Married Love and Life
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - December 8, 2006
In the history of the Church, no encyclical has been a greater sign of contradiction than Pope Paul VI's 1968 Humanae Vitae, which taught that the use of contraception in marriage violated the natural law. The controversy surrounding it divided the Church. Not only did many couples reject its teaching on a practical level, but on a theological level, it spawned a class of dissenters who took advantage of the controversy to undermine the teaching authority of the Church on various other issues, mainly dealing with human sexuality.
Even supporters of the encyclical acknowledged that the Church's teaching could have been stated more persuasively. The document failed to mention that the Church, from the first century, had always taught that contraception was wrong; the only thing that was new in the 1960s was the consideration of whether the recently-invented birth control pill might be an exception to the Church's general condemnation. After study, it was concluded that it was not. Moreover, the encyclical was written in a natural law language that was not persuasive to people prone to be swayed more by sentiment than by rational arguments. Pope John Paul II saw this and was convinced that the Church needed to provide more persuasive premises to support Paul VI's conclusions. That is why he spent five years of Wednesday audiences from 1979-1984 sketching out his theology of the body, the purpose of which was to provide a re-reading and re-phrasing of Humanae Vitae from the perspective of the human person made in God's image, rather than the perspective of a "cold" and objective natural law.
Pope John Paul II's positive presentation of the theological anthropology of human sexuality and its application to the use of contraception in marriage was made accessible for all couples by the U.S. Bishops, in their November pastoral letter, Married Love and the Gift of Life. Written in an easily understandable question-and-answer format, the document is tailor-made for couples in parish and diocesan marriage preparation programs as well as in marriage enrichment outreaches. As a sign of the U.S. Bishops deep desire for it to be accessible and compelling, it was given to "focus groups" of engaged couples in four different dioceses, whose questions and feedback were incorporated to help make the document even more persuasive.
The main point of the document is to connect the sacred promises the spouses express at the altar with the body language they employ in the sacred conversation of making love. "In the Rite of Marriage," the bishops declare, "a man and woman are asked if they will love one another faithfully and totally — in short, if they will love as God loves. 'Have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?' asks the bishop, priest or deacon. 'Will you love and honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives? Will you accept children lovingly from God and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?' These are different ways of asking the same basic question: Are you ready to accept this person, and all that may come from your union, completely and forever?"
The use of artificial contraception is a violation of this mutual acceptance in love. "When married couples deliberately act to suppress fertility," they write, "sexual intercourse is no longer fully marital intercourse … [and it] does harm to the couple's unity. The total giving of oneself, body and soul, to one's beloved is no time to say: "I give you everything I am — except….'" In other words, in the use of contraception, rather than embracing one's spouse and giving oneself wholly and entirely, one is rejecting either the maternal potential of the wife's femininity or the paternal potential of the husband's masculinity in the very act made by God for that potential to be expressed and embraced.
Like Pope Paul VI, the U.S. bishops acknowledge that a married couple may have good reasons not to have a child, "In married life," they state, "serious circumstances — financial, physical, psychological, or those involving responsibilities to other family members — may arise to make an increase in family size untimely." But the means which a couple chooses to adopt must be consistent with the moral law and the meaning of marital love. The bishops distinguish between the use of artificial contraception, which always violates the meaning of the total exchange of persons, and the use of periodic continence, popularly known as natural family planning (NFP). "A married couple can engage in marital intimacy during the naturally infertile times in a woman's cycle without violating the meaning of marital intercourse in any way." In the use of NFP, the spouses are not partially embracing and partially rejecting the other, but wholly embracing each other as God made them, including the woman's cycle fertility and infertility.
There is also a huge disparity in the way the two approaches influence a couple's relationship to God. "When couples use contraception, either physical or chemical, they suppress their fertility, asserting that they alone have ultimate control over this power to create a new human life. With NFP, spouses respect God's design for life and love. They may choose to refrain from sexual union during the woman's fertile time, doing nothing to destroy the love-giving or life-giving meaning that is present. That is the difference between choosing to falsify the full marital language of the body and choosing at certain times not to speak that language." In other words, the difference is between lying and not saying anything.
The bishops acknowledge that "living God's design for human sexuality in marriage can be difficult" but add that "husbands and wives have not been left alone to live out this fundamental life challenge.… God offers us the strength to live up to this challenge." They encourage all couples to let God give them this help. "The Church's teaching on marital sexuality is an invitation for men and women — an invitation to let God be God, to receive the gift of God's love and care, and to let this gift inform and transform us, so we may share that love with each other and with the world."
With the bishops, the whole Church should pray that couples respond wholeheartedly to that marriage invitation.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
