Not entirely. You did respond, didn't you.
Ball four!
Posted on 08/16/2005 1:48:10 PM PDT by NYer
Having married in 1985 when both were medical students, Ann and Michael Moell had their life together planned out.
Once they established medical practices and had a big house with a sprawling back yard, they would begin to have children. Until then, Ann would take the birth-control pill.
Although both had grown up in large Catholic families in Ohio, neither was well versed or much interested in the Church’s teaching on birth regulation.
“While we were in medical school and residency, we didn’t think we had time for a child,” Ann says. “We had the American dream in mind, not just for ourselves but for the children we would have.”
Their plans began to unravel four years into the marriage, when Ann stopped taking the pill because of persistent headaches.
“Here we were, both studying medicine, and neither of us knew anything about the pill and its side effects,” she recalls. “It just isn’t a topic in medical school because the pill is assumed to be a good thing.”
They used periodic abstinence, condoms and other barrier methods but, within a year Ann became pregnant. They welcomed the child into their lives, yet continued to contracept.
After their third child arrived, Ann says, “That was it. We were still young, with three children and growing medical practices. We thought we had to do something foolproof that would keep us from having more children.”
They discussed the possibility of a vasectomy for Michael.
“We thought it would be the best thing for our family,” Michael explains.
Something happened, though, in the Moells’ pursuit of the American dream. Ann began to pray. The couple had begun attending Mass again with the birth and baptism of their first child, but they were “just doing the Catholic thing,” Michael says. “We didn’t know anything about contraception being sinful or that Jesus is present in the Eucharist. We were missing so much.”
“To actually ask God to give us an answer was something new,” Ann admits. “I was praying at Mass, ‘God, show us what to do about this issue.’ A month later, I was pregnant. It was God’s answer. It was so immediate, so direct, and I was elated. It changed our whole attitude about who was in charge of our lives and our marriage.”
They began using natural family planning, and have welcomed two more children into their lives.
But God was not finished with them yet. Ann was a family-practice physician who prescribed the pill. Michael was a pediatrician who was prescribing the pill for young girls. Someone gave them the videotape “Contraception: Why Not?” by Janet Smith. “It changed the whole direction of our practices,” Ann says. “We started looking into the side effects of the pill and I knew I had to stop prescribing.”
Now Dr. Ann Moell is a stay-at-home mother who volunteers as a prenatal-care physician at a pro-life pregnancy center in Dayton, Ohio. Michael left a pediatric partnership to open Holy Family Pediatrics, in the same building as the pregnancy center. About half his patients are pregnant teens referred by his wife. They recommend abstinence before marriage and NFP in marriage to their young patients. Many Catholic parents travel long distances to bring their children for routine care to Holy Family Pediatrics.
“This has been a huge spiritual journey as well as a growth and learning experience in proper health care,” says Ann.
“It was a huge financial leap and leap of faith, to give up the partnership and open my own medical practice,” Michael adds. “Four months after I opened the door, our fourth child was born. I was questioning God the whole way. But it’s worked out better than I could have dreamed.”
Conversion is a word Penny and John Harrison use often to describe their experience with birth control. They were married in 1983 in Penny’s Protestant church; a Catholic priest witnessed the ceremony for John, who was raised in a Catholic family.
They used various forms of contraception for the first 10 years of marriage and had two children “pre-conversion,” as John describes it.
A Catholic Marriage Encounter weekend opened Penny’s heart to the Church, and, when she decided to become a Catholic, all the assumptions of their lives were uprooted. While she was going through a parish RCIA program in their hometown of Kansas City, Mo., John began looking at his own faith and asking questions. He had no problems with the sacraments or the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, but his vague knowledge of the Church’s teaching on contraception nagged at him.
When he and Penny asked a priest about the issue, “we got some confusing and unspecific answers,” John recalls. “We ultimately were told to ‘follow our conscience.’ Unfortunately, that’s the answer too many Catholic couples get today, and they’re not being told the full beauty of the truth.”
Penny entered the Church at the Easter Vigil in 1993 and shortly thereafter she and her husband went on a 10th-anniversary vacation without their two children.
“We were both very uncomfortable using contraception on that trip,” John said. “We came back and just stopped using contraception of any kind, and prayed and hoped for another child.”
Key to their decision was hearing a talk by Catholic evangelist Scott Hahn, a former Protestant minister, and reading Rome Sweet Home, in which Hahn and his wife, Kimberly, defend the Church’s teaching on contraception.
“We date our deeper conversion to the heart of the Church primarily from the fervor we took from listening to Scott Hahn’s talks,” John says.
Since their conversion, the Harrisons have had three more children, including twins in 1999.
“I come from a Protestant background where it is considered irresponsible not to practice contraception, so I’ve come a long way,” Penny says. “The problem was that when I was preparing to enter the Church, we knew what Catholics were supposed to believe but we couldn’t find any Catholics who actually lived the teaching on contraception.”
As teachers with the Couple to Couple League, which promotes NFP, John and Penny are seeing “more and more couples open to the gift of life,” she says. “I tell them that, in the Nicene Creed, we call the Holy Spirit ‘Lord and Giver of Life.’ If we take that title seriously, we cannot shut the Holy Spirit out of our marriages.”
John says he tells couples who are not particularly religious that contraception is “disrespectful to your wife’s body. You expect a woman to take these hormones that make her body think she’s pregnant just so she can be available to you sexually all the time. And it goes the other way too. Your wife expects you to put on a special device. That’s not very respectful of the man, either.”
“Love means giving your whole self to your spouse,” adds Penny. “And that’s the great gift of NFP.”
to further the connection between spouses
Absolutely, but this valid reason must not be at the expense of the procreative aspect, which alone uniquely invites God as a full partner of your marital union. For example a good dinner has two aspects as well: nutritious and social; it would be fine to enjoy a dinner alone if the companion is unavailable for dinner and thus forego the social aspect; but it would be wrong to go to two separate rooms to eat dinner when the companions can have it together.
oral sex
My studied understanding is that any foreplay designed to increase the enjoyment of the marital union is a good thing as long as the marital act remains a unitive and procreative act as a whole, -- which means, oral sex cannot result in the seed ending up in wrong places, and it cannot be something only one partner enjoys. Of course, a risk of those caveats being violated is substantial with oral sex.
NFP teaches that when abstinence is recommended according to the goals of the couple using NFP, it should be complete abstinence, not just avoidance of regular intercourse.
What don't you like about Christopher West?
Sexual acts done for pleasure alone (even a passionate kiss) are mortally sinful. Pope Alexander VII condemned the opinion: "It is a probable opinion which states that a kiss is only venial when performed for the sake of the carnal and sensible delight which arises from the kiss, if danger of further consent and pollution is excluded." (Denzinger 1140)
So all sexual pleasure involving arousal that does not conclude in intercourse with the man climaxing inside the woman in the normal way is mortally sinful. Hence all complete acts of oral sex on a male are mortal sins, and all complete acts of oral sex on a female apart from the male either before or after climaxing inside the woman in the normal way are also mortal sins.
So all methods of producing sexual pleasure in a woman apart from the man completing it with an act of marital intercourse must be entirely excluded as mortal sins.
The problem with sexual pleasure is that it is not under the control of right reason due to the disorders of concupiscence.
To will the pleasure of lust as the end of an act (rather than to simply experience it as something that is a part of an act and that impels us to perform it) is to will the surrender of the mind to the sensitive appetites and to turn ourselves away from rationality to slavery to sensible pleasures (sex, food, drink, etc.), and to confuse the means (the inducement of pleasure) with the end (a completed act of marital intercourse).
Good point about sexual feelings after fertility is over. I think you hit something on the head. Nail or . . . whatever! LOL!
Thanks for your time and input!
But you know many women cannot orgasm by intercourse alone, of course. So helping her along is sinful? Or am I misinterpreting and it is not sinful as long as the man ejaculates inside her after her orgasm?
I guess if I read you correctly there should be no physical contact at all between unmarried persons? Because obviously intercourse is wrong before marriage and even a goodnight kiss can cause arousal.
I am not being flippant, I am trying to understand. I did not go to Catholic school so I guess I am deprived!
Okay, another question. Sorry.
Is it wrong to kiss your wife passionately say, when you are exiting the car to go into a restaurant for a romantic dinner, or in the hall in the morning when you have to run to work but you want to connect?
Bumpus ad summum
Anything you list above, including 4 to a bedroom, could constitute a just reason. A married couple should "thoughtfully take into account both their own welfare and that of their children, those already born and those which may be foreseen. For this accounting they will reckon with both the material and the spiritual conditions of the times as well as of their state in life. Finally, they will consult the interests of the family group, of temporal society, and of the Church itself" (Gaudium et Spes, 50).
Or is it up to the individual conscience?
Yes, if the conscience is well formed in its moral obligations. To those with doubts, they should consult a Priest.
I am not trying to be rude. SOrry if you took it that way.
But you are continuing to make the same untrue assertions about the teaching of the Church that I showed you were not true many moons ago.
Those who know me well know that on these topics I try to present what the Church teaches and refrain from offering unsubstantiated opinions.
I invite you to back up your assertions you made with teaching from the Church.
With their current partner's incompetence ... but I digress. However, far too many women are told they are "frigid" or have a low sex drive when in reality what they have is a spouse very poor at lovemaking and perhaps too focused on their own pleasure.
So helping her along is sinful?
No, it is perfectly acceptable.
Or am I misinterpreting and it is not sinful as long as the man ejaculates inside her after her orgasm?
There is nothing wrong with oral (or manual) sexual stimulation for a female either before or after sexual intercourse where the man has or will climax inside her.
Female oral sex is only sinful if it is seperated from the completed sexual act and is made into a solitary act of its own. One is not permitted to enjoy female oral sex during fertile periods as a substitute for sexual intercourse.
The same cannot be said about male oral sex. Male oral sex is always wrong because the sine qua non of sexual activity is the man climaxing inside the woman's vagina. So for him to climax in her mouth is inherently perverted. Because of the excitability of many men, even the use of this as a pre-intercourse stimulative technique is highly dubious because of the risk of pollution.
It would also seem that a woman is permitted to enjoy multiple orgasms both vaginally, orally, or a combination of the two, since the female orgasm does not end the sexual act, unlike the male orgasm. OTOH, the practice of some men with a high sexual drive of achieving multiple orgasms is inherently contraceptive unless the first is achieved vaginally, since nearly all the sperm are sent forth in the first male climax. So it would seem okay for a woman to achieve an orgasm orally and then another vaginally, but it is not okay for a man to do so.
A normal person would kiss his wife in these situations as an expression of love and would enjoy the pleasure of the kiss as something arising out of the expression of love.
To kiss ones wife to enjoy the pleasure of the kiss only is to turn the means into the end. Sexual pleasure is not a licit end in itself.
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