A Pastoral Letter by Bishop Victor Galeone
My brothers and sisters in the Lord,
1. Some state legislatures are presently considering bills that would
redefine marriage as the stable union of any two adults regardless of
gender. Such legislation would equate same-sex unions with traditional
marriage. Furthermore, divorces continue to escalate to the point where
couples may now get a bona fide divorce online for fees ranging from
$50 to $300. These latest developments are mere symptoms of a vastly
more serious disorder. Until the taproot of that disorder is cut, I
fear that we will continue to reap the fruit of failed marriages and
worsening sexual behavior at every level of society. The disorder?
Contraception. The practice is so widespread that it involves 90% of
married couples at some point of their marriage, cutting across all
denominational lines. Since one of the chief roles of the bishop is to
teach, I invite you to revisit what the Church affirms in this area,
and more importantly, why.
I. God’s Plan for Marriage
2.
The vast majority of people today consider contraception a non-issue.
So much so that to label it a disorder sounds like a gross
exaggeration. And to revisit it seems analogous to studying a treatise
from the Flat Earth Society. But contraception is an issue, an
absolutely vital issue. To comprehend why it is wrong, it’s first
necessary to understand what God originally intended marriage to be. In
the opening chapters of Genesis we learn that God himself designed
marriage for a twofold purpose: to communicate life and love.
3.
There are two accounts of creation in the book of Genesis. The first
account occurs in chapter one: “God created man in his own image, in
the image of God he created him: male and female he created them.”
(Gen. 1:27) The next verse contains the very first command given by
God: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” We thus see that
God’s first purpose for marriage is that it be life-giving. Without the
love embrace between husband and wife, human life would cease to exist
on this earth. In the second account of creation in Genesis 2, we learn
that the other purpose God has for marriage is that it be love-giving:
“It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helpmate as
his partner.” (Gen. 2:18) Yes, God meant husband and wife to be
intimate friends, supporting each other in mutual and lasting love.
Accordingly, marriage exists to communicate both life and love.
4.
The two purposes of marriage are so mutually interconnected as to be
inseparable. First, recall that Jesus ruled out the possibility of
divorce by applying these words to the union of husband and wife: "They
are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one ever separate." (Mk 10:8,9) In other words, spouses form an organic
entity, like head and heart—not a mechanical one, like lock and key. So
the separation of the head or heart from the body—unlike the removal of
a key from its lock—entails the death of the organism. So too, with
divorce. Likewise, it was God who also combined the love-giving and the
life-giving aspects of marriage in one and the same act. Therefore, we
can no more separate through contraception what God joined together in
the marital act than we can separate through divorce what God joined
together in the marriage union itself.
II. The Body Language of Marital Love
5.
Before examining what the Church teaches about contraception, I would
like to digress for a moment. According to Pope John Paul II, God
designed married love to be expressed in a special language—the body
language of the sexual act. In fact, sexual communication often uses
the same terms that verbal communication does: intercourse (originally,
“to exchange ideas”); to know (a euphemism for “sexual relations”
Lk.1:34) to conceive (“I can’t conceive how that happened.”) With this
in mind, let's pose some questions:
Is it normal for a wife to insert ear-plugs, while listening to her husband?
Is it normal for a husband to muffle his mouth, while speaking to his wife?
These examples are so abnormal as to appear absurd. Yet if such
behavior is abnormal for verbal communication, why do we tolerate a
wife using a diaphragm or the Pill, or a husband employing a condom
during sexual communication?
6.
Worse still, how can one justify a husband having a surgeon clip his
robust vocal cords, or a wife having her healthy eardrums surgically
removed? Yet in the area of sexual communication, how do such horrific
examples differ from a vasectomy or a tubal ligation? Isn't it the task
of a surgeon to remove an organ only when it is diseased and threatens
human life? If the testes or ovaries are not diseased, on what grounds
are we frustrating their purpose? Could it be that we now consider
babies a disease, from which we must immunize ourselves through
sterilization?
7. Yes, we have been created in the
image and likeness of God! Jesus revealed God’s inner life to us as a
Trinity of persons. Accordingly, the body language of the marital union
between husband and wife must reflect God’s own inner life, namely, the
mutual love between the Father and the Son, which is the person of the
Holy Spirit. From the first page to the last, the Bible is a love
story. It begins in Genesis with the marriage of Adam and Eve and it
ends in the Book of Revelation with the wedding feast of the Lamb—the
marriage of Christ and his Bride, the Church. From all eternity God
craves to give himself to us in marriage. No one expressed that fact
more graphically than the prophet Isaiah:
“As a young man marries a maiden,
so will your Maker marry you.
As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride,
so will your God rejoice over you.” (Is. 62:5)
St. Paul embellished this theme when he wrote, “Husbands, love your
wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her.”
(Eph. 5:25) How did Christ give himself up for the Church? Totally—to
the last drop of his blood! He held nothing back. If husbands are to
love their wives as Christ loved, can they hold anything back? Not even
their fertility?
III. Contraception: Telling Lies with Our Bodies
8.
Since God fashioned our bodies male and female to communicate both life
and love, every time that husband and wife deliberately frustrate this
twofold purpose through contraception, they are acting out a lie. The
body language of the marital act says, “I’m all yours,” but the
contraceptive device adds, "except for my fertility.” So in actual
fact, they are lying to each other with their bodies. Even worse, they
are tacitly usurping the role of God. By thwarting the purpose of the
marital love embrace, they are telling God, "You may have designed our
bodies to help you transmit life to an immortal soul, but you made a
mistake—a mistake we intend to correct. You may be Lord of our
lives—but not of our fertility."
9. In 1968, Pope
Paul VI said essentially the same thing when he issued his encyclical
Humanae Vitae: “There is an inseparable link between the two meanings
of the marriage act: the unitive meaning (love-giving) and the
procreative meaning (life-giving). This connection was established by
God himself, and man is not permitted to break it on his own
initiative.” (H.V, no. 12) Pope Paul went on to condemn every form of
contraception as being unworthy of the dignity of the human person. A
tidal wave of angry dissent erupted over this teaching. Catholics and
non-Catholics alike berated “the celibate old man in the Vatican” for
failing to read the signs of the times and thus hindering the Church’s
full entry into the modern era. But the Holy Father was merely
restating the unbroken teaching of the Church from the beginning,
upheld by all Christian denominations until the Anglican Church made
the first break at the Lambeth Conference of 1930. In substance—though
not expressed in these exact words—he was declaring: “It is not right
for man to separate what God has joined together. Attempting to do so
would enshrine man in the place of God, and unleash a series of
unspeakable evils on society.”
10. Many scoffed at the
dire consequences that Pope Paul predicted if the use of contraception
escalated. Among his predictions were: 1) increased marital infidelity;
2) a general lowering of morality, especially among the young; 3)
husbands viewing their wives as mere sex objects; and 4) governments
forcing massive birth control programs on their people. Thirty-five
years later the moral landscape is strewn with the following stark
reality: 1) The divorce rate has more than tripled. 2) The number of
sexually transmitted diseases has expanded from six to fifty. 3)
Pornography grosses more than all the receipts from professional sports
and legitimate entertainment combined. 4) Sterilization is forced on
unsuspecting women in third world countries, with China’s
one-child-per-couple policy in the vanguard. Today, even critics of
Humanae Vitae admit that its teaching was prophetic.
11.
Many Catholics who make use of contraceptives claim that they are doing
nothing wrong since they are merely obeying the dictates of their
conscience. After all, doesn’t the Church teach that we must follow our
conscience to decide if a behavior is right or wrong? Yes, that's
true—provided that it's a properly formed conscience. Specifically, we
must all conform our individual consciences to the natural law and the
Ten Commandments, just as we have to adjust our clocks to sun time
(Greenwich Mean Time). If a clock goes too fast or too slow, it will
soon tell us that it's bedtime at dawn. And to say that we must
accommodate our individual conscience to behavior that clearly
contradicts God's law is to say that we must rule our lives by the
clock, even when it tells us that night is day.
IV. NFP: Speaking the Truth with Our Bodies
12.
I fear that much of what I have said seems harshly critical of couples
using contraceptives. In reality, I am not blaming them for what has
occurred during the past four decades. It was not their fault. With
rare exceptions, because of our silence we bishops and priests are to
blame. A letter I received from a young father last year is
characteristic of many others: “Early in our marriage, Jan and I used
artificial contraception like everybody else. Today’s culture was
telling us that this was the normal thing to do. We knew the ‘official’
Church teaching was against it, but we were not taught why. We even had
priests tell us that it was a personal decision; so if we felt the need
to use contraception, it was okay. But couples need to be taught why
contraception is wrong. We were never taught that the Pill is an
abortifacient, that can possibly abort a (newly conceived) child
without us knowing it. We were not taught that artificial birth control
is a hindrance to building a healthy marriage. We did not know that
there is a healthier, Church-approved alternative to artificial birth
control.”
13. While contraception is always wrong,
there is a morally acceptable way for married couples to space their
children—Natural Family Planning (NFP). Couples, when properly
motivated, may regulate births by abstaining from the marital act
during the wife’s fertile period. NFP instructors teach couples how to
identify the fertile days, which can last from seven to ten days per
cycle. NFP has a number of benefits: It is scientifically sound, it
involves no harmful side effects, and it entails no cost after the
initial fee for materials. Studies have shown that NFP, when accurately
followed, can be 99% effective in postponing pregnancy. That’s
equivalent to the Pill and better than all the barrier methods. Best of
all, while complying with God’s will, husband and wife discover the
beautifully designed functions of their fertility, enhance their
intimacy, and deepen their love for each other.
14.
But how does Natural Family Planning differ from contraception? And why
bother, if their objective is the same? To understand the difference,
one must realize that having a right intention for an action does not
always justify the means. For example, two separate couples want to
support their families. The first couple does it through legitimate
employment, while the other couple does it by trafficking in illegal
drugs. Or two persons want to lose weight. The first accomplishes the
objective through a strict diet; the other, by binging and purging. Or
to return to our analogy of the language of the body: To say that NFP
is no different from contraception is to say that maintaining silence
is the equivalent of telling a lie. Paul VI expressed the same idea
more poetically: “To experience the gift of married love while
respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not
master of the sources of life, but rather the minister of the design
established by the Creator.” (H.V. no.13)
15. What
would you think of a scientist who discovered the cure for cancer but
refused to divulge it? Confronted with the spiritual cancer attacking
the family today, how can one explain the reluctance of us bishops and
priests in spreading the good news of the Church’s full teaching on
married love and life? Consider this statistic: Today at least 30% of
all marriages end in divorce, compared with only 3% of NFP users. Since
the use of contraception burgeoned in the early 1960s to the present,
there has been a corresponding increase in the incidence of divorce.
Why such a dramatic increase in failed marriages? As we saw in
paragraph # 4, to separate what God joined together in the marital act
through contraception is bound to have repercussions on what God joined
together in the marriage union—namely, divorce. The solution is clear. What's needed is courage.
16.
In order to counter the silence surrounding the Church’s teaching in
this area, as your bishop, I ask that the following guidelines be
implemented in our diocese:
• All pastoral
ministers should study the liberating message of John Paul II’s
Theology of the Body in order to share it with others.
• When appropriate, priests and deacons should present in their
homilies the Church’s teaching dealing with marriage, including why
contraceptive behavior is wrong.
• Adequate instruction in NFP is to become a part of all marriage preparation programs.
• Instruction in our high schools, the upper grades of Religious
Education classes, and RCIA classes should clearly teach the immorality
of those forms of sexual behavior condemned by the Church, including
contraception.
17. In closing, I would like to quote from an article by Roberta Roane that appeared in the National Catholic Reporter. (Oct. 31, 1986)
She began by asserting: “Yes, I was alive and fertile in 1968. I was 19 and I knew the Pill was a gift from God and Humanae Vitae
was a real crock. The Pill was going to eliminate teenage pregnancy,
marital disharmony and world population problems…” After recounting her
odyssey of bearing three children while switching from the Pill, to the
IUD, to condoms, she continues:
“Finally, my husband and I reached a turning point. At a very low point
in our marriage, we met some great people who urged us to really give
our lives to the Lord and be chaste in our marriage.
“That blew our minds. We thought it meant ‘give up sex.’ That’s not
what it means. It means respecting bodily union as a sacred act. It
meant acting like a couple in love, a couple in awe, not a couple of
cats in heat. For my husband and me, it meant NFP…and I won’t kid you,
it was a difficult discipleship. NFP and a chaste attitude toward sex
in marriage opened up a new world for us. It bonded my husband and me
in a way that is so deep, so strong, that it’s hard to describe.
Sometimes it’s difficult, but that makes us even closer. We revere each
other. And when we do come together, we’re like honeymooners.
“Sad to say, I was past 35 when I finally realized that the Church was
right after all. Not the grab-your-sincerity-and-slide Church of
Charlie Curran, but the real Church, the Church we encountered in the
Couple to Couple League, the Catholic Church.
The Church is right about contraception (it stinks), right about
marriage (it’s a sacrament), right about human happiness (it flows—no,
it floods when you embrace the will of God). It gave us depth. It
opened our hearts to love.”
Roberta Roane is merely echoing what St. Paul said many centuries ago:
“Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is
in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were
bought at a great price. Therefore, glorify God with your body!” (1
Cor. 6:19,20)
+ Victor Galeone
Bishop of St. Augustine
July 10, 2003
