Homily 3rdSunday Ord. Time Yr. B: Contraception & theLink to Abortion
This past Wednesday morning I left on bus trip for WashingtonD.C. with parishioners from both parishes and students and teachers from St. Joseph’s High School. On Thursday Jan. 22, after touring the nation’s capitol, we participated with people from across the country in the March for Life – an exhilarating experience.
Jan. 22 marked the 42nd anniversary of the horribleRoe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, which overturned every state law in the country and permitted the killing of unborn children through abortion throughout the full nine months of pregnancy. Since that 1973 decision, between 55 and 60 million pre-born children have been killed in the womb – a veritable American Holocaust which still continues.
A few months ago Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, the chairman of the U.S. Bishops committee on pro-life activities, reported that under the Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare), more than 1000 healthcare plans in our country now receive federal subsidies that cover for elective abortions – which means that our tax dollars are now being used by the federal government to kill unborn babies!
This past Wed. night, at the vigil servicebefore the March for Life, Cardinal O’Malley called abortion a “barbaric practice” that devastates the lives of women; he told the youth gathered:“We must work tirelessly to change the unjust laws, . . . But we must work even harder to change hearts, to build a civilization of love.”
How did this happen? How did it come about that we, a largely Christian nation, have killed close to one-third of all the children conceived in the womb over the past 42 years? In today’s homily, I’d like to “connect the dots” – that is, paint a picture and explain how we arrived at this point in our country – something I did for our youth while on the bus as we were driving to the March for Life.
To understand what has happened, we must go back to God’s plan for love, life, marriage and the family. In Genesis we read: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28) – God’s first blessing on the human race; and St. Paulsays: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?. . . [Therefore,] avoid immorality”(1 Cor. 6:15 ff.). These teachings apply above all in marriage.
In God’s plan for the marriage act, there is an inseparable link between love and life – between the unitive, or love-giving aspect of the marital act, and the procreative, or life-giving aspect. This is because we are made in God’s image and likeness, and in God Himself – the three persons of the Trinity – love and life are inseparable: God’s love is always life-giving; and human love, marital love, is intended by God to reflect or be an image of divine love.
In other words, in the marital act there must be a total gift of self between the spouses; husband and wife cannot hold anything back, including their fertility. Every marital act must remain open to the possibility of cooperating with God’s life-creating love, and generating new human life: a child. Vatican II teaches that in God’s plan, “authentic married love is caught up into divine love” (GS no. 48).
In God’s plan, because love and life are inseparable, one cannot have authentic marital love without openness to human life; and this is why the Church prohibits artificial birth control – whether it be contraception or sterilization.
If couples have a serious reason for postponing a pregnancy, they may use a natural means to do so. Natural Family Planning is based upon knowledge of a woman’s monthly reproductive cycle, and requires periodic abstinence – which actually helps to strengthen authentic love between spouses. When couples use NFP, every marital act remains open to life and to God’s potentially life-creating love. By the way, Laurie Walsh (a nurse at Mt.Carmelparish) will teach a series of NFP classes beginning next month; details are in the bulletin.
To intentionally exclude the procreative aspect of marital love by some artificial means really de-forms the marital act, rendering it life-less, thereby excluding God from participating in the act, and therefore de-sanctifies the act: Contraceptive sex is lifeless sex, and lifeless sex is Godless sex.
Archbishop Listecki, in his “Love One Another” column from July 16, 2013, says: “The contraceptive mentality attempts to separate the act of lovemaking from procreating. There is little doubt in my mind that contraception has created a type of selfishness, especially in the lives of young married couples. The child is seen as an afterthought to their security or convenience. Large families, and for many that is more than two children in a family, are often treated as an archaic concept.”
Pope St. John Paul II teaches in his encyclical The Gospel of Life that when the two meanings of sexual relations, unitive and procreative, are artificially separated by contraception or sterilization, “the marriage union is betrayed and its fruitfulness is subjected to the caprice of the couple. Procreation then becomes the ‘enemy’ to be avoided in sexual activity” (no. 23).
And it is precisely this anti-child, anti-life mentality of contraception that leads to abortion. St. John Paul II makes this clear in The Gospel of Life when he says: “The close connection, in mentality, between the practice of contraception and abortion is becoming increasingly obvious” (no. 13). I like to call abortion the “flip side” of contraception; people use contraception to avoid a child, and when contra-ception fails, as it often does, the “solution” is the “final solution”: abort the child.
The great pro-life missionary, Fr. Paul Marx, O.S.B. – for whom I was privileged to work for two years while I was in the seminary – visited close to 100 countries preaching the pro-life message. Fr. Marx said, many times, “I never visited a country where there was with nice, clean contraception, and no abortion. In any country where there was contraception, there was always abortion. Always.”
It’s helpful to realize that up through early part of the 20th century, every Christian denomination – Lutherans, Methodists, etc. – condemned contraception. The first Christian group to allow it was the Anglican church, in 1930. Soon a few other Protestant denominations followed; but most did not. To get an idea of how almost everyone regarded contraception as immoral at that time, I’ll quote the editors in the March 22, 1931 Washington Post: the acceptance of contraception, they said, “would sound the death knell of marriage as a holy institution by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality” – like adultery and premarital sex. How prophetic!
Most people would be shocked to learn that as recently as 50 years ago, state laws in our country prohibited doctors from dispensing contraceptives even to married couples; and in 1960 the U.S. Supreme Court (Poe v. Ullman) upheld such laws as constitutional, based on the rationale that contraception was regarded as “immoral in itself,” and that it led to adultery and “a general lowering of morality.”
But in 1965 the Supreme Court reversed itself (Griswald v. Conn.) and held that such laws violate a couple’s “right to privacy.” In the years that followed, with the widespread use of the contraceptive pill, the divorce rate doubled in the U.S. Why? Because by violating God’s unchanging laws concerning marital love and the generation of human life, couples fell out of God’s love – and out of His grace.
Contraception also led to the so-called “sexual revolution,” which began in the 1960’s, and continues in our present time. Can anyone doubt that over the past half century there has been a general lowering of morality?
The common thinking of our culture is that with contraception, people can engage in sexual activity freely, without consequences – like having children. Not true: contraception fails, children are conceived, and then aborted. And there are other consequences. There’s an old saying that “God always forgives, man sometimes forgives, but nature never forgives.” Today there are a plethora of sexually transmitted diseases which are at an epidemic level in our country, especially among young people. If you want see the shocking statistics, get on the Wisconsin Right to Life website; here are two statistics: there are over 70 million people with an STD in the U.S.; over 19 million new cases each year.
But even worse than the physical consequences are the spiritual: sin leads to death – spiritual death, and if unrepented, eternal separation from God.
In 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court used the so-called “right to privacy” (found nowhere in the Constitution) to rule that women had the “right” to kill their unborn children throughout the full nine months of pregnancy.
The Supreme Court has had numerous opportunities to overturn Roe v. Wade, but has refused to do so, in spite of all the scientific evidence that human life begins at conception. Why? Listen to what the Court said in its 1993Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision: “For two decades of economic and social development [i.e., since Roe v. Wade], people have organized intimate relationships and made choices . . . in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail."
That’s the bottom line: the so-called “right” to abortion trumps everything else, even the lives of preborn babies; and abortion is a necessary back-up to failed contraception in a society which sees the primary purpose of sex as pleasure, rather than the generation of new human life.It’s not surprising that abortion followed contraception in both law, and practice, for it is the anti-child, anti-life mentality of contraception that leads to abortion.
One of the reasons so many people see nothing wrong with the fiction of same-sex marriage is because they are locked in a contraceptive mentality which fails to see that the primary purpose of sex is not pleasure, but the procreation of new human life. If sex is not ultimately ordered to the generation of new human life, then there is no basis for saying that homosexual sodomy is inherently disordered and therefore a sin.
Now, God loves us, and He wants us to be happy. He created us and He knows what is good for us. If we follow His plan for love, life, marriage and the family, we will be happy – in this life, and for eternity in the next life.We as Catholics have the fullness of the truth, and we have the responsibility to give witness to the truth about God’s plan to a society that is spiritually sick and has lost its way. What the Catholic Church teaches in these matters is the Good News of the Gospel, and we must proclaim it – shout it – from the housetops!
The way to end abortion is for people to live chastely, to embrace lives of purity, and to express love in the way that God has designed: in the context of the life-long bond of marriage, with an openness always to His life-creating love. To quote once again Cardinal O’Malley at the March for Life vigil this past Wed.: “One of the logical ways to reduce the number of abortions would be to discourage the promiscuous behavior that is rampant in our culture. . . . The glamorization of promiscuity needs to be reversed by having people speak out against it.” He said practicing chastity, which is an integration of sexuality within the person that is applicable to every state of life (single or married), is a way to be pro-life by “[protecting] the transmission of life.”
In today’s readings we see a call to repentance from sin, first by the Prophet Jonah to the people of Nineveh, and then by Jesus Himself to all people as He begins His public ministry. Let us pray to the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus and our spiritual Mother, that people in our nation – and throughout the world – may repent of their sins; that they may return to sanity and embrace the beautiful teaching of her Divine Son, Jesus, on love, life, marriage and the family!
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