Good question. Some thoughts…
- You MUST read Humanae Vitae. Google it and read it. That is the definitive encyclical by Pope Paul VI that will answer your question at the deepest levels. It’s a surprisingly easy read. By way of prepping you for the document, I offer the following.
- Your question is the secular understanding of what the Catholic Church teaches, based upon…the secular understanding of what the Catholic Church teaches. It’s an echo chamber that reverberates the same distorted message endlessly. So let’s clean up the premise to the argument you made
.
- I agree with what the other post says. Augustine had a primitive understanding of biology, and tried to address faith matters with what was known at the time. Also, simply because he was a saint, does not mean that his understanding was transported out of the times in which he lived. It also does not make his every theological opinion infallible. Only the Magisterium is given that charism.
- We do not take as our starting point the false presupposition that every sperm and every egg are destined for the creation of a new human being. An average ejaculation contains a half-billion sperm cells. Only one gets to be the lucky winner if an egg happens to be in the neighborhood. The remaining 499, 999,999 die. Were they ‘wasted’?
- We take as our starting point that sex has two major functions in marriage:
a.)
UNITIVE. It unites husband and wife in deeper bonds of intimacy and love through the broad spectrum of gentle quiet to ecstasy :egyptian::coolinoff:
b.)
PROCREATIVE. Every occasion of sexual activity needs to climax inside the birth canal. There must be an openness to the possibility of life being transmitted. That does not mean probability. The Church teaches that it is permissible to take advantage of God’s wise design by refraining from sex during those fertile times of the month, and then coming together during the infertile times of the menstrual cycle. The key here that addresses you concern over eggs being wasted is ‘God’s wise design.’ He made the menstrual cycle and its associated functions. Therefore it is good. He did not command to use each cycle as an opportunity to get pregnant.
The unitive and procreative were made to be inextricably intertwined. To artificially tease them apart through contraception is to do violence to both dimensions, as well as doing violence to the nature of one another and the intimacy and responsibility that goes with it. Here I speak as a husband and father. Sex, expressed and engaged in, in both of its dimensions is holy
- The insertion of artificial contraception does violence by rejecting God’s wise design. Barrier methods demolish for the man the sensations offered by the wife’s body. 'Nuff said there. Chemical methods such as spermacides attack the fertility of the husband and are caustic to the vaginal epithelium. Hormonal methods such as the pill prevent implantation of the embryo, thus killing the new baby. These also place women at vastly increased risk of cancers. IUD’s are placed in the uterus and kill new embryos.
All of these say ‘I love you baby, but not your fertility’. It is the beginning of a mentality that implicitly rejects life and actually begins to kill new life in the womb. This is how we richly fertilize the soil for the bumper crop of abortion. 50 million abortions in the US since 1973.
1.8 BILLION (yes BILLION with a B) worldwide since 1960! To put that in perspective, that’s just shy of 1/3 of the world’s current population.
It’s no small coincidence that abortion on this scale has occurred precisely in the same time frame as the introduction of the pill. By rejecting the possbility of life and the resposibility that comes with it, we collapse into narcissism. It’s also no small coincidence that the Church, in 1968, gave us
Humanae Vitae, which is the expression of the clear and constant teaching of the Church from its founding.
I hope that helps.
