Church’s vision for married love still beckons to a broken world

By Dr Rachel Bradley, Director of the Office of Life, Marriage and Family

G.K. Chesterton once said that the Christian ideal had not been tried and found wanting, but rather it had been found difficult and left untried.

I think something like this has happened to the Church’s teaching about marriage and human life.

In today’s world, it can seem unrealistic to want to keep sexual activity solely for marriage, with marriage as a lifelong exclusive relationship, and every individual sexual encounter open to new life.

It can seem as though the Church is totally out of touch. Many of us don’t understand the Church’s teaching in this area, especially when it comes to the use of contraception, so it is put aside as too difficult.

Yet, the Church’s vision of married love is one of great beauty and although it does require self-discipline and self-sacrificial love, what truly worthwhile enterprise does not?

Moral decisions about our sexual lives have great significance and importance.

The sexual act is not only designed by God to unite the couple deeply body, soul and spirit but is also the way that he co-operates with them to bring a new human being into the world.

To split apart the procreative (life-giving) and unitive (bonding) aspects of the conjugal act by using contraception threatens the dignity of the man and woman. The marital act is no longer one where the couple truly give themselves to one another, it instead denies the full truth of what the marital act is.

In the bodily dimension of the act the spouses are saying they want to be joined together as one, a total gift of each to the other, but the use of contraception creates a barrier to this self-giving. They are holding back their fertility from each other. They want to separate the pleasurable aspect of sex from its inherent life-giving nature.

This is not to say that every time a couple has sexual intercourse they should intend to conceive. When there are serious reasons to postpone conception, they can make use of the God given rhythms of the female body to avoid the fertile periods of the woman’s cycle.

This is different from deliberately trying to make every act of intercourse sterile by using contraception. Use of Natural Family Planning (NFP) encourages reverence for the woman and promotes co-operation and communication between husband and wife. Research shows that married couples using NFP are less likely to divorce. (1)

Efficacy of modern fertility awareness methods (FAMs) of NFP is excellent (0.4-3% failure rate). FAMs also help women gather information about their reproductive health and can help when couples are struggling to conceive.

It is a fantastic experience to be able to understand how your body works and to plan your family responsibly in harmony with it. This contrasts with the attitude that our fertility is something to be fixed with medication or sterilisation.

Humanae Vitae was published 55 years ago this month, from the time it was published it has been the subject of intense debate within the Catholic community.

This short encyclical by Pope Paul VI surprised many at the time because there was an expectation that the Pope would declare that the use of contraception was morally permissible.

Instead it declared the use of contraception to be an intrinsically evil act because it intentionally seeks to block the procreative dimension of the conjugal act, separating the procreative and unitive (though some medical conditions can be legitimately treated with hormonal treatments that may also have an unintended contraceptive effect).

The Pope believed that the use of contraception would lead to an increase in marital infidelity and a general lowering of the societal standards of sexual morality.

 He also predicted that the proper reverence due to woman would be significantly undermined and that she may be reduced to an instrument for the satisfaction of man’s desires.

Fifty-five years later, we can see how prophetic he was. Effective contraception has made it much easier to indulge in sexual relationships outside of a stable, faithful marriage.

There has been a drastic reduction in the number of marriages over the last few decades and an increase in both marital infidelity and the divorce rate.  

Separating the unitive and procreative dimensions of the conjugal act by using contraception has also contributed to an increase in the demand for abortion as it normalises the mentality that the act of sexual union has nothing inherently to do with procreation. 

In relationships where this mentality prevails and the woman falls pregnant, because the intentionality of the act is completely closed off to procreation, the child is seen as the unwanted outcome with termination viewed as the natural extension of this mind set.  

Although accurate statistics on abortion in Australia are difficult to obtain, South Australian data (2) states that around a quarter of pregnancies end in termination and up to one third of women will have an abortion at some point in their lifetime, even though 81% of Australian women are using contraception.

When a couple follows the way to live that Christ shows through His Church, they will grow in true freedom. Their sexual union will be a full and organic expression of their marital love.

They will practice acting from love rather than being driven by their passions. This helps the whole family to thrive and as St John Paul II said, ‘As the family goes, so goes society’.

For those interested in learning more about Natural Family Planning, please contact me at rachel.bradley@aohtas.org.au