying at home is certainly one big aspect (not the full of it but a big part) but my job has benefits including free college tuition for my two teenagers which they will be able to use next year, that is another 4 years I must stay. (Willing to hear others opinions on that but that is a big deal in our family since my husband and I have dealt with the horrors of college debt).
Thank you again for your thoughtful post.
 
MarthaSo said:
my job has benefits including free college tuition for my two teenagers which they will be able to use next year
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That is a really nice benefit! Continuing to work to allow your older children to utilize it, is certainly one way to ensure debt-free college education, but it’s not the only way.

There are also top private schools, like Stanford, that only charge students who earn above a certain income level. Stanford undergraduates only pay tuition if their parents earn above $125,000. a year. Admission – Stanford University

There are lots tuition-free colleges in the United States and abroad. This link is to a news article dated earlier this school year with a list of some of those schools in the U.S. https://www.usnews.com/education/be...r-college/slideshows/12-tuition-free-colleges

There are 20 States in the United States that offer free Community or free State College tuition. Free college is now a reality in nearly 20 states

15 out of 16 States in Germany still offer free University education to Americans, and other foreigners, as of the writing of this article in 2017 https://www-washingtonpost-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/worldviews/wp/2017/10/05/want-to-study-for-free-in-germany-you-might-need-to-hurry-up/?amp_js_v=a2&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCCAE%3D#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%1%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fnews%2Fworldviews%2Fwp%2F2017%2F10%2F05%2Fwant-to-study-for-free-in-germany-you-might-need-to-hurry-up%2F

I’m sharing this information with you to simply to let you know that there are many other debt-free college options so that you don’t have to feel trapped into just one option. You’re free!
 
Thanks so much for taking the time to post those!! I live in NY so I will do a little more digging. I look forward to reading through those links. God bless you!
 
Christians who are ignorant of God’s true demands in difficult aspects of life (such as using NFP or complete abstinence when a pregnancy is not desired for grave reasons, or staying single involuntarily when one cannot get an annulment) live in a fool’s paradise.

I will admit that I have murmured to myself “I bet those people wouldn’t be so chipper and giddy about their ‘walk with the Lord’ if they had to live according to hard Catholic principles”, but that is not the way to think. You can’t second-guess their faith if they were, in a flash of enlightenment, to come to full knowledge that contraception and remarriage-after-divorce (with no annulment) were indeed mortally sinful. Some might continue to be blissful in their faith, some might not. That is not for us to know (in that it’s a hypothetical), and not ours to challenge.

The typical (or perhaps I should say stereotypical) situation goes something like this. The non-Catholic Christian believer (let’s say Baptist, Methodist, etc.) says “I’ve had all the children I am going to have, and I am either going to contracept from here on out, or have myself “fixed” so that another pregnancy can’t happen. I’ve been blessed.” They are entirely ignorant of the common teaching of all Christians on birth control prior to the early- to mid-part of the 20th century; it’s not part of their experience, and if they were reminded of it, they’d say something like “it’s modern times and nobody thinks that way anymore”. The Bible, in their understanding, is silent on the subject. Then if they do get pregnant, they either approach it positively as an “oops baby”, or possibly they have an abortion and you never know about it because that’s not something they share with others. (I would hope the latter scenario is very rare.) Either way, everything is sunshine and roses in the eyes of the world.

Same with divorce and remarriage. I have never, ever, heard of a non-Catholic Christian saying “I have to stay single as long as my ex-spouse is living, because in the eyes of God we are still married, and divorce doesn’t change that”. That’s not to say it never happens, just that I’ve never heard of it. Has anyone else? No, they accept the divorce as a dissolution of the marriage, and go on their merry way.

How they will be judged by Our Lord, when that time comes, is a mystery. I’m not even going to go there.
 
Great insights, thank you. I guess I wonder if that “fools paradise”, as it relates to birth control, isn’t so bad. I could keep my good health and my good conscience before the Lord were I in it vs the real risk of losing it leaving my children orphans for example if something were to happen to me if I had another pregnancy.

I’m aware that may sound strange to many but I do wonder if my having the “fullness of truth” benefits me more in any way (sorry that sounds selfish but that’s the only way I know how to describe it) than Protestant Jane if we’re both following our conscience except she can keep her good health etc…
Thank you.
 
We must never wish that we were ignorant of the truth.

Many of us suffer mightily, either mentally or physically (or both), because we have to live by God’s teachings. It is only human to feel jealous of those who don’t perceive themselves as being bound to those teachings, and who enjoy temporal benefits (better health, contentment of mind, a better standard of living, and so on) because of being able to avoid these burdens. But we have to get past that, and realize that God wants what he wants, even if we have to suffer for it in this life. If nothing else, perhaps we will be happier in eternity than those who have an “easy life” on this earth.

And I have noticed, and maybe this is “just me”, but sometimes I pick up on a kind of uneasiness, a furtiveness, about the whole phenomenon of birth control. Perhaps some people, deep down, have a feeling that there is something “wrong” with it, even if they can’t articulate it. Again, that might just be me. I don’t know,
 
Thanks very much, I appreciate your (name removed by moderator)ut. My children are spaced out by 16 years because we were truly ignorant of it being a moral evil. Although this child is most certainly a blessing, the large gap itself I think might be one of the negatives of birth control to be frank. That has nothing to do with his upbringing being great and him being spoiled and having a great childhood hopefully but we never know if it could have been “better”. I certainly won’t dwell on such thoughts because God will grant us the strength to raise him and we will always try to live in His grace.
 
@MarthaSo You sound so very sad and I am sending you a virtual hug. Your little baby boy won’t wonder if his childhood could have been “better.” He has a mother and father who love him! He has older siblings to look up to! He will know that he is wanted and loved! A 16 year age gap is hard, but you are completely up to the challenge. Of all the women in the world, God thought you would be the best mommy to give your little boy. You will get to see his little smiles; be the recipient of many crayon drawings and his love. You are blessed in a way no vlogger on YouTube could be. No one else gets to be your little boy’s mom.
 
You can watch all the videos but what you don’t see is what goes on behind the scenes. Couples that use contraception are hindering their own relationship, the relationship with their children, and most importantly their relationship with God. Don’t believe everything you see online for face value. There is the wisdom of God at work.
 
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