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To: Mrs. Don-o; metmom; RnMomof7; Alex Murphy; bkaycee; blue-duncan; boatbums; caww; ...
It's staggering how I ....have never met one single, solitary Catholic who thought sex between a husband and wife is dirty and sinful.

Perhaps not, but while modern RCs have become more enlightened on the subject, RCs often assert one must go to the "fathers," and there we see no less than Jerome, Augustine and Tertullian imputing uncleanness to marriage or its relations.

this too we must observe, at least if we would faithfully follow the Hebrew, that while Scripture on the first, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth days relates that, having finished the works of each, “God saw that it was good,” on the second day it omitted this altogether, leaving us to understand that two is not a good number because it destroys unity, and prefigures the marriage compact. Hence it was that all the animals which Noah took into the ark by pairs were unclean. Odd numbers denote cleanness. St. Jerome, Against Jovinianus Book 1 http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.vi.vi.I.html

So much for 2 x 2 evangelism! And behold how the scholar resorts to this false dilemma, as on First Corinthians 7 he reasons:

It is good, he says, for a man not to touch a woman. If it is good not to touch a woman, it is bad to touch one: for there is no opposite to goodness but badness. But if it be bad and the evil is pardoned, the reason for the concession is to prevent worse evil. (Against Jovinianus (Book I, v. 7)

He furthermore stated,

It is not disparaging wedlock to prefer virginity. No one can make a comparison between two things if one is good and the other evil....Let them marry and be given in marriage who eat their bread in the sweat of their brow, whose land brings forth thorns and thistles, and whose crops are choked with brambles. My seed produces fruit a hundredfold.(''Letter'' 22; http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/447.html).

In addition, Augustine held marital relations must involve sinful lust:

...the very embrace which is lawful and honourable cannot be effected without the ardour of lust, so as to be able to accomplish that which appertains to the use of reason and not of lust....This is the carnal concupiscence, which, while it is no longer accounted sin in the regenerate, yet in no case happens to nature except from sin. — On Marriage and Concupiscence (Book I, cp. 27); http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/15071.htm

Then we have Tertullian, who argued that second marriage, having been freed from the first by death, "will have to be termed no other than a species of fornication,'' partly based on the reasoning that such involves desiring to marry a women out of sexual ardor. ''An Exhortation to Chastity,'' Chapter IX.—Second Marriage a Species of Adultery, Marriage Itself Impugned, as Akin to Adultery, ANF, v. 4, p. 84.]

50 posted on 06/25/2015 6:02:57 PM PDT by daniel1212 (Come to the Lord Jesus as a contrite damned+destitute sinner, trust Him to save you, then live 4 Him)
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To: daniel1212; Mrs. Don-o

That last quote of Augustine’s was the one I remembered.

And again, the typical Catholic’s reaction at the thought of Mary having sex with her lawful husband reveals what people really think about sex within marriage.

While there is no doubt that sex outside of marriage is wrong, the way celibacy and virginity are held up as standards to attain over marriage, strips off the fluff and shows what Catholic teaching really is stating.


51 posted on 06/25/2015 6:11:49 PM PDT by metmom (...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith...)
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