Fr John Boyle's website has an interesting letter about the contraceptive mentality of the clergy! I've shortened it a bit, In our parish there are fewer married couples than normal, mainly because after the birth of the first child people move out to somewhere less urban and so many of our parishioners are single."To this day the vast majority of Catholic clergy refuse to talk about contraception despite their moral obligation to do so... something I call clerical contraception.
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Contraception itself is a rejection of God's sovereignty over one's marriage and a refusal to obey the Lord's command to "be fruitful and multiply." The priest, though not married, analogously contracepts the life-giving seed of truth when he refuses to preach the Catholic Faith - all of it. Faith comes through hearing, says St. Paul, and it is through the priestly ministry that Christ transmits the Faith to His bride, the Church, so that she can be fruitful and multiply the souls who are brought to salvation.
This is probably the main reason why so many Catholics today contracept or sterilize themselves and see absolutely no contradiction in receiving the Eucharist every Sunday and believing themselves in perfect communion with the Church. They've never been admonished that it is a mortal sin to use contraception or get sterilized. They've never been told of the physical and spiritual danger of these practices, and they've never been made aware of the magnificent, life-giving alternatives that the Church offers to the Ideology of Infertility.
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Contracepting men and women who are not warned of their sin and who therefore do not repent of it risk the death of their immortal souls, and that is a scandal of immense proportions. To be warned is to be forewarned, especially about something so crucial. Perhaps the only danger of greater consequence is the danger to the priests themselves who don't do their job: they risk their own spiritual deaths because in the end they will be held accountable for preaching the Church's full message "in season and out of season."
All priests should read the Lord's message to the prophet Ezekiel to know the high stakes of failing to preach the fullness of Christ's teaching: "If I say to the wicked man, You shall surely die; and you do not warn him or speak out to dissuade him from his wicked conduct so that he may live: that wicked man shall die for his sin, but I will hold you responsible for his death" (Ez 3:18). May every priest take this warning to heart!
The Churches teaching is life giving and life affirming, it is important to remember that God's first words to the human race are, "Go forth and multiply", this seems to be pretty basic to being human, when we disregard it what will happen? "
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Very well said Father! At last, after so many years of not preaching about contraception from the pulpit, the clergy are begining to open their mouths!
What particularly caught my attention on Father Boyle's blog was Father Euteneuer's words: "Future generations will wonder why so many Catholic bishops and priests in the West didn't see contraception as a seminal evil and the chief cause of the Church's swift decline."
The reason why they did not might be a certain skepticism concerning metaphysics (arising from Enlightenment idealism and nominalism?) which disables the mind from perceiving the inherent nature of a thing or a human faculty.
Last year I posted a comment on the EWTN website in their Q&A section about the connection between contraception and the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance. It read as follows:
"One thing I have noticed about contraception is that it has favoured the four sins which were named in the old English Penny Catechism as "crying to heaven for vengeance."
Many ostensible contraceptives are in fact abortifacients, and are therefore agents of wilful murder.
The legitimisation of contraception has made sexual activity recreational, and has cut away a key argument of reason against treating sodomy as the object of a right.
Contraception tends to undermine the bond between a man and his wife, so that when couples split up the wife and children are deprived of the husband and father who is their natural protector. It also encourages extramarital childbearing and the consequent proliferation of up-front fatherlessness and the material poverty associated with these and with divorce. Not exactly widows and orphans, but they might as well be, since husbandless women and fatherless children are easy meat for those who would take advantage of them. And the contraceptive culture generates a target-rich environment.
Contraception and its effect on the preservation and formation of families give employers an excuse not to pay wages which will enable a father to support his family, or a potential father to support the family he can expect to found in the future, without his wife being forced to seek paid employment outside the home to the harm of her role as a mother and homemaker. Just as contraception enables a man to evade his responsibility by offering his girlfriend or wife an escape route via contraception, so it enables employers to unload theirs onto men by admonishing them not to have children, and their wives to contracept, as they pay them wages insufficiently high, and give them jobs insufficiently secure, to support a family."
So now if Catholics take notice of this and renounce the use of contraception, will we see an end of the decline in the Catholic Church in this country?
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." (Winston Churchill)
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