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Why is the Church opposed to contraceptive use? And what is Natural Family Planning (NFP)?

The Church has always taught that contraception (and, for that matter, abortion) is a sin, with statements to this effect being found in such first century documents as the Didache and the Epistle to Barnabas. Basically, contraception strikes at both the purpose and meaning of marriage—and hence of sexual intercourse—which are procreation and loving intimacy, respectively. Sexual intercourse is the physical expression, consummation, and renewal of the marital vows to to be fruitful with and faithful to each other. Using contraception artificially hinders or suppresses procreation, and so strikes at the purpose of marriage. It moreover means either a withholding of a part of the self from one's spouse, or a rejection of a part of the spouse's person, namely, his or her fertility. This withholding or rejection strikes at the meaning of marriage by essentially saying, "I love you so much, but not more," and "This is my body, which is not given up for you." It is a rejection of Saint Paul's instruction that husbands and wives should love each other "as Christ loved His Church" (Ephesians 5:25).

Natural Family Planning (NFP) is the morally licit means of delaying (or spacing) children, and it essentially involves abstaining from sexual relations during the fertile period of a woman's natural cycle. There are several methods of NFP—ranging from the Creighton method to the Marquette method to the sympto-thermal method—and when practiced correctly these are actually more effective at delaying pregnancy than most common forms of birth control—excluding essentially surgical sterilization—and it is also more effective in its typical (not 100% correct) use than most contraceptives under their typical uses. NFP typically fosters patience, a strengthening of non-physical and also physical intimacy, and better communication between spouses, which results in happier and healthier marriages, and fewer divorces: ~2% for NFP-practicing couples vs ~50% for the population as a whole.

Tags: RCIA-Question-Box

What is a patron saint? What is a saint? Who is your favorite?

A saint is basically anybody who lives happily for eternity with God in heaven. The Baltimore Catechism # 1 (and 2) question 6 asks, "Why did God make you?" It answers by saying that "God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next." Thus, it is proper to say that our purpose in life is to become saints, and that the purpose of the Church is to help us to do this.

A part of the way which the Church does this for us is to point to certain people who have gone on before us in the faith. These people have lived holy and virtuous lives, and so are held up to us as "role-models" in the faith. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul advises them (and us) to "Take me as your example, just as I have taken Christ for mine" (1 Corinthians 11:1). The Church is therefore following the apostle's advice and holding up the lives of her holy men and women for us to take as "examples" of how to "live in Christ."

Thus, some of those who are in heaven now are revealed to the Church as "good examples". These people are the beatified or canonized saints: the people who we call "Blessed" or "Saint" (respectively). Thus, we have Blessed John Paul II, Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, or Blessed Duns Scotus; or Saint Dominic, Saint Paul, Saint Martha, Saint Mary Magdalene, etc. These people show us the many ways of living a holy and Christ-filled life which we might learn from and imitate.

Besides being good role-models, the saints are our intercessors (1 Timothy 2:1-4). They are the "cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1), and the righteous whose prayer "has great power in its effects" (James 5:16). We can in principle ask any one of the saints to pray for us—as we do in our litany at the end of each RCIA session—and some of the saints have additionally become attached to particular causes. For example, Saint Anthony (of Padua) is the patron saint of lost items. Next time you lose your car keys, ask for Saint Anthony's intercession. Or next time you have a sore throat, you might petition Saint Blaise, and Saint Theresa if you have a headache. It may also be worth developing a relationship with one or two "personal" patrons: especially since at some point you will get to pick a confirmation saint.

For what it's worth, mine is Saint James the Greater, in part because my first name is James and in part because he is one of my favorites: the first apostle to be martyred, one of Jesus "inner circle" of apostles, and sometimes symbolizing the virtue of hope. Plus, he's depicted holding a sword, because he was beheaded. Some of my other favorites are Saint Dominic—founder of my order—Saint Thomas Aquinas (the greatest Philosopher ever), Saint Albert the Great (patron of scientists), and Saint Athanasius (who stood against the world for the Faith).

Tags: RCIA Catechesis Question

A while back I wrote a speculative post for the Nicene Guys about the possibility of infant salvation. The point of the post was that many people--Catholic and Protestant alike, and the detractors of both in common especially--have this idea that all unbaptized infants must be hell-bound. Some have speculated on the existence of Limbo: Dante, for example, placed it as the first circle of Hell, to which went not only unbaptized infants but also all those who lived worthy lives before the time of Christ; and C.S. Lewis alludes to it in his Screwtape Letters as a sort of state below consciousness to which the unbaptized infants slip, experiencing neither happiness nor sorrow. Our Holy Father has long since approved the suggestion that the speculations of Limbo ought to go by the wayside, that there is yet hope for the salvation of the unborn or unbaptized.

So, what of it? It's a question which comes up in the RCIA sessions--we've taken time to discuss this at least twice at some length. What hope is there for those infants who die unbaptized? The feast of the Holy Innocents is three days after Christmas, which seems fitting to me. After all, these were infants who were unbaptized, and yet are venerated by the Church as martyrs, as they have been since the time of the early Church. They were the first Christian martyrs, "witnesses" for Christ; but persecution is not the only form of witness, and God's mercy is wide indeed.

Tags: Short-Reflection Hope Salvation Saints

Today on the VirtuousPla.net blogs, my co-blogger Miss Anna Williams discusses the relationship between education and virtue. In summary: being more educated does not make a person more virtuous. I agree with her assessment if we take education to mean "getting a higher degree" and all of the learning which goes with it. But learning is not the same thing as education. A truly well-rounded education is one in which a person learns (strengthening the intellect) but also attempts to inculcate virtue (strengthens the will).

Now, of course, we don't just gain virtue on our own, but rather it helps to have teachers and peers who will help us to attain virtue. More importantly still, at least three of the virtues--the most important three--come from God, so we need God's grace, too. But at the very least, a proper education teaches us that we should try to be virtuous and that we should desire to be virtuous. To be sure, the rest is on us (to pray for God's grace, and then to cooperate with it when we receive it) and on God (to grant us grace--which He will always do when we need it).

With that said, I think it is actually arguable that, in our current “educational” climate at most universities, getting a degree can lead to a person’s becoming less virtuous. After all, there is one way in which knowledge is related to virtue: if we don’t know what “being virtuous” is, then we won’t be able to be virtuous even if we want to. Most people have some sort of moral compass, but it can be subverted; and all too often, it is subverted by the sheer propaganda which students are fed both in-class and out of class at their university of choice (which unfortunately includes some ostensibly Catholic universities). A person who wants to be good but whose conscience is convinced that evil things are good will not necessarily tend to be good. Propaganda--unworthy of the name "education"--can thwart us in our attempt to become virtuous, be it by convincing us that some things are virtuous which are not (and vice versa), or by alternatively convincing us that we ought not be virtuous.

Luckily, grace can work with even this. Unfortunately, a lot of people won’t cooperate with this grace. Still, we all ultimately desire what we believe is good, even if our beliefs are mistaken, perverted, or disordered. God is willing and able to work with that, too.

Tags: Virtue Morality Education Philosophy

Note: This is part one of a series of five posts about God. These were originally written as an RCIA presentation about God the Father. These posts are in an expanded form, and the presentation as given does not necessarily follow the posts exactly. I was constrained in the presentation itself to keep the time to under about 45 minutes or so, and to be somewhat conversational (sine it was their first formal session). Here is the full written transcript, which goes beyond what I did in the presentation.

In their Handbook for Christian Apologetics, Professors Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli (S.J.) present twenty different arguments for the existence of God. These range from physical to psychological, and form historical to relatively modern: and different of these ways of knowing that God exists will be helpful to different types of people. I want to begin today by outlining briefly a few of these as a sort of extension of the last two of your reflection questions, because each of these arguments also tells us something about God.

Read the rest at the Nicene Guys Site.

Tags: Catechesis Theology RCIA Philsophy Apologetics

G.K. Chesterton's Lepanto wrote: The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes, And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise, And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room, And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom, And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee

Mark Shea arguably saved the most important book of his Marian trilogy for the end. In his first two volumes of Mary, Mother of the Son, Mr Mark Shea has made the case that Catholic piety and teaching towards Mary come not from pagan sources, but rather from sacred Tradition, and that the particular Marian Dogmas are not just about Mary, but about Christ, His Church, and the destiny of mankind. Now, in the conclusion to his apologetics trilogy, he gives us "Miracles, Devotion, and Motherhood." Whereas the previous two volumes were concerned with defending the Catholic teachings and piety surrounding our Lady, the third volume is more dedicated to the practice and meaning of those devotions in the life of the Church.

This is not to say that there aren't some corruptions of Marian devotion. This, Mr Shea acknowledges; indeed, he looks at a specific corruption--this one by an ELCA Lutheran parish--in which the "trappings of of the faith" (in this case, the rosary) are turned to idol-worship. Ebenezer Lutheran Church in San Francisco hosts a "Goddess Rosary" service, in which are prayed the "Our Mother" (a distortion of the Our Father) and a decade of "Hail Goddess" (a corruption of the "Hail Mary").

Read the rest at the Nicene Guys site.

Tags: Our-Lady Apologetics Books

In the first volume of Mary, Mother of the Son, Mr Mark Shea addressed the sources from which the Church developed her teachings concerning Our Lady (or anything else, for that matter). Now, in the second volume, titled First Guardian of the Faith, he now sets his sights on four of the 5 Marian dogmas* of the Church: Theotokos (God-bearer), Mary's Perpetual Virginity, her Immaculate Conception, and her Assumption (Body and Soul) into heaven at the end of her life. Here, he gives a cogent defense of these dogmas by explaining how the doctrines have developed, examining some scriptures which hint at these dogma, and by rebutting Protestant readings of select verses which seem to counter these dogma.

Concerning these alleged proof-texts, Mr Shea states at the outset that

Quote: Marian dogmas are not derived from Scripture. They are, rather, reflected there. That is, they're what you get when you read Scripture through the lens of the apostolic Tradition as preserved by the Spirit-guided Body of Christ in union with the bishops and pope in succession from the apostles. In short, they have the same descent as the canon of Scripture itself, the doctrine of the Trinity, the rejection of polygamy, and the teaching that human life is sacred from the moment of conception. To reject such teaching, it's not sufficient to show that it's not absolutely in Scripture alone, since none of the teachings I just mentioned earlier are, either. Rather, one must show that Scripture clearly and unequivocally contradicts it. And, as we shall show, not only is there no place where Scripture clearly and unequivocally contradicts Catholic Marian teaching, there are actually many places where the Bible bears surprising witness to it.

One theme in the first volume is that Our Lady points beyond herself. This theme is taken up again in the First Guardian of the Faith. Every one of the Marian dogmas is literally about Our Lady--but literal is not the only sense in which a doctrine is to be interpreted, though any dogma will have that literal interpretation, too. Thus, for example, Mary's title of Theotokos or "Mother of God" does not mean that she created God; but it does mean that she is the mother of Christ, who was God, and that she bore Him in her womb for nine (or so) months, and that He truly was God during this time--hence Saint Mary really was the God-bearer**. It also means that Christ truly was man, contra Nestorius. But Nestorius, in dividing Christ's humanity form His divinity, effectively destroying the depth of meaning and salvific power of Christ's sacrifice. Here Mr Shea writes:

Quote: See what happens when Nestorius' theory is applied to real life: Jesus becomes unable to save us. Why? Because he's no longer the God-Man, bearing our sins to the cross and rising to give us his divine life. His humanity is effectively cut off from his deity, like two roommates sharing the same apartment, but having nothing in common and nothing to say to each other. The man who died on the cross was not God, but a mere creature occupied by the Logos. The God who occupies that man does not share our nature and therefore can neither die for our sins as a fellow son of Adam, nor share his divine life with us, because he doesn't even share it with the human bio-envelope named Jesus that he was inhabiting.

Read the rest on the Nicene Guys site.

Tags: Our-Lady Apologetics

Quote: The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,/His hair was like a light. (O weary, weary were the world,/But here is all aright.) The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast/His hair was like a star. (O stern and cunning are the kings,/But here the true hearts are.) The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,/His hair was like a fire. (O weary, weary is the world,/But here the world's desire.) The Christ-child stood on Mary's knee,/His hair was like a crown, And all the flowers looked up at Him,/And all the stars looked down A Christmas Poem by G.K. Chesterton

One of the (relatively recent) bones of contention which Protestants have against the Church is her teachings concerning Our Lady. Whether it's over the particular dogmas of the Church concerning Mary (there are five, most modern Evangelical Protestants challenge four of these), the sources for the Church's teachings, or the place of Our Lady in popular Catholic devotion, challenges arise from both curious Protestants and more militant ones. In his Mary, Mother of the Son trilogy, Mr Mark Shea addresses these various challenges.

In the first volume of the series, "Modern Myths and Ancient Truths," Mr Shea seeks to address "the fundamental truths of where the Church gets its teachings about Mary." In particular, he rebuts the claims that the Church gets her teachings from ancient pagan sources, rather than from the teachings handed down by the apostles. In a sense, this volume is a logical continuation of his previous (and quite good) By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition (reviewed here), though "Modern Myths and Ancient Truth" does work as a stand-alone. It is a logical continuation of that previous work in that it examines the source and importance of Tradition, maintaining that Tradition is an important source of revelation in its own right; but in this case the relevant parts of Tradition are more specific, namely, those parts which pertain to our Lady.

He begins his works with a chapter about "pseudo-knowledge," or, as he says, "stuff everybody knows." He contrasts several sources of this pseudo-knowledge, form the poorly catechized Catholics who are ill-prepared to "to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you" (1 Peter 3:15), to confusion experienced by a Protestant on hearing the rosary, to more deliberate attempts at spreading falsehood (e.g. Dan Brown, Jack Chick) about Church teaching and Church history. He also notes the confusion which comes about from simple cultural differences, as for example, the fact that we often hear Evangelical culture (not theology!) expressed in masculine terms but Catholic culture (again, not theology) in feminine terms. An unfortunate result of this is that

Quote: "Before we ever get around to discussing substantial theological disagreements, Catholics and Evangelicals often mistake cultural differences as theological quarrels. Moreover, secular culture (which is hostile to both Catholic and Evangelical Christianity) often compounds the problems by feeding its own stereotypes about both cultures....There are, in additional to this phenomenon, plenty of real theological differences. But still, because this cultural difference is typically not noticed by either party, its sits there quietly operating and producing misunderstandings and feelings of alienation on both sides before the theological discussion ever begins."

Read the rest on the Nicene Guys site.

Tags: Books Apologetics Our-Lady

"As parents, we'd be pretty shoddy if we didn't point out our children's mistakes."

This is an excerpt from a comment on Mr Cristobal Almanza's post concerning "judging" for the Austin Catholic New Media site. It is the most obvious example in which we are called to make a sort of judgment—and then to act upon that judgment. Here a distinction should be made—and Mr Almanza makes such a distinction:

Quote: It is true that we are not called to judge others. We should never judge and personally condemn others to hell, no matter what the situation. That’s no one’s job but God’s, but there are other levels and forms of judgment. In fact, one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit is consel, also known as right judgement (Isaiah 11:1-2)....Judgements from and of Christians should not come out of giving ourselves an ego boost or tearing down another – there is no edification in that. It is out of love that prudent judgement can help guide people out of destructive behaviors or sin. It is because of love that we do not want to see others hurt or fall out of grace. It is also out of concern because we are all on body in Christ and our sins are never isolated.

We should not--ultimately, cannot--judge the soul of another person (see CCC 1861, CCC 1756) . We are not given to know all of the facts, nor is it generally helpful to speculate. The only major caveat is that the Church can judge as to whether a person is known to be in heaven--these are the canonized saints; there are no people held to be definitively condemned to Hell.

With that said, we are called to make moral judgments of the actions (and beliefs, for that matter) of others, be they family, friends, neighbors, or our culture at large. This is doubly true if we are placed in a position of authority over another, as a spiritual director, a priest, a parent, a religious superior, etc. These moral judgments can be done for our own good: after all, if we surround ourselves only with people who have turned away from Truth, have rejected God, have abandoned all morality and every virtue, we run the risk of slowly doing the same. That slow erosion due to peer pressure (let alone due to pressure from “corrupted” authority figures or role models) can be imperceptible, but it is inevitably there. This is perhaps why our Lord warns us to consider the actions of those who we surround ourselves with or look to for guidance: "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matthew 7:16).

It is not only for our own good that we must make these “moral judgements,” these judgments of a person's “fruits.” Especially if we are in the position of some moral or spiritual authority, we must discern wisely. Consider, for example, this passage from the Old Testament:

Quote: "You, son of man, I have appointed watchman for the house of Israel; when you hear me say anything, you shall warn them for me. If I tell the wicked man that he shall surely die, and you do not speak out to dissuade the wicked man from his way, he (the wicked man) shall die for his guilt, but I will hold you responsible for his death. But if you warn the wicked man, trying to turn him from his way, and he refuses to turn from his way, he shall die for his guilt, but you shall save yourself" (Ezekiel 33:7-9).

By our baptisms, we are made prophets, and so this duty of being a spiritual “watchman” given to Ezekiel is given to us, too. Note well, to, that the real duty of the act of “judging”--as with any form of “discernment--is not merely to judge (or discern). This is the mental and spiritual process, but it must be followed by a corporeal action, that is, we must bring the sin to the attention of the sinner (and do so as tactfully as we can). If the sin is a public one--and therefore may be cause for scandal--we must bring it also to the attention of the head of the community (priest, bishop, etc as appropriate), so that he can resolve the issue publicly if necessary. Of course, we should normally go to the individual privately first (see Matthew 18:15-17 for details).

It is therefore not an act of self-righteousness to warn sinners against their sins, be it by instructing or admonishing. Of course we are not called to judge souls, in the sense of condemning them . We are, however, called to warn a soul against damning himself, be he Christian, pagan, atheist, or what have you. It is, after all, a spiritual work of mercy to both admonish sinners and to instruct the ignorant. Charity demands nothing less of us.

-----
If you liked this post or found it helpful, you might also like these other related posts:

"Judge Not" and Mercy (Thirty Minute Musings)
Being Tactful and Being "Nice"
Tolerance, Charity, and Dignity (Nicene Guys)
What Is the Purpose of Morality? Part 1: Right Living (Catholic America Today)
_____
Originally posted on my Equus Nom Veritas blog.

Tags: Philosophy Theology Acts-of-Mercy Catechesis

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