Must-read on contraception, divorce

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I'm about 3/4 of the way through with this piece by W. Bradford Wilcox from Touchstone magazine. I encourage you to take a look.

Wilcox discusses recent sociological data - data gathered by individuals not pushing a right-leaning agenda - which provide empirical support to the Church's teachings on contraception and divorce. The arguments for the Church's teaching haven't changed and are just as valid as they've always been, but the research is incredible and edifying to see. Please read it.

With this and with Mary Eberstadt's Home Alone America, I sense an encouraging trend. Maybe enough time has passed after the sexual devolution for its ill effects to be made empirically apparent.

Of course, some people didn't need 40 years to see what was going to happen. I don't say that to gloat (I can't gloat, it's not like I wrote Humane Vitae), because I get no joy out of seeing Pope Paul's predictions of the tragic effects of contraception being shown to be true. On the other hand, there is always beauty in seeing how the Holy Spirit has kept the Church free from error.

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2 Comments

Very good article. Kind sad that it's taken 40 years for adults to realize what their kids have been saying all along... :(

I am a 43-year-old Protestant. Over the past year, I began to study the history of Christian teaching on birth control. I was considering a vasectomy, but was convicted that it might be sinful. I was shocked to discover that until 1930, no Christian body of any significant size approved of birth control and that, in fact, it had been universally condemned. The more I read, the more disturbed I became. My wife and I had used birth control for several years to limit the size of our family. Why had I never been presented the history of uniform condemnation, not just by Catholics, but by Orthodox and Protestants as well? Fortunately, I studied the issue before having surgery. Six months after being on the verge of having myself sterilized, my wife and I are expecting our third child. While my wife is nearing the end of her natural period of fertility, we hope that God will grant us a fourth child before that time comes.

While I am not yet ready to convert to Catholicism, this one issue has made me begin studying Catholicism. I have attended Daily Mass with a Catholic friend and read several books of Catholic apologetics written for Protestants. As a subscriber to Touchstone, I read the entire issue in which the Wilcox article is included. That issue also explores how the Protestant Reformation began a long process which has led to weakening the law of marriage as well. It is clear that the splintering of Christianity and the ahistorical attitudes of Protestants is a contributing factor to the problems we are now having with family life, sexuality and related moral issues. It is hard for conservative evangelical Protestants, like myself, to condemn the abandoment of traditional values when we ourselves have so abandoned those values that we no longer understand that artifical contraception is gravely sinful.

It is an issue which Protestants (and wayward Catholics and Orthodox Christians) must confront if we are to effectively address the moral decline of the United States and the developed world.

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This page contains a single entry by Papa-Lu published on February 1, 2005 8:27 PM.

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