23 Thursday Dec 2010
[Originally posted on January 22, 2009]
To hear the words, “God hates sin,” may, for certain modern men, invoke images of a deity too demanding to be very comfortable. Such moderns would find the proposition savoring of a dogmatism that borders on the primitive. For them, it sounds so arbitrary for God to label certain forms of behavior — often forms we find enjoyable — to be evil and therefore “sinful.” Continue reading
01 Thursday Apr 2010
(This was written in preparation for a series of conferences on vocations and states in life that I gave at Saint Benedict Center in the Spring of 2005. Please see the end of this piece for a small table of contents with links to the other conferences.)
We have spoken of choosing a partner and of the preparation for matrimony that we call courtship. Now I would like to speak of married life itself. Continue reading
02 Friday Jan 2009
Posted in Moral Theology, Society and Culture
Visiting a nearby college recently, I picked up the campus newspaper to see what the students are reading nowadays. The front-page headline proclaimed that the dean of the college opposes lowering the legal drinking age from 21 back to 18. It seems that binge drinking is a problem on campus, and this problem is pandemic. Eighteen-year-olds just aren’t “mature” enough to drink.
The institutionalized prolongation of adolescence we call higher education has evidently failed to imbue any sense of moral restraint on its inmates, so the officials want draconian laws to keep them from getting themselves hurt. Continue reading
02 Tuesday Dec 2008
Posted in Book Reviews, Moral Theology
Not afraid to call a spade a spade, and deeply grounded in the Scriptures and the fathers of the Church, the scrappy and erudite Cardinal Giacomo Biffi has done it again. When his last book was published, we wrote Cardinal Biffi’s Bombshell. With his recent publication of Pecore e Pastori (Sheep and Shepherds), the good Cardinal has proven that there is more shock and awe left in his arsenal, and he’s delivered the ordinance right on target. Continue reading
04 Saturday Oct 2008
Posted in Moral Theology
I copy here an entry from the Catholicism.org News Portal because it brings up the moral issue of NFP, but first, a few more general thoughts on the subject:
NFP, or Natural Family Planning, is a more scientific version of what used to be called the “Rhythm Method.” Under Pope Pius XI, the church tolerated the use of this kind of “planning” by married couples, but under very strict circumstances that involved grave dangers to health or serious poverty. There is today a very dangerous movement that virtually sacramentalizes NFP. The votaries of this movement make it a virtual obligation on all couples to learn NFP and practice it to some degree. This is an objectionable abuse of the tolerance previously allowed by the papal magisterium. Married couples that have serious problems of health or poverty ought to consult a priest formed in the traditional theology on this point. Under his direction, they may, in good conscience, temporarily utilize the infertile periods as provided for in the program of NFP.
Now for the news story:
On Friday, Pope Benedict send a message to the President of the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for the study of Marriage and the Family. The message was occasioned by an International Congress marking 40 years of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. Both Vatican Radio and AFP have coverage of this story.
The tendentious journalism of the AFP report may not be trustworthy, but it contains this notable paragraph:
The 81-year-old pope’s message Friday to a seminar on the encyclical also reaffirmed that the rhythm method is an acceptable form of contraception for couples in “dire circumstances” who need to space their children.
If the Holy Father really restricted the use of infertile periods (he almost certainly would not have said “rhythm method”) to “dire circumstances,” then he is distancing himself from the increasingly liberal interpretations of the Church’s traditional tolerance of this practice. The “tolerance” was limited to highly restricted circumstances, and the practice of the method for putting off contraception was always seen to be temporary.
21 Sunday Sep 2008
Posted in Moral Theology
Father Chad Ripperger’s sermon on NFP (MP3) is one of the most intelligent things I’ve yet heard on this much-discussed subject. This is highly recommended for married couples.
22 Saturday Sep 2007
Posted in Medical Ethics, Moral Theology
“Ensoulment” is the word which describes the point at which the body of the conceptus is said to be informed by a human soul. (The notion of a living being having “no soul” is a philosophical oxymoron, since the soul is the principle of life in a material being.) There are two basic theories of ensoulment. The first is called the “immediate animation, immediate ensoulment theory”; the second, the “immediate animation, delayed ensoulment theory” (also called the “serial ensoulment theory”). As the names suggest, the former asserts that, at the very moment of animation (when life begins), the newly conceived human is animated by a rational soul; while the latter holds that the human soul’s informing of the new body is delayed. This latter theory further holds that there is a progression from vegetative to animal to human soul as the principle of animation. Common in the middle ages, the theory was based on Aristotelian biology and is untenable considering all that is presently known from the empirical sciences. Many learned Catholic authors of the ages of Faith held this theory and advanced it in their writings because it was the accepted biology of the day. Continue reading