Archive for July, 2008

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The Repentant Sterilized Couple

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

The Repentant Sterilized Couple

Imagine that you had yourself sexually sterilized at a time when your faith was weak, and then something happened to wake you up.  You somehow heard that your Catholic Church taught that such behavior was immoral.  You realized you should not be receiving Holy Communion in such a state.  Then you learn about systematic NFP.  Now you are really mad.  Why didn’t someone tell you years ago?  You wish that you had never been sterilized.  You would like to have it reversed and then practice systematic NFP and periodic abstinence during the fertile time.  Then you learn about all the costs of reversal surgery, and you break out in a cold sweat.  You would have to put a second mortgage on the house, and you can barely make your current payments right now.  You have what many would say is an “extraordinary” financial burden to attempt to restore your fertility.  What can you do?  Are you required to abstain for the rest of your fertile years?  Or can you go to confession, confess the sin of mutilation, do the penance assigned by the priest, and have no change in your subsequent behavior?  Or after confession are you obliged to abstain during the fertile time, that is, practice systematic NFP for avoiding pregnancy?

Let us further imagine you find my book, Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis of Morality.  Let’s imagine that the idea that the marriage act ought to be a renewal of your marriage covenant makes sense to you, and that you realize that contraceptive behavior contradicts this built-in meaning of the marriage act.  Then you read its chapter on “The Sterilized Couple.”  You read that well respected theologians of the recent past have taught that repentant sterilized couples should undergo reversal surgery and then practice systematic NFP if they had a serious reason to avoid pregnancy. 

Now it gets confusing.  You learn that some theologians say that if a couple have an extraordinary reason not to have reversal surgery, they don’t have to have the reversal surgery and they also don’t have to abstain during the fertile time.  To use the vernacular, all they have to do is confess it and they are “home free.”  Just a few prayers.  No reversal.  Continued sexual sterility.  No abstinence.  It sounds too easy to be true, and that’s my opinion. 

Why does it sound too easy to be true?  Can you think of any sin where repentance doesn’t call for a change in behavior?  More directly, can you think of any sexual sin where repentance does not involve a change of behavior?  Of course not.  So what is so special about the sins of sexual sterilization and consequent sins of contraceptively sterilized intercourse? 

I am convinced that repentant sterilized couples are obliged to practice the same marital chastity as normal fertile couples who believe they have sufficiently serious reasons to avoid pregnancy.  That means that they will practice systematic NFP with chaste abstinence during the fertile time.

In a previous discussion on this matter, I was accused of imposing an unnecessary burden on repentant sterilized couples.  This raises a question about my accusers’ attitude towards systematic NFP?  Do they think that the self-discipline of periodic abstinence is some sort of extraordinary burden?  A burden, yes.  Extraordinary, no.  Far from it, such self-discipline is the normal practice of every chaste married couple once they reach the point where they are still mutually fertile but think that God is not calling them to have any more children. 

In my opinion, the “too easy to be true” advice may be the single biggest reason why Catholics frequently resort to sterilization.  What comes across is a simple one-sin, one confession approach to a complex and enduring sinful situation.  “Get sterilized.  Go to confession.  Say your penance prayers.  And you are home free to have as much sterilized sex as you can.” 

Are the sterilized couples who take such an approach truly repentant?  Are some priests teaching such couples that the canonical penance—the few prayers usually assigned as penance—constitutes the true repentance called for by the Lord?  Doesn’t repentance mean “I wish I had not done it.”?  Doesn’t repentance also entail the attitude that “if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t do it”?  Applied to sterilization, doesn’t that mean that the repentant sterilized couple wishes they had not done it and would not do it over again?  And doesn’t that mean that they wish they were still fertile?  And if so, would they not be practicing systematic NFP if they had a sufficiently serious reason to avoid pregnancy?  And so, how could such a repentant couple or their consulting priest think that the obligation to abstain during the fertile time as part of their change of heart is somehow out-of-the-ordinary? 

Sometimes I wonder if those who think that my position is too demanding actually think that systematic NFP is too demanding for real men.  If so, that implies that those of us who have accepted it are really sort of an effete elite.  On the contrary, I suggest that the real men of the Church and of our culture are those who accept the great challenge of chastity in a sexually saturated society.  Most such men and their spouses readily admit that chaste periodic abstinence is difficult and that they need prayer and grace to live a life of Christian chastity.  Not easy but true. 

I am convinced that this “too easy to be true” confessional practice must be changed as part of the authentic reform and renewal needed in moral theology.

*  *  *

Allow me to suggest that you obtain and read Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality.  I don’t know where else you will find a 20-page chapter supporting the argument that the repentant sterilized couple ought to practice systematic NFP.  Father Peter M. J. Stravinskas expresses the same conviction in The Catholic Answer Book (OSV, 1990).  My chapter not only quotes him but also addresses at some length the various objections to our common conviction.

Tomorrow: What to do for the next 40 years?

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant 

Posted in NFP Week 2008, Sterilization | 1 Comment »

Humanae Vitae and Sterilization

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Sexual Sterilization

Sexual sterilization is a highly used form of birth control by Catholics.  Data from the NIH-sponsored Family Growth Survey in 2002 indicate that female sterilization is only slightly less for Catholics than for the country as a whole, and male Catholics choose sterilization even more frequently than non-Catholic men. The survey also indicated that only about 3% of Catholics and other Christians practiced any form of natural family planning. 

Of course, some will say that those numbers apply only to the non-practicing Catholics who don’t go to Church anyway.  On the contrary, just last month, a correspondent told me about a deacon friend of his.  In that deacon’s ordination class of 12, he was the only one who was not sterilized. 

Humanae Vitae clearly teaches that it is morally wrong both to have oneself sexually sterilized and to engage in contraceptively sterilized intercourse.  After absolutely excluding abortion as a means of birth control, Pope Paul VI continued: “Equally to be excluded, as the teaching authority of the Church has frequently declared, is direct sterilization, whether perpetual or temporary, whether of the man or of the woman” (n.14). 

The pastoral problem is twofold.  First, there is the question about the personal holiness or sinfulness of the sterilized person who continues to engage in marital relations during the fertile time.  That constitutes engaging in sterilized intercourse in contradiction to the teaching of Humanae Vitae.  The second problem has to do with the role of contracepting and sterilized persons in the various ministries of the Church including those at the parish level.  Let’s put it this way.  People who are engaging in contraceptively sterilized intercourse, whether that sterilization is temporary as with the use of condoms or the pill, or permanent, are acting in living contradiction of Catholic teaching.  Do they really believe the teaching of the Church?  If they say they do believe but are acting in contradiction to that teaching, they have a serious problem.  If they say they simply do not believe the teaching of the Church when it comes to love, marriage and birth control, the rest of us have a serious problem.  How can they be expected to transmit the faith that the Catholic Church is the one true and infallible Church?  Instead, their very presence in the public ministries of the Church helps to perpetuate the notion of a cultural non-doctrinal or pick-and-choose Catholicism. 

I think that an important aspect of authentic renewal in the Church is going to be the realization at the practical level that the Church is a faith community in which its members should be able to safely assume that its representatives believe and practice what the Church actually teaches.  Currently, we have no assurance whatsoever that those who volunteer as lectors or Holy Communion distributors are believing and practicing Catholics.  It is very possible that the fertile-age woman who is distributing the Body of Christ may be at that very moment aborting a new life within her through the action of her hormonal birth control.  It is all too possible that Catholic grade and high school teachers are teaching a cafeteria pseudo-Catholicism especially regarding sexuality and the teaching authority of the Church.  

We have had forty years of this sort of Church under the Babylonian captivity of the dissenters.  Too much is more than enough. 

Tomorrow:  The Repentant Sterilized Couple

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality

Posted in Humanae Vitae, NFP Week 2008, Sterilization | 1 Comment »

Humanae Vitae: Theological Support

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Holy Communion: Eucharistic and Marital by John Kippley

Part 3 of 3

Sealing of the covenant
A fifth similarity [between the Eucharistic and marital communions] can be urged by looking at the way in which the covenant is sealed. The New Covenant made by Christ is sealed in his own blood the next day on Calvary. On his part there was a complete giving of self, an act of complete obedience, a perfect compliance with the will of the Father without regard to his own inconvenience and suffering. The matrimonial covenant is sealed by sexual intercourse which, if it symbolizes anything, symbolizes a complete mutual giving of self and acceptance of the other. In this aspect of the seal of the covenant we can see the full force of the marriage discourse of St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Wives are to be subject to a loving husband.  Husbands are to love their wives in the same way that Christ loved the Church: He gave up his life to sanctify the Church.  Likewise, the husband should not be seeking his own benefit but must be willing to sacrifice, to achieve a higher union with his spouse, through the giving of himself.  In marriage as in all other phases of life, the words of Christ have new bearing: “He who seeks his life will lose it; he who loses his life for my sake will gain it.”

The covenant of marriage is to sacramentalize the covenant of Christ with his Church. That is, it is to be the same reality only under difference appearances. The New Covenant was sealed by the death of him who in this way sanctified the Church, his body.  The covenant of Matrimony must be sealed likewise by the death to self in order to help the spouse, now joined in a unique oneness, to attain a life of holiness.

Conditions for validity
The similarities of these two types of personal communions are likewise helpful in reaching conclusions about the conditions for a truly valid encounter in the marital communion. For the worthy reception of the Eucharist, for a Holy Communion, the communicant at the minimum must be free from mortal sin. And what does this mean?  It means that he must not be set against the covenant, that he must not be opposed to any sacrifice that might be demanded from him in order to remain true to his covenant with his Savior. For the communion of sexual intercourse to be a means of holiness or, at the least, not a means of unholiness, the spouses must likewise be free from any obstacles that will deny the covenant that they have made before God. If they have taken each other for better or for worse, their renewal of their marriage covenant must likewise be for better or for worse. Just as when they pledged to give themselves and to receive the other regardless of the consequences, so also must their subsequent communion in the marriage act be free from any denial of this covenant.

In the reception of the Holy Eucharist, it is not enough to be “generally” turned toward God. A person in a state of sin may not look back to last year (when faced with fewer temptations he was not in a state of sin) and receive the Eucharist on the basis of last year’s state. His present state is all-important.  Nor may he look forward to the unknown future and, under an intention to leave the state of sin sometime in the future when conditions are less pressing, receive the Eucharist in his present state of sin.  The worthiness of his Communion depends upon his present state of soul, his present willingness to give of himself in following Christ. In other words, he may not play a percentage morality and state that since most of the time he is open to the sacrifice required by Christian life, he may therefore worthily receive Communion at any time even though he be temporarily alienated from God and unwilling to live the life of love as his circumstances demand it. What he must avoid in this particular example is the false application of what might be called a principle of totality.

One of the current [mid-1960s] questions concerning marriage and sexual intercourse is whether it is not sufficient to have the marriage as a whole open to the service of life but permissible to exclude positively that openness to life in the expression of mutual love in sexual intercourse. It renews again the conflict between the purposes of marriage—procreation and mutual development. Or to state it positively, would it not be permissible to positively preclude the possibility of conception through direct contraception? According to some, a principle of totality, under which the marriage as a whole is open and generous in the service of life, would be sufficient; but it would not be necessary for each and every act of married sexual love to reflect that openness even in a minimal way, i.e., at least open to the remote possibility though not intending procreation.1

Personally, I find the approach very attractive, especially when I imagine some family burdened by a severe health problem on the part of the woman which makes pregnancy extremely dangerous, and whose openness to the service of life is witnessed by the adoption of other children. Because of these hardships, it is all the more important that the question be clearly answered: Is marriage itself and the overall generosity and openness to life the only sacred reality involved, or is the act of married sexual intercourse something sacred of itself—something whose sacred character must be respected in every instance regardless of circumstances? Or to put the question in terms of today’s ethical theories, is the sacred character of the married sexual act something absolute or is it conditioned by the situation of the married couple?

Conclusion
It is the task of anyone who hopes to shed light on a problem not to construct a theory to support his sympathies but rather to show by reason, example and analogy the inner unity of the entire Christian faith. Thus it is that this analogy between the Holy Communion of the Eucharist and the holy communion of married intercourse must reach its conclusion, namely, that in order for marital sexual intercourse to be a valid expression of marital love and thus a means toward growth in holiness, it must at least be free from abortive, sterilizing and contraceptive impediments to the transmission of life.

The comparison has been made that the two communions are similar because they are both the results of sacraments, both the result of sacrificial love, both an expression of bodily love, both a renewal of the covenant, both covenants sealed with a death to self.  Because of this, just as each reception of the Eucharist is in itself a sacred reality signifying complete acceptance of the covenant, likewise each act of married sexual love is a sacred reality. It entails a renewal of the marriage covenant, an acceptance of each other regardless of the circumstances, even if this renewal should lead to sickness or to poorness or even to death itself. That degree of self-giving is certainly going to require a supernatural faith, a deep and abiding realization that only he who loses his life for the sake of Christ will find it, and that he who seeks his life will lose it.

The Christian must come to realize that it is only through a constant, ever-increasing gift of himself to God and neighbor that he can arrive at the true development of himself.  The married couple must come to realize that their desire to increase their mutual love and self-development can be fulfilled only through the self-giving which they signified through their exchange of marriage promises.

In this manner, with every act of intercourse a renewal of the marriage covenant in which they pledged undying fidelity to each other regardless of the situation, the married couple enter into a truly holy communion, a true source of grace and the occasion of the fullness of married love.

                        *  *  *
1.Pope Paul VI thoroughly rejected the totality thesis in Humanae Vitae. He concluded his argument against the “totality” argument in this way: “Consequently it is an error to think that a conjugal act which is deliberately made infecund and so is intrinsically dishonest could be made honest and right by the ensemble of a fecund conjugal life” (n.14).

Tomorrow: Humanae Vitae and Sterilization

John F Kippley
NFP International
www.NFPandmore.org
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality

Posted in Humanae Vitae, NFP Week 2008 | Comments Off on Humanae Vitae: Theological Support

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