The full reference for the text below, in its context from the Catechism, can be found at this link: http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a6.htm
THE LOVE OF HUSBAND AND WIFE (from the Catechism of the Catholic Church)
2360 Sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman. In marriage the physical intimacy of the spouses becomes a sign and pledge of spiritual communion. Marriage bonds between baptized persons are sanctified by the sacrament.
2361 "Sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and woman commit themselves totally to one another until death."143
- Tobias got out of bed and said to Sarah, "Sister, get up, and let us pray and implore our Lord that he grant us mercy and safety." So she got up, and they began to pray and implore that they might be kept safe. Tobias began by saying, "Blessed are you, O God of our fathers. . . . You made Adam, and for him you made his wife Eve as a helper and support. From the two of them the race of mankind has sprung. You said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; let us make a helper for him like himself.' I now am taking this kinswoman of mine, not because of lust, but with sincerity. Grant that she and I may find mercy and that we may grow old together." And they both said, "Amen, Amen." Then they went to sleep for the night.144
2362 "The acts in marriage by which the intimate and chaste union of the spouses takes place are noble and honorable; the truly human performance of these acts fosters the self-giving they signify and enriches the spouses in joy and gratitude."145 Sexuality is a source of joy and pleasure:
- The Creator himself . . . established that in the [generative] function, spouses should experience pleasure and enjoyment of body and spirit. Therefore, the spouses do nothing evil in seeking this pleasure and enjoyment. They accept what the Creator has intended for them. At the same time, spouses should know how to keep themselves within the limits of just moderation.146
2363 The spouses' union achieves the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life. These two meanings or values of marriage cannot be separated without altering the couple's spiritual life and compromising the goods of marriage and the future of the family.
The conjugal love of man and woman thus stands under the twofold obligation of fidelity and fecundity.
* Conjugal fidelity
2364 The married couple forms "the intimate partnership of life and love established by the Creator and governed by his laws; it is rooted in the conjugal covenant, that is, in their irrevocable personal consent."147 Both give themselves definitively and totally to one another. They are no longer two; from now on they form one flesh. The covenant they freely contracted imposes on the spouses the obligation to preserve it as unique and indissoluble.148 "What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder."149
2365 Fidelity expresses constancy in keeping one's given word. God is faithful. The Sacrament of Matrimony enables man and woman to enter into Christ's fidelity for his Church. Through conjugal chastity, they bear witness to this mystery before the world.
- St. John Chrysostom suggests that young husbands should say to their wives: I have taken you in my arms, and I love you, and I prefer you to my life itself. For the present life is nothing, and my most ardent dream is to spend it with you in such a way that we may be assured of not being separated in the life reserved for us. . . . I place your love above all things, and nothing would be more bitter or painful to me than to be of a different mind than you.150
* The fecundity of marriage
2366 Fecundity is a gift, an end of marriage, for conjugal love naturally tends to be fruitful. A child does not come from outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfillment. So the Church, which is "on the side of life,"151 teaches that "it is necessary that each and every marriage act remain ordered per se to the procreation of human life."152 "This particular doctrine, expounded on numerous occasions by the Magisterium, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act."153
2367 Called to give life, spouses share in the creative power and fatherhood of God.154 "Married couples should regard it as their proper mission to transmit human life and to educate their children; they should realize that they are thereby cooperating with the love of God the Creator and are, in a certain sense, its interpreters. They will fulfill this duty with a sense of human and Christian responsibility."155
2368 A particular aspect of this responsibility concerns the regulation of procreation. For just reasons, spouses may wish to space the births of their children. It is their duty to make certain that their desire is not motivated by selfishness but is in conformity with the generosity appropriate to responsible parenthood. Moreover, they should conform their behavior to the objective criteria of morality:
- When it is a question of harmonizing married love with the responsible transmission of life, the morality of the behavior does not depend on sincere intention and evaluation of motives alone; but it must be determined by objective criteria, criteria drawn from the nature of the person and his acts, criteria that respect the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love; this is possible only if the virtue of married chastity is practiced with sincerity of heart.156
2369 "By safeguarding both these essential aspects, the unitive and the procreative, the conjugal act preserves in its fullness the sense of true mutual love and its orientation toward man's exalted vocation to parenthood."157
2370 Periodic continence, that is, the methods of birth regulation based on self-observation and the use of infertile periods, is in conformity with the objective criteria of morality.158These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage tenderness between them, and favor the education of an authentic freedom. In contrast, "every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible" is intrinsically evil:159
- Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality. . . . The difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle . . . involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality.160
2371 "Let all be convinced that human life and the duty of transmitting it are not limited by the horizons of this life only: their true evaluation and full significance can be understood only in reference to man's eternal destiny."161
2372 The state has a responsibility for its citizens' well-being. In this capacity it is legitimate for it to intervene to orient the demography of the population. This can be done by means of objective and respectful information, but certainly not by authoritarian, coercive measures. The state may not legitimately usurp the initiative of spouses, who have the primary responsibility for the procreation and education of their children.162 In this area, it is not authorized to employ means contrary to the moral law.
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July 25, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A lengthy article appearing in the most recent edition of First Things, reevaluates Pope Paul VI's controversial encyclicalHumanae Vitae (the 40th anniversary of the publication of which takes place today) in terms of the empirical evidence supporting the Pontiff's prophetic predictions about the consequences of the widespread acceptance of artificial contraception.
"To many people," writes author Mary Eberstadt, the idea of opposing the use of contraception, "simply defies understanding. Consenting adults, told not to use birth control? Preposterous. Third World parents deprived access to contraception and abortion? Positively criminal. A ban on condoms when there's a risk of contracting AIDS? Beneath contempt."
Indeed, "if there's anything on earth that unites the Church's adversaries…the teaching against contraception is probably it."
And yet, writes Eberstadt, for all of the contempt that is poured upon Humanae Vitae and the Church's continued official defense of Paul VI's teaching, the 40 intervening years since its publication have done nothing if not provided heaps of empirical data validating the Pope's dire warnings about a contraceptive culture.
"Four decades later, not only have the document's signature predictions been ratified in empirical force," says Eberstadt, "but they have been ratified as few predictions ever are: in ways its authors could not possibly have foreseen, including by information that did not exist when the document was written, by scholars and others with no interest whatever in its teaching, and indeed even inadvertently, and in more ways than one, by many proud public adversaries of the Church."
This is the great irony, says Eberstadt - that the evidence marshaled forth in condemnation of a contraceptive culture has been provided almost entirely by secular or explicitly anti-Catholic researchers, men and women who are "honest social scientists willing to follow the data wherever it may lead."
Consider, she suggests, the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Geroge Akerlof, who, in a well-known 1996 article, "explained in the language of modern economics why the sexual revolution…had led to an increase in both illegitimacy and abortion."
Then there is the work of "maverick sociobiologist" Lionel Tiger, who has in the past described religion as "a toxic issue." And yet, for all of that, Tiger has shown his ability to honestly "follow the data," linking "contraception to the breakdown of families, female impoverishment, trouble in the relationship between the sexes, and single motherhood."
"Tiger has further argued - as Humanae Vitae did not explicitly, though other works of Catholic theology have - for a causal link between contraception and abortion, stating outright that 'with effective contraception controlled by women, there are still more abortions than ever....Contraception causes abortion.'"
And the list goes on. Eberstadt provides numerous examples of secular researchers who have followed the data, vindicating each and every one of Paul VI's four primary predictions about the consequences of contraception: "a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments."
The evidence proving that each of these predictions has come to pass is so obvious as to be common sense. For instance, on the question of the "coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments," one need only consider the well-known forced-abortion and forced-sterilization practices of the Chinese government. Eberstadt also points to lesser-known examples of similar coercion that have taken place in India and Indonesia. And there are many other examples besides.
What about this matter of the deforming of the relations between the sexes, and the "general lowering of moral standards"? "Today," responds Eberstadt, "when advertisements for sex scream from every billboard and webpage, and every teen idol is sooner or later revealed topless or worse online, some might wonder what further proof could possibly be offered."
However Eberstadt searches for and finds even further concrete proof of the devolving of male/female relations right in the heart of the feminist movement, that great champion of contraception as the great liberator. Since 1968, she observes, "feminist literature has been a remarkably consistent and uninterrupted cacophony of grievance, recrimination, and sexual discontent. In that forty-year record, we find, as nowhere else, personal testimony of what the sexual revolution has done to womankind."
"The signature metaphors of feminism say everything we need to know about how happy liberation has been making these women: the suburban home as concentration camp, men as rapists, children as intolerable burdens, fetuses as parasites, and so on. These are the sounds of liberation? Even the vaunted right to abortion, both claimed and exercised at extraordinary rates, did not seem to mitigate the misery of millions of these women after the sexual revolution."
The author then turns her attention to the proliferation of pornography, which one social observer wrote, "is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as 'porn-worthy.''' The fact is, Eberstadt writes, Archbishop Chaput of Denver was correct when he wrote that, rather than freeing women, "Contraception has released males - to a historically unprecedented degree - from responsibility for their sexual aggression."
Perhaps the most damning indictment of contraception in Eberstadt's piece comes when she quotes from philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe, who wrote about the inevitable slippery slope that would follow the acceptance of contraception: "If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here-not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)?"
"It can't be the mere pattern of bodily behavior in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. I am not saying: if you think contraception all right you will do these other things; not at all. The habit of respectability persists and old prejudices die hard. But I am saying: you will have no solid reason against these things. You will have no answer to someone who proclaims as many do that they are good too. You cannot point to the known fact that Christianity drew people out of the pagan world, always saying no to these things. Because, if you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition."
Eberstadt goes on to make several more observations about the link between contraception, adultery, and prematerital sex. She also observes that the shortage of priests in the Church, and the clergy sex-abuse scandals, are deeply related to the widespread dissent by Catholic faithful and clergy againstHumanae Vitae.
The author concludes by once again quoting Archbishop Chaput, who said ten years ago, "If Paul VI was right about so many of the consequences deriving from contraception, it is because he was right about contraception itself."
"This," says Eberstadt, "is exactly the connection few people in 2008 want to make, because contraceptive sex…is the fundamental social fact of our time….Despite an empirical record that is unmistakably on Paul VI's side by now, there is extraordinary resistance to crediting Catholic moral teaching with having been right about anything, no matter how detailed the record."
Yet, for all of that, she concludes, "instead of vindication for the Church, there is demoralization; instead of clarity, mass confusion; instead of more obedience, ever less. Really, the perversity is, well, perverse. In what other area does humanity operate at this level of extreme, daily, constant contradiction?"
To read the original article in First Things, see:
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6262