Why does the Catholic Church consider contraception a sin?

[AdamP88]

Fair enough. But practically speaking, children do impede employment of both parents which is often difficult to do without in the modern world.

Maybe we should be trying to change that.

 

[Rau]

Maybe we should be trying to change that.

I have a friend who contemplates alternative economic systems. Interestingly, the one he comes up with involves an acceptance that there won’t be enough jobs to go round, and the government will need to print money and pay incomes to those without.

 

[Rosebud77]

You sound like you have a sincerely merciful heart, but this is the same attitude that is used to justify abortion and euthanasia, the only difference is the act isn’t as icky" and unpalatable on the surface.

We can not sin under the guise of mercy. We cannot do evil in order to achieve good.

Now you REALLY ARE insulting me. Dear Lord!

If you cannot argue without this kind of insult.?And inaccuracy

No one dies through using a condom . indeed lives are saved.

Reported and added to my blocked sender list.

 

[Rosebud77]

Because the church wants as many catholic babies as possible.

 

[Rosebud77]

We should be teaching these people NFP, which is a method of spacing children that they can use with NO MONEY and will give them great insights into how their body works. Even condoms cost money.

If the problem is that these women have abusive husbands who refuse to use NFP, then giving the women condoms is surely just masking the fact that they are stuck in an abusive relationship and enabling it in a way? It’s like how paedophiles sometimes use abortion to cover up their crimes.

In the case of AIDS and other diseases, these can still be transmitted with condoms; condoms only reduce the risk. If

I fear you have a very naive idea re men and bad husbands. Enabling? Quite the opposite in fact.

And what a terrible comparison to mention paedophiles in the same para as abused women

 

[Rau]

Now you REALLY ARE insulting me. Dear Lord!

If you cannot argue without this kind of insult.?And inaccuracy

No one dies through using a condom . indeed lives are saved.

Reported and added to my blocked sender list.

I think that’s a bit harsh Rosebud. I don’t think Max intended any personal insult. His issue is with the notion that “mercy and kindness” (which are motivations) can be sufficient to justify an act as good. If contraception can be good because “mercy and kindness” motivate it, then so can other acts, including the ones Max quoted (eg, euthanasia).

I presume you accept that euthanasia is wrong and you do not accept that condom/contraceptive use is wrong. That is the key issue here - the motivation of “kindness and mercy” is not relevant to a discussion about whether these acts are in themselves good. A good motivation does not change their intrinsic nature - it cannot, for example, cause an act of contraception to become “good”. The act itself has to be good, and the church teaches that it is not.

So while you may reject the Church’s teaching on the wrongs of contraception, your rationale for rejecting it must not be that it is a “mercy and kindness”, for such reasoning IS regularly used to justify acts such as abortion and euthanasia, as Max said. Such arguments are wrong because good intentions do not assure us of a good act - “the ends do not justify the means”. I think that is Max’s point.

 

[AdamP88]

Now you REALLY ARE insulting me. Dear Lord!

If you cannot argue without this kind of insult.?And inaccuracy

No one dies through using a condom . indeed lives are saved.

Reported and added to my blocked sender list.

Do you get offended by everything?

Maybe you should ask CAF to post trigger warnings?

 

[LightBound]

Now you REALLY ARE insulting me. Dear Lord!

If you cannot argue without this kind of insult.?And inaccuracy

No one dies through using a condom . indeed lives are saved.

Reported and added to my blocked sender list.

Really Rose?? Really???

You seem to have no problem arguing with priests in CAF and insulting them, but you take someone’s post that simply disagrees with you and you have a hissy fit over it? If you can’t handle this forum and what is posted on it that your delicate sensibilities can’t handle, then perhaps you should not engage in such dialogue. You’d do well to follow what the Church teaches and keep your mouth closed if you can’t play nice!!

 

[LightBound]

Now you REALLY ARE insulting me. Dear Lord!

If you cannot argue without this kind of insult.?And inaccuracy

No one dies through using a condom . indeed lives are saved.

Reported and added to my blocked sender list.

Really Rose? If you are upset about that, you best stay off CAF because you are going to find that others DO adhere to Church teaching instead of your way of thinking. Grow up!!

 

[ShrodingersCat]

I fear you have a very naive idea re men and bad husbands. Enabling? Quite the opposite in fact.

And what a terrible comparison to mention paedophiles in the same para as abused women

Well, it was indeed an extreme comparison, but I stand by it. Abusers often use abortion to hide the fact that they are abusing young girls when those girls get pregnant. Don’t you think that women who might be in an abusive relationship should be educated on NFP rather than handed a condom because her husband will not tolerate not being able to have sex whenever he wants? I understand that these women might not be in a position to do anything about it, but giving them a condom because their husband won’t tolerate NFP is tacit to approval for their husband’s behaviour and that does not sit well with me.

 

[Coder]

To the OP, would you rather have a diamond or a zirconium (think about it).

 

[BioNerd]

To the OP, would you rather have a diamond or a zirconium (think about it).

The one that doesn’t come with a baby.

 

[LiamQ]

The one that doesn’t come with a baby.

Abstinence?

 

[Maximilan_Kolbe]

Now you REALLY ARE insulting me. Dear Lord!

If you cannot argue without this kind of insult.?And inaccuracy

No one dies through using a condom . indeed lives are saved.

Reported and added to my blocked sender list.

Oh please. I doubt anyone saw this post as an insult. I even stressed that you seem to have a merciful heart. Clearly the moderators saw no insult, as there was none. But you can’t justify what the Church has deemed wrong by using random circumstances and context. We as Catholics need not overthink our faith. Where the Church has spoken definitively, we obey. My time and energy is better spent pondering questions that the Church, through the Holy Spirit (far wiser than me), has not answered.

If you don’t want to discuss issues (nicely, by the way), why post at all?

 

[BioNerd]

Abstinence?

So far and IUD + a condom have working out perfectly.

 

[mvercimak]

In reviewing this thread since my last reply I keep seeing the argument that contraception is a sin because the Church says so. This is circular reasoning. One reply even completed the circle by asserting ‘the church said so because contraception is a sin.’ These arguments are not only logical fallacies but prevent any progress in the discussion. Humanae Vitae addressed this issue in 1968. This was, however, an encyclical letter not an ex cathedra declaration. Although authoritative and binding on the faithful it could still be modified, expanded further even abrogated by a present or future pontiff.

The argument that contraceptives interfere with a “natural process” seem to be what people keep coming back to. Checking your daily temp, examining the viscosity of your vaginal discharge etc. for the specific purpose of dramatically decreasing the chances that intercourse will result in pregnancy certainly is not ‘natural’. It is confusing and confounding the natural process-sexual relations-that has as its natural end conception. It is at least as unnatural a using a mechanical barrier to decrease the chances of pregnancy.

 

[Rau]

In reviewing this thread since my last reply I keep seeing the argument that contraception is a sin because the Church says so. This is circular reasoning. One reply even completed the circle by asserting ‘the church said so because contraception is a sin.’ These arguments are not only logical fallacies but prevent any progress in the discussion. Humanae Vitae addressed this issue in 1968. This was, however, an encyclical letter not an ex cathedra declaration. Although authoritative and binding on the faithful it could still be modified, expanded further even abrogated by a present or future pontiff.

The argument that contraceptives interfere with a “natural process” seem to be what people keep coming back to. Checking your daily temp, examining the viscosity of your vaginal discharge etc. for the specific purpose of dramatically decreasing the chances that intercourse will result in pregnancy certainly is not ‘natural’. It is confusing and confounding the natural process-sexual relations-that has as its natural end conception. It is at least as unnatural a using a mechanical barrier to decrease the chances of pregnancy.

The teaching of the church on contraception is infallibly taught by virtue of consistent teaching by the ordinary magisterium. It cannot be abrogated. Very little has been taught by ex-cathedra statement because there has been no need for it. HV did not establish this teaching. It reiterated it and presented it in fresh terms.

The “unnaturalness” in question is the corruption of the sexual act, and the use of our sexual faculties, to exclude what is an essential element of it - it’s ordering toward procreation. It is inherently “unnatural” to do that given the very nature of our bodies and their sexual function. A condom removes that aspect, whereas intercourse during an infertile time does not. Conversely, it is not unnatural for us - intelligent, planning creatures that we are - to (seek to) know the state of our fertility, and to use that knowledge with a view to family planning, and whether we do that by casual observation or computer is of no relevance.

 

[mvercimak]

The teaching of the church on contraception is infallibly taught by virtue of consistent teaching by the ordinary magisterium. It cannot be abrogated. Very little has been taught by ex-cathedra statement because there has been no need for it. .

Really? Consider these two statements by the ‘magisterium’:

The proposition that the Earth is not the center of the world and immovable but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false philosophically and theologically considered at least erroneous in faith.
Pope Urban VIII papal condemnation of Galileo June 22,1633

Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture…

— Pope John Paul II, L’Osservatore Romano N. 44 (1264) Apology to Galileo– November 4, 1992

In the intervening 350 between these two diametrically opposite teachings of the Church. the books by Galileo, Copernicus and Kelper were banned by the church and anyone who dared to ponder or even read a book that suggested the sun did not orbit around the earth committed a grave and serious sin. At the least he had to confess that sin to a priest and if ‘unrepentant’ was liable to torture and excommunication.

There are many more examples of the church changing its teaching:

The First Council of Orange forbidding the ordination of deaconesses in 441 after they had been hundreds of them over the centuries instructing catechumens, administering baptisms and other sacraments.

The treatment of the aboriginal children in Australia, sanctioning certain kinds of slavery etc. This is one of my favorites:

Urban VIII issued a 1624 papal bull that made the use of tobacco in holy places punishable by excommunication;[9] Pope Benedict XIII would repeal the ban one hundred years later.

When the ‘magisterium’ speaks all that means is that for right now we (the Church) are using our power to ‘bind and loosen’ to declare something a sin. Next week or next year or maybe in 350 years or so we may again exercise our ‘bind and loosen’ authority to change it.

 

[mvercimak]

[The “unnaturalness” in question is the corruption of the sexual act, and the use of our sexual faculties, *to exclude what is an essential element of it - it’s ordering toward procreation. It is inherently “unnatural” to do that given the very nature of our bodies and their sexual function.
Let me now address this part of your reply. You use words like “corruption” and “unnatural” without qualification as if it is obvious to everyone that what is essentially your opinion is a fact. These words have indefinite meanings and meanings which change over time, context and by virtue of who is using them. My opinion is that NFP is more unnatural than a condom. Yours apparently is the opposite. The “naturalness” of something is a matter of opinion and therefor not something we can invoke to prove contraception is moral or immoral.

 

[Rau]

Really? Consider these two statements by the ‘magisterium’:

The proposition that the Earth is not the center of the world and immovable but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false philosophically and theologically considered at least erroneous in faith.
Pope Urban VIII papal condemnation of Galileo June 22,1633

Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture…

— Pope John Paul II, L’Osservatore Romano N. 44 (1264) Apology to Galileo– November 4, 1992

In the intervening 350 between these two diametrically opposite teachings of the Church. the books by Galileo, Copernicus and Kelper were banned by the church and anyone who dared to ponder or even read a book that suggested the sun did not orbit around the earth committed a grave and serious sin. At the least he had to confess that sin to a priest and if ‘unrepentant’ was liable to torture and excommunication.

There are many more examples of the church changing its teaching:

The First Council of Orange forbidding the ordination of deaconesses in 441 after they had been hundreds of them over the centuries instructing catechumens, administering baptisms and other sacraments.

The treatment of the aboriginal children in Australia, sanctioning certain kinds of slavery etc. This is one of my favorites:

Urban VIII issued a 1624 papal bull that made the use of tobacco in holy places punishable by excommunication;[9] Pope Benedict XIII would repeal the ban one hundred years later.

When the ‘magisterium’ speaks all that means is that for right now we (the Church) are using our power to ‘bind and loosen’ to declare something a sin. Next week or next year or maybe in 350 years or so we may again exercise our ‘bind and loosen’ authority to change it.

The church has no teaching capacity in matters of science. The present pope has spoken about global warming too - his thoughts have merit but, as to whether the earth is warming, his opinion is no better than yours.