The Glory of God Revealed in the Human Body
by Dave Sloan
A Catholic, Christian view of sexuality, including the question of contraception.
Our society careens between the extremes of seeming to be obsessed with sex, and then claiming that it's really no big deal. What gives? Which is it? It might come as a surprise to some to find that Christianity teaches that sex is actually far more important than anyone in the secular world would conceive.
When shared in fully, by a husband and wife, sex is actually a prefigurement of, even a participation in, the ecstasy of the nuptial union we are called to experience with our Lord in paradise. Ephesians Chapter 5 tells us that the union of man and wife is a sign of the union of Christ and his Church. Revelation describes the wedding feast of the Lamb with his Bride, made ready in her fine linens, bright and pure, for the linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. (Rev. 19:7-8). The Greek term for Revelation, Apocalypsis, actually means "unveiling," and specifically refers to the moment when the Bridegroom removes the veil from his bride, at the moment of the consummation of their union.
It is the nuptial union of Adam and Eve from which we descend, and a nuptial union in Heaven toward which we tend. In between these nuptial mysteries is played out the entire saga, all of the beauty and the pathos, of every human life.
There are times in all of our lives when we find ourselves caught up in the wonder and awesomeness, even the fearfulness, of our very existences. At births, funerals, and other instances of particular tenderness or difficulty, this natural world is cracked open, and the supernatural comes flooding into our consciences. We confront the timeless questions--what is this life, after all, and what is my place in it? Who, when all is stripped down to the very nakedness of being, am I? How and why did I come to be?
This great wonder we all experience regarding our origins and our identities is bound up with sex. When we encounter all of the myriad mysteries pertaining to our sexuality, we are simultaneously encountering the mystery by which we were brought into being. Though much will remain veiled in mystery so long as we live in this world, much as well of what we long to know is revealed, many of our most profound questions answered, in the language spoken by our bodies, the language of our sexuality, written by the great author Himself in the very beginning. If we will but listen, we can hear and understand so much; if we will but look, we can receive from our creator the gift of a wisdom of surpassing beauty--and we too can learn to speak this language, the language of the love that can grow up between a man and a woman who recognize God in their longing for one another.
God's revelation of himself to us in scripture begins almost immediately by addressing the transcendent nature our sexuality. We are not merely persons. We are men and women, sexual creatures from the beginning: "In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" [Gen 1:27]. Immediately after our creation we receive our first command from God, to give ourselves to one another so completely that we become one flesh, participating in the creation of new human persons with souls destined to live forever [Gen 1:28, 2:24].
Our Triune God is a life-giving communion of persons. We, as men and women, are called to submit our sexuality to God's plan in such a way that we too become life-giving communions of persons. In this way we are truly "his image" here in this world.
Clearly, both the unitive, or bonding, and the procreative aspects of our sexuality are given to us by God from the very beginning. It is God's plan that once he has made the first man, and the first woman, every single man and woman created will be a product of our sexuality. God has determined that through our sexuality we will image him not only in our oneness, but in our fruitfulness as well.
For any creature, there is no greater good than to be created. God in his unlimited love and wisdom has determined that sex will be the means by which our greatest good, our creation, is brought about. For this reason, when God's plan for our sexuality is violated, the damage can threaten our very beings. The shame felt over illicit sex can shatter our personalities, seemingly beyond repair--as when the psalmist exclaims, "I am like a dish that is broken." [Ps 31:12]
On the opposite end of the spectrum from this despair lies chastity, which I like to define as "submitting our sexuality to the Lord." The chaste person stands upon a sure foundation, knowing that his or her very existence at its core is in harmony with what the Lord intended at the moment we were brought into existence.
This is why people whose hearts are pure exude such loving-kindness. Charity is the virtue closest to chastity. Chastity is a participation in the Lord's gift of life to us. He gave us life through sex. When we live chaste lives (and I mean both in and out of marriage, according to the definition above), we are able most purely to receive and to give the life we have been given, both the natural life, and the supernatural life.
Love, real love, is always a life-giving communion of persons. We do well to remember this, given all of the confusion in our world today about what love really is. Real love is always giving, and what it gives is life. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" [John 3:16].
Therefore, Catholics believe that licit sex is both unitive and procreative, and that every sexual act must be open to life. This brings us to the necessary discussion of contraception, which requires some explanation.
THE CATHOLIC UNDERSTANDING OF CONTRACEPTION
Many people today, even many well-meaning Christians, believe it acceptable to artificially controvert the life-giving aspect of our sexuality. This has been condemned as a great evil from the very beginning of God's covenant with his people. The sin of Onanism, who spilled his seed on the ground so as not to procreate [Gen. 38:9], was paid for by Onan with his life. This sin has been understood for thousands of years to have been a sin of contraception.
Until 1930 every major Christian church, teacher, writer, and preacher, including all of the Catholic Fathers and Protestant reformers, taught that contraception is a gravely disordered act against God's sovereignty.
Three decades of intense activism by Margaret Sanger and her Birth Control League at the beginning of the Twentieth Century began to erode this united front. Sanger relentlessly pressed for the scientific construction of the master race, using sterilization to prevent the lower, "feeble-minded," races from breeding, while using more selective birth control to set the intelligentsia free to enjoy unrestricted sexual activity without the constraints of what she considered to be excessive childbearing and rearing. (See Sanger's "The Pivot of Civilization," available free of charge at www.gutenberg.org.)
Her eugenics theories achieved widespread popularity during the 1920's, and led to the 1930 decision of the Lambeth Conference of the Church of England to break with every other Christian authority and determine in favor of contraception in certain extraordinary cases. After Hitler's holocaust, the Birth Control League changed its, now stigmatized, eugenics rhetoric, changed its name to Planned Parenthood, and continued its battles until every major Christian Church save the Catholic had accepted its contraceptive tenets.
With the encyclical "Humanae Vitae," in 1968, Pope Paul VI confirmed the unchanging and unchangeable teaching of the Catholic Church on this matter, and prophesied that contraception would lead to increases in divorce, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, pornography, and every form of degradation of women. These prophesies have been fulfilled to the very letter. It is statistically provable, as we'll see in a moment, that contraception does in fact lead to dramatic increases in these, the very evils it is supposed to relieve.
In 1992, the Supreme Court of the United States, in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, ruled that abortion must be legal, because contraception is legal and widespread. The majority opinion stated that, "for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail" (emphasis mine).
The dilemma is that, on the one hand, contraception has given people the expectation that they ought to be able to have sex without having children. On the other hand, the combination of frequent contraceptive failure and dramatic increases in promiscuity has led to a skyrocketing increase in the numbers of unwanted pregnancies. The obvious and necessary solution, so the Supreme Court ruled, is abortion.
Some of the most popular forms of contraception, including "the pill," Norplant, Depo-Provara, and of course the "morning after pill," actually function in many cases as abortifacients. In practice, there is no meaningful line of demarcation between abortion and such forms of contraception. The Catholic Church agrees with the US Supreme Court that contraception and abortion are ethically, morally, and biologically bound together as one issue.
The "contraceptive mentality," is premised upon several critical fallacies which I will briefly address. As I mentioned earlier, it was assumed in the 1960's that the great new age of contraceptive technology would bring about enormous improvements in the lives of women and families. Many of these assumptions appeared quite reasonable on the surface and at the time. For starters, most people assumed that the number of unwanted pregnancies would be reduced. No one, except the Catholic Church, predicted that birth control would lead to enormous, almost inconceivable, increases in the number of unwanted pregnancies. In 1960, before the contraceptive revolution, the illegitimacy rate in America was under 5%. Today in a culture drenched in contraceptives, where they are handed out like candy, the out of wedlock birthrate is over 32%, and there are urban communities where the rate actually hits and surpasses 80%.
It was also assumed that contraceptives would keep couples from rushing into immature marriages, or from suffering the pressures of too many children. These factors, most people assumed, would lead to a decrease in the divorce rate. Pope Paul VI assured us that the opposite would take place. The Catholic Church has not been surprised by the catastrophes, including that of a fifty percent divorce rate, inflicted upon families by the contraceptive mentality.
We were told that condoms would prevent diseases. We have seen instead the explosion of so many horrific diseases. All around us scores of millions of American women are silently suffering the effects of Human Papilloma Virus, and Herpes, neither of which is preventable with condoms, and which are wreaking havoc upon all aspects of the reproductive systems of their victims.
Across the continent of Africa, millions and tens of millions, soon to be over 50 million people, are infected with AIDS, and are beginning to cry out "enough," to those who seek to inundate them with HUNDRED OF MILLIONS, even BILLIONS more condoms.
The contraceptive mentality, that is, the mentality of promiscuity, is driving the epidemic growth of this disease. The numbers both of deaths and of condoms distributed continue to grow astronomically higher in tandem, as two twin pillars of evil. The horror of the lost lives, and of the children orphaned by the millions, is at last compelling public health officials in Ghana, Rwanda, and South Africa to launch nationwide campaigns calling for a return to virtue, to chastity, as the only hope to stop the murderous rampage of sexually transmitted disease. (Visit http://allafrica.com/stories/200211190694.html for more about Ghana's Miss Virgin HIV/AIDS Ambassador Pageant.)
We were told that contraceptives would set women free to be themselves. No longer enslaved to bearing and raising too many children, women would pursue their true identities. Unfortunately, what we have seen instead is an insidious and massively successful assault upon the very identity of femininity itself. Women have been taught that they are now free to use men sexually, even as men were free to use them for so long.
Women are being encouraged to eradicate the best of what it means to be female, that is, to give and nurture life, and replace it with the worst of what it means to be male, that is, to take, to dominate, and to use. The contraceptive mentality has led to the masculinization of women. Equal rights has come to mean that women can be like men in every area, from their careers to their sports to their casual sex without consequence. Meanwhile the life-giving and nurturing qualities of femininity, upon which we as a society depend for our very humanity, are being maligned at every turn. This mentality is leading toward a world with no nuns, no nurses, no women who believe they will find a man who will cherish, protect, and provide for them and their children with courage, faithfulness, and tenderness, 'till death do us part.
Has freedom for women been the consequence of all this? Quite the contrary, women have been victimized more than ever by adultery; they have been divorced, abandoned with their children. They have been degraded by the two new pornographies of the contraceptive era, the one spreading its tentacles relentlessly across the face of the mainstream culture as we speak, and the brutal, unspeakably dehumanizing pornography growing at the speed of broadband just beneath the surface of prime-time culture. This new evil, unlike any the world has ever seen, is preparing soon, very soon, to explode like a two hundred million dollar a year bomb planted boldly right in the middle of our society, distributed by every major media conglomerate and sponsored by many of the largest corporations in America.
Such has been and continues to be the fruit of the tree of contraception.
Next, the contraceptive mentality fosters the horrendous notion that, as the world is dangerously overcrowded, the birth of a child is an inherently bad thing. The fact of the matter is that the world, including its most habitable climes, is almost empty. A simple trip in a car or, better yet, an airplane, proves this conclusively. Overpopulation is an outlandish lie. I've looked out the windows of planes up and down the supposedly "highly populated" Eastern States of America, and most of the land is simply not populated at all. I bicycled from Atlanta to Los Angeles. The Southern and particularly Southeastern United States feature some of the most livable geography on earth. And I assure you, it was a lonely trip. Those states are almost entirely empty. The Lord commanded us to be fruitful and multiply, and to fill the earth. We are a long, long, long way from fulfilling that command. (See photographic proof at visibleearth.nasa.gov.)
All of the population of the world today could fit in the State of Texas, and every person would have over a thousand square feet of living space. And thanks to modern technology, the world has more food and more of just about every other significant resource per person than we've ever had before.
Thomas Malthus, the demographer who started the great scare about world overpopulation, has been proven the most erroneous of any prognosticator in the history of science. And still, the powerful propaganda of the population explosion/anti-child forces holds great sway in the minds of millions today. We've all seen drawings of a globe with people falling off of it, and that foolishness is taken very seriously by an enormous number of people who just don't know better.
In China even to this day the government forcibly aborts mothers who bear more than their one or two allotted children, and infanticide results in 116 boys per 100 girls who are allowed to live. But fly over China in an airplane, or look at the website mentioned above, and you'll see that the whole darn country is just about empty. The problem is not too many children. The problem is too little love. As Mother Teresa said, "How can you say there are too many children? That's like saying there are too many flowers."
When we have plenty of resources for the kids, and the kids are deprived of what they need, it is simply insane to blame the kids.
Children, as both the Old and New Testaments make repeatedly clear, are a great blessing from God, and happy he whose quiver is full of them [Psalm 127:4-5]. When we allow the culture to begin to disdain the birth of a child, and when we participate in that disdain, we are practicing perhaps the gravest conceivable form of idolatry. From the beginning, our first instruction from our Creator, is to participate with him in the creation of life.
Another set of fallacies pertains to the practice of using the natural periods of fertility to regulate childbirth. Some would claim it doesn't work. But the truth is that "natural family planning," as understood and practiced today, is rated the most effective means of regulating childbirth available today (98.5% effective) by the World Health Organization. (For more information, visit the Protestant website for natural family planning, at www.sweeterthanhoney.org.)
Some would hold that abstinence for a week or so each month is simply not possible. If this were true, though, how could men be expected to be faithful before and after childbirth, or while traveling or otherwise separated? If this periodic abstinence were not possible, how could we be expected to be chaste throughout our entire single lives? We know better. We know that with the Lord's mercy, chastity, and periodic abstinence as well, are eminently possible.
Some say there is no moral difference between contraception and natural family planning, as the result is the same. That is like saying there is no difference in buying a car and stealing one, as the result is the same. While the most natural course for married couples is to be charitable in bringing forth children into the world, there can be legitimate reasons why a couple might need to postpone pregnancy. How this is achieved is as important as whether it is achieved. Just as how one acquires a car, that is, whether one pays for it or steals it, is just as important as whether one acquires a car.
In truth, there is an enormous chasm between conforming our lives and desires to God's order for fertility, and seeking to remake our fertility according to our own plan. I must tell you that I've known many women who married faithful Catholic men who respect them and their bodies according to the Lord's order. I have watched these women become marvelously more beautiful through the love of husbands who conform sexual desire to the God-given and miraculous rhythms of a woman's body.
It is not hard to tell who is ordering their sexuality to God's plan, and who is practicing the idolatry of scientifically restructuring their sexuality according to man's plan. Just look at the fruits. One the most compelling fruits I've seen is the blossoming beauty of women whose husbands refuse to use them sexually according to the disorder of contraception.
Sex which is artificially separated from God's plan for marriage is sex which cannot and does not consummate the bond of marriage. Not only does such sex deny the fundamental command and plan of God for our sexuality, but it actually erects a barrier between husband and wife. God intends sex to be complete self-giving. Contracepting says, in effect, "I give myself to you, but with reservations." Even worse, contracepting says "no" to God's sovereignty over our sexuality.
The contraceptive mentality is the mentality that not only places the self first, but exists along a continuum, at the end of which is the ultimate idolatry--an idolatry that seeks to recreate the human race not in God's image, but in the image of our own desires.
A war is being waged in our society between the Gospel of Life and the Culture of Death. At ground zero is the battle for the dignity of women, and particularly for the dignity of the woman's body. God determined that through a woman's body human life would enter the world. The evil one is having great success convincing both men and women that a woman's body is not a source of life according to God's plan, but that it is merely a thing to be used. Those who contracept, even in marriage, are furthering that evil plan, at the end of which is every form of manipulation of the procreative process.
Many modern scientists tell us that we can destroy life when it is most vulnerable. They tell us that we can make remake life, no longer in God's image, but in the image of our own desires, in test tubes, in artificial wombs, with altered genetics, using cloned combinations of humans and other animals, etcetera.
What the Catholic Church teaches against these evils is consistent, systematic, reasonable, and imbued with the glory of God's unchanging truth, written in the depths of each of our hearts. It is premised upon embracing the dignity of every human person, and particularly the God-given and indissolubly bound unitive and procreative aspects of the nuptial union of those persons.
Many great teachers, including St. Paul (I Thess 4:1-12) Augustine, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, and The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2518), have taught that charity and chastity are mystically bound to one another in the deepest possible way. Charity is the surely the virtue most needed for us to bring forth, open our hearts to, and live our lives for children, rather than devoting ourselves ceaselessly to our own desires. Charity is also what we receive from children. They soften our hearts; they transform us; they make us what we must be if we are to be fit for paradise (Mat. 19:14).
A nuptial union which is open to children has the characteristics both of charity and chastity. This is the union for which we long. Contracepted sex does not simply lack this character, but actually rejects it.
Married people must trust that God can grant them the charity needed in order to bear and raise children, and that he can grant them the chastity needed to remain abstinent during periods of fertility. They must pray that God will grant them wisdom to discern which graces they are being offered during the various stages of their lives together.
They must implore him with confidence, knowing that our heavenly Father will not fail to pour out his graces in superabundance upon all who seek and do his will.
Through Christ we have the power to find our true identities, as children of the living God, and to bring forth more children to fill the earth now, and paradise forever, joining with us and the Heavenly Hosts in the great wedding feast of the Lamb. This is the glory of human sexuality.
For more information you can find "Humanae Vitae" at www.vatican.va, and I recommend as well Janet Smith's talk, "Contraception: Why Not," the transcript of which can be found at www.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/264/contraception-whynot.htm. The tape of her talk is free at www.catholicfreebies.com Many of my ideas (the better ones) are taken from the Pope John Paul II's Love and Responsibility and The Theology of the Body. Highlights from those texts and links to the publishers, along with more of my writings, can be found at www.purelove.net.
