bear06:
Where do you get this stuff? See the footnotes in Humanae Vitae. The sources go back way before Vatican II. The Summa Theologia speaks of the unitive aspect.
Here is something:
This century has seen an ongoing debate within the Church about the ends of marriage. **A traditional understanding presented these ends in a clear hierarchy or order of importance: a “primary” end (procreation) and two
“secondary” ends (mutual help and the remedy for concupiscence). ** Early on in the century a feeling began to emerge that this understanding was too exclusively centered on the procreative function of the marital relationship, while it neglected “personalist” aspects or values also characterizing this relationship, and of which modern times have become
more aware: love between man and woman as the main motive for marrying, the promise of personal happiness or fulfillment that marriage seems to offer, the human values felt to underlie physical sexuality.
The Second Vatican Council incorporated these personalist values into its presentation of marriage. And, as is well known, married personalism is notable in the teaching on marriage of John Paul II. Sexuality and marriage, interpreted in a personalist light, were in fact the theme of a lengthy papal catechesis covering the first years of the present pontificate; and the same presentation has frequently recurred since. Thus it now seems beyond question that a personalist view of marriage has
become firmly established in magisterial teaching.
**Here, in what Pope John Paul II has described as the “last document of the Second Vatican Council,”[1] we are offered a brief formula of the greatest importance, which marks a development and crystallization of the married personalism of Vatican II. ** Particularly to be noted is the progress from
the rather vague conciliar statement about matrimony being endowed with “various” or “other” ends, besides procreation,[2] to the specific enunciation of < ends to marriage, the good of the spouses and the procreation/education of children.
Now this is very telling:
" A traditional understanding presented these ends in a clear hierarchy or order of importance: a “primary” end (procreation) and two “secondary” ends (mutual help and the remedy for concupiscence)."
Procreation as the goal, mutual help and the REMEDY FOR CONCUPISCENCE as the secondary end. It is possible that remedy for concupiscence has something to do with Paul who says in the Bible that those who cannot be chaste let them marry lest they sin.
I think if the Church is given time she will incorporate new understandings about the good and importance of sexual pleasure (just because it is plesurable emotionally and physically) into her teaching on sex and marriage. Natural law dictates that she should, because the primary reason why human beings have sex so often is pleasure. If it was not pleasant, we might have it as a chore only when we wanted babies. We might even be disgusted by it, and there would be no unitive component to sex.
And there is nothing wrong with that. Sex is good. Pleasure is good. Happiness is good. Things like that make life worth living.
Note also how the early “traditional” understnading mentioned nothing about love, intimacy, emotions etc. It is very like the current understanding mentions so little about sexual pleasure. Look around you, sex drives human life (and animal life for that matter). And it does this because of the extremely powerful physical and emotional sensations people experience during sex.
And I think the reason why these sensations are there is evolution. The propagation of the species IS the focus of evolutionary survival, the genes that made sex pleasurable, that made us “lustful”, that made us good at sex are the genes that survived the most. That is why we desire it so much. People who didn’t like sex or were technical about it got outcompeted by people who had lots of sex and left lots of offspring behind.
Guess whose genes we have now? Guess who our ancestors are? People who didn’t have too much sex and didn’t leave too many offspring behind, or people who were crazy about sex, who were driven by sex, and who left behind the greatest number of offspring?
(Of course there is more to it than that, you have to raise the offspring after you have it for your genes to survive. But sex is still a critical part of it.)
Embrace human nature, don’t seek to suppress it. It’s not healthy and I can’t see it leading anywhere good.
(or for the people who struggle with pure thoughts)
(couldn’t resist).