Sex Au Naturel (15 page)

And yet, as I emphasized in the introduction, any correct understanding of the natural law relative to something as culturally accepted as contraception is deeply affected by our fallen natures. In this area, to state the cataclysmically obvious, our erotomaniac culture stands in need of divine grace and the teaching of Christ. While natural law is objective and knowable by all, the kindly atheist is therefore less likely than the crotchety daily communicant to grasp the truth
of Humanae Vitae.

The Second Vatican Council alludes to natural law in several key sections:
⁴

• “It is in accordance with their dignity as persons—that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility—that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth.”
  ⁵
  

   
  

• “The highest norm of human life is the divine law—eternal, objective and universal—whereby God orders, directs and governs the entire universe and all the ways of the human community by a plan conceived in wisdom and love”(DH 3).
  

   
  

• “For the Church is, by the will of Christ, the teacher of the truth. It is her duty to give utterance to, and authoritatively to teach, that truth which is Christ Himself, and also to declare and confirm by her authority those principles of the moral order which have their origins in human nature itself” (DH 14. Paul VI builds on this passage in Section 4 of
  Humanae Vitae
  )
  

   
  

• Man discovers this law of God “in the depths of his conscience,” and that this law summons man to “to love good and avoid evil” (
  GS
  16).
  

   
  

• In reference to the Church’s right and duty to proclaim the Gospel, “by imparting the knowledge of the divine and natural law” (GS 89).
  

   
  

Again, these sections express in technical language what we know from everyday life. No one delights in being lied to. If someone steals from our store, we don’t sit down like Rodin’s statue
The Thinker
and wonder if there is such a thing as an absolute morality. No, we call the cops.

The Appendix of
The Abolition of Man
by C.S. Lewis gives an eclectic review of moral maxims from wildly divergent human cultures. Lewis found that, with minor differences, what western philosophy calls the natural law is perceived universally. No known civilization has ever handed out trophies for cowardice, ribbons for corruption, or medals for mocking the blind.

The external natural law has an internal counterpart: man’s built-in detection and decision apparatus known as conscience. The
Catechism
defines conscience as “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed” (CCC, no. 1778). Human conscience doesn’t invent moral truth, nor does culture or socialization create it (although it does condition our sensitivity to it); conscience discovers it and urges us to act this way or that, according to the facts before us. Cardinal Newman called it the “aboriginal Vicar of Christ.”

Conscience isn’t a perfect means of perceiving moral truth, as we know, since fallen human nature is weak and limited. The voice of conscience doesn’t imprint itself in our hearts and minds as unmistakably as it did “in the beginning,” before sin entered the world. In writer-blogger Mark Shea’s pithy phrase, “Sin makes you stupid.” The whole concept of conscience has been hijacked to mean any sincere feeling about what one has done, is about to do, or wants to do.

Pope John Paul II warned against the temptation to be facile and self-serving when it comes to moral decision-making:

Paul could still tell the Romans that this fallible grasp of natural law is the basis of accountability for the “Gentiles,” those who never received God’s revealed law (Rom. 1:32; 2:14–16). The natural law needed to be superseded and perfected by the supernatural, which the Light of the World Himself brought into the world through the Incarnation. Ultimately, conscience can be a powerful ally in the spiritual battle. Cardinal George Pell of Sydney wrote, “The formation of a Christian conscience is thus a dignifying and liberating experience; it does not mean a resentful submission to God’s law but a free choosing of that law as our life’s ideal.”
⁶

From: Pope Paul

To: All

Paul VI cites the teaching of four previous popes in affirming that the Church’s interpretive competence is not restricted to divinely revealed spiritual matters, but includes the natural moral law as well:

Here he is witnessing both to the constant self-understanding of the Catholic Church as the true guardian/interpreter of the natural law, and asserting that obedience to this law is necessary for eternal salvation. Another footnote in Section 4 invokes Christ’s words, “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Mt. 7:21).

So the condemnation of birth control is not the oddball opinion of Paul VI, or a “ban” that some future pope could lift. Nor is it a custom relative to one’s particular faith (eg. Jews don’t eat pork, Baptists don’t dance, Catholics don’t contracept). On the contrary, since Catholics aren’t the only ones with a human nature, and aren’t the only ones who propagate via sexual intercourse, this teaching is proposed equally to everyone as “the will of the Father.” It’s the opposite of sectarian; it’s universal (
katholikos
).

In the eyes of the world, this is high scandal. (Very few Catholics know that this is the teaching.) Yet the Holy Father addressed
Humanae Vitae
to “all men of good will” and appealed to the very broad foundation of natural law as “illuminated and enriched by divine Revelation.” As a good evangelist and teacher, he knew the natural correspondence between faith and reason, but also that God’s Word boosts the candlepower of the natural law, so we may see it with brighter clarity and obey it with greater joy.

Okay, enough setting the stage. How does the natural law apply to contraception?

There is no single “official” way of understanding how contraception violates the natural law. Indeed, there are different, sometimes conflicting, theories held by Catholic scholars on this question. Assessing their differences would bring us far afield, but the mere fact of variation in approach is not an argument against the natural law, for all orthodox writers agree on the basic content.
⁷

For our purposes, it’s enough to say that contraception violates the natural law because contraception acts against the natural end, or goal, of sexual intercourse, which is the coming to be of new human life. Sexual intercourse is, in Janet Smith’s fine phrase, clearly ordained to “babies and bonding.”
⁸
We tamper with this fundamental order of things at our peril.

Contraception is inherently anti-life because it treats a real good (the child-to-be) undesirably enough to motivate a counter-action against the very possibility of its arrival in the womb. The integrity of a well-functioning biological process is regarded as a threat to the pursuit of subjective pleasure at the expense of objective purpose.

One famous way of glimpsing the natural law in action is to consider the natural end, or purpose, of eating. Obviously, it is nutrition. The mouth, teeth, tongue, esophagus, stomach, and the rest of the digestive system comprise a set of organs and processes that are ordered to the purpose of maintaining nutritive health.

But food is also tasty (well, except for cauliflower), and it’s pleasurable to enjoy a hearty meal with family and friends. Even if the food tasted awful, to stay alive you’d still eat it, i.e., you’d act in accord with reason in harmony with the natural law. We will revisit this analogy in Chapter Ten.

You can probably guess where this is going. Birth control (particularly the condom and coitus interruptus) corresponds to putting a spoon down one’s throat to induce vomiting. The sensual pleasure of eating would thus be indulged in for its own sake, severed from its primary end, much like the Roman custom of feasting, stepping into the vomitorium to disgorge the food, and returning for more.

If human life is sacred and inviolable, then the means of transmitting human life must be in some way sacred and inviolable. In the same sense in which the eye was made for color, the ear for sound, and the mind for truth, sex was made for something: for the co-creation of a new someone, and the deepened unity of those (hopefully loving) co-creators otherwise known as mom and dad. The whole contraceptive enterprise denies this implication of inviolability, and, insofar as it meddles with a natural power that transcends both spouses, it is unnatural.
⁹

Dr. Smith has summarized six different natural law arguments against contraception, which she dissects for validity and logical soundness.
¹⁰
Her Version D is the most similar to what we have said about the link between God’s sacredness and the reverence we owe to His special involvement, so to speak, in the marital act:

• Major premise:
  It is wrong to impede the procreative power of actions that are ordained by their nature to assist God in performing His creative act that brings forth a new human life.
  

   
  

• Minor premise:
  Contraception impedes the procreative power of actions that are ordained by their nature to assist God in performing His creative act that brings forth a new human life.
  

   
  

• Conclusion:
  Therefore, contraception is wrong.
  

   
  

The key word is “impede.” Contraception is sex—
and
the introduction of an impediment. As we’ll see later, abstinence during natural family planning is not an impediment in any sense since there is no sex act to impede!

Among other things, the above argument conveys something of the world’s best-kept secret: the deep veneration the Catholic Church has toward sex.
¹¹
The world has it exactly backwards. The world tends to look upon sex as merely currency for “hook-ups,” as a proof of love, as something for sale—or more commonly, something by which to sell something else, like cars or beer. The Catholic Church turns this thinking right side up and proclaims that sexual intercourse—and all the erotic intimacies that cultivate it—deserves the most thoroughgoing protection and respect. “Casual sex” is an oxymoron. When a young man picks out a ring for his intended, he makes sure the ring and its setting matches the beauty of the diamond. He would never superglue the diamond onto a plastic ring. And upon receiving her ring, the young fancée would never toss it carelessly on a park bench or keep it near the edge of the toilet seat. We ought to treat as awesome things that fill us with awe.

Likewise, it is most fitting that sex be surrounded by the proper setting (the security of marriage), and within marriage, accorded the proper respect (freedom from the intrusion of contraception). Catholicism affirms that sex is not merely acceptable or tolerable (“close your eyes and think of England”) but pure and holy—something that ought never be subject to the blessing-refusal inherent in contraception.