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To: Mrs. Don-o

You’ll hate the source but
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_teachings_on_sexual_morality

Intercourse was for procreative reasons. Various rules also forbade intercourse between sterile or older partners but no penalty was mentioned.


24 posted on 05/28/2014 12:21:38 PM PDT by AppyPappy
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To: AppyPappy
I see where you got your information, but your mistake here is that sources like penitential handbooks and feminist ex-Catholics are not the same as magisterial teachings.(And I can hardly blame you, since it can be confusing.)

The penitentials were guidelines for confessors to assess the severity of a sin and to find the proper corrective penance to be given. They varied in different times and places, depening on who issued them: it could have been the abbot of a monastery, or a bishop. or a local synod: it was not "defined doctrine."

Some of these would raise your eyebrows clear past your hairline today: the Irish penitentials of the medieval period were particularly severe, and very much expressed the "ethic of the day" --- but this was not simply another name for the de fide "doctrine of the Church."

Many of the ethical values found in the penitentials come down to 3 considerations:

For instance, since a woman who is still experiencing bleeding and discharges in the weeks after childbirth may likely be exhausted as well as vulnerable to infection, a demand by the husband for intercourse would be interpreted as his excessive appetite for sex when his wife still needed to recuperate.

It was likewise thought that intercourse during pregnancy could lead to miscarriage (as we now know it can, but nowadays rather rarely: for instance if the wife suffers from cervical incompetence)--- therefore, the confessors sought to protect wives from selfish and inconsiderate demands from their husbands.

However the begetting of children also entails the long-term duties of raising those children, and the Church also saw the maintaining of marital satisfaction as a way to keep husbands and wives together and faithful in view of their long-term bonding and their responsibilities. So the "unitive" aspect of sexuality also was respected from the very beginning, and of course pleasure is a unique element of this pair-bonding.

Looking through the history, you can see these values --- unitive and procreative --- becoming more clearly understood and receiving various accents of greater or lesser pastoral emphasis, even to the present day.

None of this indicates that it was a "dogma" of the church that infertile married people should not have intercourse.

I noticed that the only source Wikipedia had for Catholicism in the medieval period was one woman: Uta Ranke-Heinemann (LINK), who is an excommunicated former Catholic, who labels herself a feminist who has "departed from Christianity." She denies most of the doctrines of the Catholic faith: the authority of the Bible, the existence of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the redemptive value of His death on the cross, etc.

I would not consider her an authoritative interpreter of Catholicism, and rather wonder that the Wiki authors chose her as their principal source on the medieval period.

27 posted on 05/28/2014 1:33:39 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o ("Stone cold sober, as a matter of fact.")
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