Posted on 11/29/2006 10:18:03 AM PST by Alex Murphy
Meeting last month in Baltimore, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a number of statements, including guidelines for the pastoral care of “persons with a homosexual inclination” and an instruction-titled “Happy Are Those Who Are Called to His Supper”-on who should or shouldn’t receive Communion.
Overshadowed in the media reaction to the guidelines and the bishops’ “hard saying” about Communion was Bishop William S. Skylstad’s “Call for Dialogue and Action on Responsible Transition in Iraq.” Skylstad is president of the USCCB and his statement on the war has much to recommend it. Dismissing the idea that there are only two options in Iraq, either “cut and run” or “stay the course,” Skylstad pleads for a “collaborative dialogue that honestly assesses the situation, acknowledges past difficulties and miscalculations, recognizes and builds on positive advances.”
These are sensible recommendations, necessary steps in bringing about a responsible resolution to a tragic and untenable situation. The USCCB would do well to adopt just as sensible a policy in confronting the laity’s doubts about church teaching on the meaning of human sexuality. For instance, 95 percent of married Catholics do not find the teaching on contraception persuasive. And how do the bishops respond? “Stay the course or get out of the Communion line” might be a rough paraphrase of the USCCB statements. Homosexuality is not a sin, write the bishops further, but engaging in homosexual acts is. Increasingly, Catholics find this distinction hard to square with what they know about homosexual persons. The bishops’ response? “Stay the course or get out of the Communion line.”
It is especially disappointing that before issuing their statements, the bishops didn’t bother to listen in any systematic way to either homosexual or married Catholics. If one’s syllogisms are all in order, why bother talking with people who possess such “inclinations,” or who have tried to reconcile the church’s teachings with actual marital life? Instead, the bishops stumbled on the brilliant strategy of reminding the faithful that in the church’s view, resorting to contraception and engaging in homosexual acts are equally “disordered.” Evidently, the bishops believe that equating homosexual acts with a sexual “sin” committed by 95 percent of married Catholics makes their pastoral guidelines “welcoming” to homosexual persons.
Echoing John Paul II’s idiosyncratic “theology of the body,” the USCCB’s statement on “Married Love and the Gift of Life” argues that the use of contraception introduces “a false note” into the spousal sexual relationship. By such acts, the bishops explain, you begin to make yourself “into the kind of person who lies.” When fertility is “suppressed”-rather than merely outwitted through the diagnostic calculations of Natural Family Planning (NFP)-the sexual act becomes “something less powerful and intimate, something more ‘casual.’” Married Catholics may be surprised to learn they are inveterate liars obsessed with having “casual” sex. What is not surprising is how unconvincing the argument for NFP remains. Why is it morally permissible to avoid pregnancy by using NFP, but “disordered” and an “intrinsic evil” to act on the same intention using a different contraceptive method? When the bishops can explain that, perhaps Catholics will resume listening to what they have to say about marital love.
Some outspoken conservative Catholics argue that it was the failure of the bishops to strongly affirm Humanae vitae, and not the teaching itself, that explains the encyclical’s rejection by the laity. Will the condemnation of contraception now be vigorously preached from the pulpit? If so, the effect may be the opposite of what is hoped for. Telling married Catholics that their sexual lives are seriously “disordered” will likely only increase their doubts about the church’s understanding of sexuality, while strengthening the growing moral solidarity felt between heterosexual and homosexual Catholics. Ironically, perhaps that is what the Holy Spirit has been up to at the USCCB. As the saying goes, God writes straight with crooked lines.
The point is that when “stay the course” and “cut and run” are the only alternatives in the battle over human sexuality, too many Catholics will opt for the latter. Just as Iraq requires, in Bishop Skylstad’s formulation, an honest collaborative dialogue-one that “assesses the situation, acknowledges past difficulties and miscalculations...and builds on positive advances”-so too is such a dialogue desperately needed between the laity and the bishops concerning the church’s teachings on sexual morality. The current situation, to adapt Skylstad’s words again, is indeed “taking a terrible toll,” and “moral urgency, substantive dialogue, and new directions” must be found. While “stay the course” is not an option, “cut and run” cannot become the default position. What Catholicism has to teach us about the meaning of sexuality should not be reduced to NFP.
Whoever wrote this is a moron. This is the first remotely correct thing the USCCB has done in decades. Homosexual acts are horribly wrong (nature advises against it) and contraceptives are a very different (and wrong) thing from NFP.
How does what one know about homosexual persons (who can exhibit a wide variety of behaviors and should not be stereotyped) say anything about whether Divine Revelation as handed down in Scripture and the Tradition of the Church from the apostles holds homosexual activity to be sinful. Faith is based on revealed truth, not majority vote. Liberal "Catholics" have no respect for the deposit of faith received from the apostles.
There's a lot of rubbish to address in this post, but I'll confine myself to this one point:
Why is it morally permissible to avoid pregnancy by using NFP, but “disordered” and an “intrinsic evil” to act on the same intention using a different contraceptive method? When the bishops can explain that, perhaps Catholics will resume listening to what they have to say about marital love.
"The bishops" don't have to explain this, because the Supreme Pontiff, who is the bishop of bishops, already has. Pope Paul VI, writing in Humanae Vitae put it this way:
Recourse to Infertile Periods16. Now as We noted earlier (no. 3), some people today raise the objection against this particular doctrine of the Church concerning the moral laws governing marriage, that human intelligence has both the right and responsibility to control those forces of irrational nature which come within its ambit and to direct them toward ends beneficial to man. Others ask on the same point whether it is not reasonable in so many cases to use artificial birth control if by so doing the harmony and peace of a family are better served and more suitable conditions are provided for the education of children already born. To this question We must give a clear reply. The Church is the first to praise and commend the application of human intelligence to an activity in which a rational creature such as man is so closely associated with his Creator. But she affirms that this must be done within the limits of the order of reality established by God.
If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained. (20)
Neither the Church nor her doctrine is inconsistent when she considers it lawful for married people to take advantage of the infertile period but condemns as always unlawful the use of means which directly prevent conception, even when the reasons given for the later practice may appear to be upright and serious. In reality, these two cases are completely different. In the former the married couple rightly use a faculty provided them by nature. In the latter they obstruct the natural development of the generative process. It cannot be denied that in each case the married couple, for acceptable reasons, are both perfectly clear in their intention to avoid children and wish to make sure that none will result. But it is equally true that it is exclusively in the former case that husband and wife are ready to abstain from intercourse during the fertile period as often as for reasonable motives the birth of another child is not desirable. And when the infertile period recurs, they use their married intimacy to express their mutual love and safeguard their fidelity toward one another. In doing this they certainly give proof of a true and authentic love.
The Catholic position with regard to artificial contraception is a matter of simple logic, and depends upon only two premises: 1) God exists; and 2) He is the Author of Life. Human beings do not create life (i.e., it is a misnomer to say that we "make babies"), we merely procreate. We use our free will to decide when to engage in the marital act, but God decides if that act is to result in the conception of a new life or not.
Artificial contraception therefore potentially thwarts God's will to bring a new life into existence, and it should be obvious that it is therefore sinful. In Natural Family Planning, the couple exercises its free will not to engage in intercourse at certain times, so there is no potential for thwarting God's will.
Calvinists, since they reject free will altogether, will no doubt have difficulty with this analysis.
The wealth of misinformation, especially willful misinformation concerning NFP, is especially aggravating. But what else can you expect from the Culture of Death?
"When fertility is “suppressed”-rather than merely outwitted through the diagnostic calculations of Natural Family Planning (NFP)-the sexual act becomes “something less powerful and intimate, something more ‘casual.’”"
There is absolutely no outwitting fertility in NFP, and such a statment is just stupid. NFP teaches and enables you to recognize signs of fertility. Recognition is not outwitting. It is knowledge, something the left fears.
"Married Catholics may be surprised to learn they are inveterate liars obsessed with having “casual” sex."
If they are truly Catholic then they would be surprised and horrified and take steps to understand the Church's liberating teachings when it comes to marital love. Most of society is obessed with casual sex after all.
"What is not surprising is how unconvincing the argument for NFP remains. Why is it morally permissible to avoid pregnancy by using NFP, but “disordered” and an “intrinsic evil” to act on the same intention using a different contraceptive method?"
Well the rest of the paragraph indicates that the author has never even heard the Church's teaching on marial love presented correctly. Or there is culpable ignorance at play. There is no act, when NFP is used to avoid pregnancy, therefore there is no mockery of the life giving love of the Father. It is intrinsically evil to take a natural act and make it unnatural. It is intrinscally evil to accept as a lover most of a person, but not all of a person. To choose not to engage in an act is not the same as the choice to take a natural act and make it unnatural.
"When the bishops can explain that, perhaps Catholics will resume listening to what they have to say about marital love."
Many bishops have, John Paul the Great most certainly did. And you know it, you just choose to not hear.
Oh, BTW, not talking to you Alex, but the idiot author of this article.
See, this is why we need to label satire. (Poke in ribs.)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.