Pearls of Wisdom

     But where is wisdom to be found, and where is the place of understanding?  Man knoweth not the price thereof, neither is it found in the land of them that live in delights....The finest gold shall not purchase it...Gold or crystal can not equal it....High and eminent things shall not be mentioned in comparison to it...Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding?...Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom: and to depart from evil, that is understanding.  ~Job 28:12-28


Last night my brother called to speak to my mother.  Normally, there's a lot of small talk about how people are doing and what books they are reading.  But sometimes their conversation gets around to our family, especially our 7 children.  You see, we are something of a freak show with my Protestant extended family.  For some reason, they say what disrespectful thing they are thinking, right in front of our faces, and pretend that we don't hear it.  It's sorta like going to the circus and talking about the bearded lady while you are staring at her through the glass.  It's almost inhuman.  And last night was no exception.
     What's so freakish about us?  Well, we are real Catholics.  We are poor.  We have 7 children.  We obviously do not use birth control.  I do not work outside the home.  Our family is devoted to Our Blessed Mother.  We have icons all over our house.  We pray the Rosary and make the sign of the Cross often.  We go to confession and we believe that it's possible to control one's sinful behavior.  For my Southern Protestant family, we are not to be taken seriously.  We are out of touch with reality.  We are silly.  We are wicked and we need to be saved.  So every little chance my Southern Baptist brother gets, he offers some practical Protestant "wisdom" and "truth."
     The little pearl of wisdom he offered last night was in regard to our 17 year-old son.  Truth be told, we've had a difficult go with him.  He's grown up in the Northeast where religious belief of whatever sort is personal and marginal.  He came of age in the public school system where social activities are overly encouraged along with the idea of teenage personal sovereignty.  As such, our transition from a modern Catholic family to a traditional Catholic family has been especially difficult for him.  He openly questions God and, thus, morality.  And as frightening as that seems, somewhere underneath is a little seed; a seed of Truth that Our Lord will allow to blossom in His own time.  I have often been reminded, when I go to the confessional confessing my own doubts and fears about him, that St. Monica prayed for 30 years over St. Augustine.  So I know from the lives of the Saints that it only takes a seed.  Eventually, it will grow.
     Unfortunately, Protestants don't have the beautiful treasury of the Saints.  They don't have the inexhaustible collection of men, women, and children who overcame the snares of the devil and lived their lives with eyes solely on heaven.  They don't have the beautiful gift of the Sacraments, especially of Penance and the Eucharist.  They have no understanding really of God's grace in our lives.  They are, sadly, facing a broken world, a sinful world, with only their intellect and will to guide.  So it was no surprise to me when my brother threw in his unsolicited 2 cents in regard to our son.
    You see, our son has a girl-friend.  These two have been sweet on each other since they were 14.  Back in those days, we knew about their fondness for each other, and we chose not to over emphasize it.  Yet, every chance we got, we talked about chastity, respect for each other, and the necessity to protect each other's reputation.  We've insisted on that.  As they approached 16, a quite vulnerable age in this modern world, we upped our conversations about chastity and respect.  Not once, in any conversation that we have had with our son, have we mentioned or encouraged he and his young girl to sin.  In fact, we have reminded him that he can control himself-he must control himself-until they marry, if that is the Lord's will.  And yet, we realize, completely, that this modern world is fallen. And we've also recognized that, as their feelings grow, there might be occasion to sin.  And with a young son whose grown up in a modern Catholic, Protestant, and secular world this is a frightening situation.  Yet, we have peace, hope, and faith in Our Lord and our young son.
     But as the case with most Protestants, they don't see sin in this way.  For them, we are all totally depraved.  The spirit might be willing, as my brother thinks, but the flesh is weak.  So his advice, freely given to the trad Catholic freaks, is to "hope and pray they are using birth-control."  Now isn't that special?  Not that I am surprised at his suggestion.  He has offered his practical Protestant position on many occasions.  And in an effort not to seem "preachy", he disguises the "birth-control is beautiful" ideology within almost every conversation.  "It's hard enough to pay for one child to go to college.  It's impossible to pay for 4."  "Groceries are high."  "You've got to drive a big ole' gas guzzler 'cause you can't put 6 kids in Ford Focus."  "You've only got three bedrooms?" And the one that I love--"You're pregnant again?  Aren't you 43?"  He feels justified in his tid-bits of advice, though, because they are practical.  And even when counseling unmarried teens, the practicality of not having babies always trumps the sinfulness of one's actions.  So us pesky Catholics, always focused on our personal sins, are just stupid and silly because we just can't embrace the practicality of living.
     So how do I respond to my pompous, Protestant brother?  "Oh boy.  You'd encourage them to pile one sin on top of another?  How Christian of you."  And there in lies the rub, doesn't it?  And here is where our Protestant friends are let loose running in the corral.  They have lost the concept of actual sin, how we participate in it, and that we can doing anything about it.  And because we Catholics still believe in sin, still believe that Our Lord hates sin, still believe that Hell is a real place and that we can merit it by committing mortal sin, we are freaky, impractical, illogical individuals.  And, in their opinion, we aren't doing ourselves or our children any favors.
    Protestant theology and ideology has brought the United States to complete moral decay and economic collapse.  In practice, it is a Godless faith.  It is a faith where men and women make their own rules, decide who God is and what He wants, and determine for themselves how to merit heaven.  Protestant theology causes one to eventually embrace evil because they believe it to be practical or morally acceptable.  It also causes one to look upon certain people through judgmental eyes.  It is grave danger to the soul because, the ultimate outcome is a belief sin is not real, that morals are relative to circumstance, and that material possessions are a reflection of God's grace.
   I love my brother dearly.  I believe that he is sincere in his Southern Baptist beliefs.  I know, without doubt, that he loves Our Lord with his whole heart and soul.  I don't doubt his sincerity or his piety.  I don't doubt that most Protestants are this way.  I was one.  I know many.  They are good, hard working people, without question.  But Protestantism is diseased.  It is a lie from the devil and, if one is not careful to recognize the dangers, leads to hard-heartedness, selfishness, sinfulness, and loss of faith.
     I am absolutely never going to tell my sons or daughters that sin, in any form, is acceptable.  I am especially not going to tell them, when they are older, that sexual relations outside of marriage is okay or acceptable.  Sin is a horrible thing.  It damages our relationship to Our Lord.  It hurts him.  Sometimes, in the case of mortal sin, it separates us completely from Him.  And although we have a human nature, a desire for the things of this world, the things of the flesh, we also have a free will and God's grace.  Through the reception of the Sacraments we can  have a continuous flow of Our Lord's graces.  And with that, we can have the will to never offend God again, the desire to avoid sin, the ability to reject Satan and all his vices.  And that is the pearl of wisdom I am going to give my son.

More souls go to Hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason.  ~Our Lady of Fatima
   

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

St. Monica, pray for us!

St. Augustine, pray for us!
   

There Was an Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe

    I was not going to write about birth control for quite some time. I wanted my blog to reflect some of my spiritual progress as I read through lives of the saints or came to realizations about my personal life. But this last week birth control has been in the news and out in the blogosphere a lot. The Medical Advisory board hopes to convince the President that birth control coverage should be mandatory coverage for insurance companies and certainly for the Medicaid program. As expected, the discussion has drawn criticism from every avenue, even among individual groups of religious people where birth control is controversial. Birth control itself (not mandatory insurance coverage) is hotly debated in real life but especially in the blogosphere. Jill Stanek, a very popular pro-life blogger, even has a poll up over on her site. Sometimes advocates of birth control can be quite vitriolic. Families with large numbers of children are the brunt of cruel jokes and silent scorn. This type of reaction is almost expected of the secular world. By definition, secularists are interested in worldly things and care very little for the religious or Divine. But when this reaction is prevalent among those proclaiming to be religious, there seems to be something troubling about it.

    Like the Old Lady mentioned above, I have a fair number of children. Seven, to be exact. Each and every one of those children is special and unique—a precious gift from Our Lord. As hard as it is in modern times to raise a family, I don't regret for one moment the sacrifices we have made to care for them. It is not easy. It is downright difficult, especially when the entire world in which we live is focused on getting and acquiring material things. That particular discussion, raising a large family in modern society, is better left for another day. A more pressing discussion regards a deeper subject and question that needs to be addressed. Why is a person who uses contraception considered a virtuous person and one who does not considered a miscreant?

    I have always considered myself lucky to be alive. My mother was an early feminist and, from her own admission, used various forms of birth control. My parents were married in 1959 and my brother came along in 1961. Shortly thereafter, the Pill became available and was marketed as the woman's "liberator." That one scientific contribution was the catalyst to change an entire society and, surprisingly, a fundamental moral and religious belief.

    When I was a young girl in the 70s, families had already begun to experience the after effects of oral contraceptives. Since I grew up in a predominantly Protestant area, a normal family size by then was about 3. There were some families with 4 children and occasionally I met a family with 5 or 6 but that was rare by the time I made it into elementary school. And most certainly by the 80s, most Protestant families, and many Catholic ones, had adopted the secular view that two children was enough. In less than one generation, the secular world view managed to uproot traditional Christian morality. Now that another generation has passed, traditional Christian morality is more than passé—it is archaic and irresponsible. How did this happen?

Before Christ ascended into Heaven, He established His visible Church, leaving the Apostles with full teaching authority in regards to faith and moral law. On Pentecost, Our Lord sent the Holy Ghost to aid the Apostle in this manner. All that the Catholic Church teaches is revealed Truth. It is Truth because it is revealed by the Divine Master, who neither deceives nor can be deceived. As such, the Church has always taught that using contraception in any form, except under certain conditions, is always gravely sinful. This knowledge permeated all of Christian society, even when the Protestant churches began to spring up.

In Christian society, using birth control in any form, intentionally making the sexual act sterile, was a clear violation of God's moral law. Protestant churches held this position for centuries, until the Anglican Church opened the floodgates on this issue in 1930 at its Lambeth Conference. The "bishops" at this Conference declared that if married couples felt compelled for moral reasons, then they could use whatever means necessary to limit parenthood or avoid it all together. That declaration laid the framework for all Protestant denominations to re-examine the nature of marriage and sexual relations. Now, after only 80 years, the Truth that contraception is morally sinful is now so watered down that Protestant and Catholics alike are counseled to simply "follow their consciences", even if their consciences are formed through secular relativism rather than Divine Truth.

Before I continue, I would like to clarify this. Before 1930, two decades before the "Pill", contraceptive was morally sinful. Married people didn't use it and unmarried people, well they got married. Now, according to almost all Christians, contraception in some form isn't a moral issue at all. What gives? Well, it's all about sex---what it is and what God designed it for.

Before you start shouting at the screen, I've heard all the usual arguments and then some. I have had my feet squarely planted in many worlds, the pagan, the secular, the Protestant, the modern Catholic, and, now, the traditional Catholic. "Sex is a natural bodily function, just like digestion." "Marriage is about companionship." "The Church doesn't tell us to have as many children as we can!" "Sex is love." While all of these rationalizations and feelings may have some merit or contain some truth, they are not the Truth. There is a Truth, though. Christ and His Church hold the Truth and the leaders of the Church have been quite negligent as of late in disseminating that Truth.

So what is the Truth, then, about contraception? Using contraception, in whatever form, is a mortal sin. Those are powerful words indeed. But before we can really understand why that is so, we must really understand marriage. I hope to write another post in the near future on the topic of marriage, but for the sake of this conversation, I will only address the main points. Marriage was designed by God for pro-creation. In marriage, the spouses have an immense love for God and each other. It is through this love that God brings new life into the world. It is only through sexual relations that the pro-creation can occur. In other words, the end or purpose of marriage is for the birth of children and their education. Since marriage was ordered by God in this manner, contraception, because it purposely seeks to frustrate or interfere with this purpose, is always morally sinful.

This is something our Christian ancestors seemed to have understood. Marriage was made for having babies. If you wanted to have children, then you got married. If you didn't want to have children, then you didn't get married. Now of course, there have always been exceptions to the rule. Some people got married for money or property or lust. Some people who got married, didn't really want the responsibilities of children. Others who wanted to have children didn't get married. There have always been illegitimate children and barren women. But the general rule was always understood---marriage was for having and raising children. And couples had the number of children that God intended for them to have, whether that be1, 3, 8, 12, or none. It was God's design and no one dared attempt to alter what God had established. At least not until the Anglicans in 1930.

Perhaps the Anglicans thought they were doing a great favor to their Protestant members. Perhaps they thought men and women shouldn't have to make that many sacrifices in order to raise a family. Maybe they didn't want people to suffer in poverty or to become overburdened. Whatever the reasons, I am convinced that they really believed it was a positive re-examination of marriage. Actually what they did was institute a new way of thinking about marriage and sex and that way of thinking has taken root in Christianity like a weed. Contraception allows for the possibility that marriage is not designed for having children, but simply having sex. Thus the natural sex act, in essence, becomes unattached to the conception of children. In other words, sex no longer means "having babies" and "having babies" no longer means sex. What we have in, then, is a "contraceptive mentality."

As the Anglicans were paving the way for the contraceptive mentality to take root in Christian culture, the Catholic Church was attempting to battle it. In response to the Lambeth Conference, Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical, Castii Connubii, on the last day of the year in 1930. It is an amazingly beautiful document outlining clearly the nature of marriage, the role of the spouses, and their responsibilities. The Pope reaffirmed what the Code of Canon Law of 1917 had already clarified: "the primary end of matrimony is the procreation and the education of children." (Canon 1013). Pope Pius XI specifically declared that "no reason, however grave" could make any act intrinsically against nature "conformable to nature and morally good." In other words, nothing that is morally sinful (contraception) can ever become morally good, regardless of the reasons or justifications for participating in the act. He goes on to explain that Christian doctrine makes it perfectly clear that humans do not have an "absolute dominion" over their bodies. We have control over its use, of course, but we must always use it according to the will of God.

Unfortunately, huge societal changes were sweeping across the world in those years regarding marriage, sex, and contraception. Before the birth control "Pill" came onto the market, the Protestants were poised to embrace the secular world's scientific contributions to contraception as commendable and helpful. By 1958, most Protestants had accepted the idea that responsibility for the number of children a family had fell onto the consciences of the husband and wife and they could utilize whatever means necessary in attaining that goal, including sterilization. Two generations later, every Protestant I know firmly believes that using birth control to determine for themselves when they will have children and exactly how many is responsible Christian parenting. They believe it and they will adamantly confirm that God doesn't have any problem with it. They also believe that if God really wants them to have children, then they will regardless of their use of contraception.

I would like to say that, in spite of the secular world and the Protestant sects, that the Catholic Church has remained steadfast and strong regarding the issue of birth control. Sadly, that would not be true. In wake of the 1960s societal changes and Vatican II, the leaders in the Catholic Church waited a very long time to address the issue. By the time Pope Paul VI issued his Encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968, the damage had already been done. Priests and bishops across the world had been encouraging couples to "follow their conscience" regarding the use of birth control. Although Pope Paul VI's examination of birth control was quite prophetic, he did may have actually opened up an avenue for Catholics to change their views of marriage and contraception, as well. He identified fecundity as a "problem." He also emphasized and elevated a secondary aim of marriage—that it is "primarily ordered to the good of the spouses." That marriage is primarily for raising children has been de-emphasized in the modern Church. In fact, a large proportion of faithful Catholics use various means of birth control. Those that are particularly conscience of the Church's teaching now use a "natural" form of birth control entitled Natural Family Planning. While time does not allow for an analysis of this at the moment, I will say what the Church has merely tolerated for centuries among Catholics is now being taught in parishes and promoted as a moral good.

Sadly, we are living in a culture where even the Christians no longer know what is good or evil anymore. We are lost and no one knows how to read a map. The fruits of our contraceptive mentality are glaring us in the face---abortion, economic collapse, euthanasia, demographic decline, and homosexuality. Do we have the courage to change it? I certainly hope so.


 
St. Catherine of Siena, pray for us, that we may welcome each child God gives us as another soul for heaven.

St. Girard Majella, pray for us, that childbirth is once again embraced and treasured.