It is not surprising that the Catholic Church should constantly be attacked for her staunch refusal to accept artificial contraception. Contraception is a diabolic invention; yet most Churches have succumbed to the pressures of this world and stopped opposing it
Up until the 1930s almost all Christian denominations agreed that the destruction of human fertility was inadmissible. God gave man and woman the ability to transmit life in love. Contraception is a denial of this gift. This is an obvious truth to anyone who cares to consider the matter objectively from a Biblical standpoint. But adhering to this truth has proved very difficult. Today the Catholic Church is the only Christian body to resolutely oppose the use of contraception.
Some say the Church ought to change her teaching and accept artificial intervention in human fertility; however, such a change would mean a betrayal of Truth. The marriage of Kimberly and Scott Hahn is an eloquent testimony to this fact. In their unswerving search for Truth, these two Protestants eventually found it in the Catholic Church. In their own Church they had heard nothing on the subject of contraception. It was only in the books of Catholic authors that they discerned the true biblical approach to fertility as a gift of God. Kimberly read and then passed to her husband John Kippley’s book entitled Sex and Marriage. In it the author argues that marriage is a covenant and not a contract. A covenant consists in a mutual exchange of persons and not just of goods and services. The marital act makes present the power of life-giving love. It renews the marriage covenant through which God can call a new human being into existence. When a married couple renew their covenant in the marital act and yet resort to contraception they profane not only the marital act, but also God’s love and their own love for each other. Kippley, a Catholic, compares this to receiving Holy Communion and then spitting it on the ground or to the ancient Roman banqueters who gorged themselves to excess and then resorted to the vomitorium to avoid the consequences of their gluttony. After reading the book, the surprised Scott Hahn noted that the author was absolutely right. The use of contraception ran counter to natural law and was a profanation of the marital act, since it negated the promise of the spouses to a total self-gift of each other. As a deeply believing person, who sought counsel in the Bible for daily living, Hahn knew that in creating human beings (man and woman) in His own image and likeness, God commanded them to be fruitful and multiply. The union of a man and woman in marriage was to be an image of the perfect union of God in the One Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. The three Divine Persons give of themselves totally in unselfish love.
The marital act was to be an image of this total and unselfish mutual self-giving of the Divine Persons―and therefore it was a holy act. By contrast, every use of contraception was a profanation of this act. Moreover, Christ ordained that marriage should mirror the union of Christ and His Bride, the Church (Eph 5: 22-23). In this context, it was absolutely clear that when the married couple deliberately sterilized themselves through contraceptive means, then their intimate union in the marital act reflected neither the perfect union and unselfish love of the Three Divine Persons nor the intimate bond between Christ and His Church.
It was this teaching that opened Scott Hahn’s eyes to the fullness of truth proclaimed by the Catholic Church. Hahn noticed that Protestants focused only on certain aspects of the truth, while dismissing other essential elements of Divine Revelation. Protestant theologians know that Holy Scripture speaks of children as a great blessing from God (cf. Ps 127: 3). Our fertility is a reason for joyful celebration and thanksgiving to God and not for fear and dread of conceiving a child. Children in the Bible are a great grace and a special blessing from God. The Bible holds out no blessing for parents who for petty reasons postpone the conception of a child or who flee from the hardships of parenthood. Alas, even though they know this, Protestant theologians do not consistently teach that contraception is a serious sin that thwarts God’s plan for humanity and thus destroys the bond between man and God.
Seeing this, Scott Hahn finally abandoned Protestantism and received Baptism in the Catholic Church so as to draw fully from her wellspring of graces. In doing so, he confirmed that the Church’s teaching on contraception was entirely Biblical, and that the theology of the body as developed by our dear John Paul II was in full accord with Divine Revelation and told the whole truth about the human person. What a pity that so many of us Catholics remain indifferent to this great spiritual treasure of our Church; indeed some even stand on the side of her adversary, Satan, and criticize her for resolutely defending man’s dignity.
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