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.”
There is a simple rule of thumb for unmarried people. If the act they are contemplating cannot be done in front of their parents or the general public, they should not do it.
Normal unmarried people can kiss each other goodnight, or give an embrace, provided it is not done for the sake of pleasure. St. Thomas Aquinas notes:
"A sin is called mortal by what sort of action it is in itself and by what it is caused by. On the first count, kisses, embraces, and caresses signify no mortal sin. They can be done without libidnousness according to the custom of the country or from some fair need or reasonable causes ... Now we have noticed already that consent to the pleasure, not merely to the act, of a mortal sin is itself a mortal sin. And therefore since fornication is itself a mortal sin - and other acts of lechery much more so - to consent to its pleasure is to be gravely wrong. Consequently when kisses and embraces and so forth are for the sake of this pleasure they are mortal sins. Then only are they called libidinous, and to be treated as mortal sins. (Summa, Pt. II-II, Q. 154, Art. 4)
As to other expressions of affection between unmarried people, the following is a common opinion of sound moralists:
In the relationship between a boyfriend and a girlfriend, assuming there is no lustful intention, an expression of affection, which is acceptable but not necessary, which produced an incomplete disorder [sexual arousal], would be a venial sin, if the disorder is positively rejected, but it would be a mortal sin to continue this same action if it involved the proximate danger that the disorder would become complete. (A. Lanza, P. Palazzini, Principles of Moral Theology)
You have got to be kidding.
Seek help. Really, you have crossed many lines on this forum and your comments are unacceptable.
A couple using artificial means of birth control have taken God and nature out of the equation. As the article mentioned, it is used so that the woman can be available for sex at any time. Natural Family Planning actually involves being aware of how the woman's body works, and respecting that sometimes, if the couple believes they are not ready for a child at that time, it is not possible for the couple to express their love in the coital fashion. It requires folks to understand that their 'needs' may have to take a back seat for a couple of weeks. It isn't going to kill anyone to go without, it just goes against the grain of our immediate gratification society.
Are you series? That explains the brevity of my last cycle; it lasted 5 fewer days than usual, which was unusual. The last two weeks of it, I was in Japan, and the family with whom we stayed were vegetarians, so I didn't eat a whole lot of meat. VEY interesting.
blah.. The charting is simply unnecesarily forced interaction. Women are perfectly capable of doing their own charting......
I'm not the only man who feels this way...
Don't plan on that. I started back into my cycles at 6 weeks with each of my kids. And that was while breast feeding on demand!! Each of them started sleeping 'through the night' (from midnight til about 6am) when they were about 6 weeks old, and just that gap caused my body went back to the usual condition.
Pleasure is a movement of the soul caused by the the apprehension and satisfaction of the sensitive appetites.
The passionate kiss that began as a show of love and led to arousal--knowing that the kids would probably interrupt and therefore not allow us to "conclude"--was a mortal sin?
Not at all. Pleasure is not bad. What is bad is to make pleasure from a means into an end. Pleasure should induce us to properly tend to the needs of the sensitive appetites. We are inclined to eat and drink because food tastes good and drink slakes the thirst, and we are inclined to procreate because sex is enjoyable.
It is perfectly fine for a married couple to kiss as a show of love and enjoy the pleasure of the kiss and the arousal it produces even if it is forseen that the arousal probably cannot be satisfied. It is absolutely wrong to kiss merely for the sake of pleasure and arousal with no other end intended.
A normal married couple that avoids sexual perversions like artificial contraception, masturbation, adultery, rectal sodomy and male oral sodomy needn't worry about this at all in their relations with each other.
Why should enjoying the marriage act with your spouse during the non-procreative times be a problem? Remember, God created the process so that the man and woman could become one. Women are only able to become pregnant during a limited time frame. God made us that way, so why shouldn't we use that gift to express our love for our spouse during those non-fertile times? I frankly don't see what the problem is.
The Church does not ask for grave reasons, but just or proportionate reasons to use periodic continence in general.
Pius XII called for the consideration of grave reasons in the case of a couple who felt that they could not fulfill their duties towards distributive social justice in having the number of children the Church and Nation may rightfully claim from them as their due. Thus:
"Therefore, to embrace the matrimonial state, to use continually the faculty proper to such a state and lawful only therein, and, at the same time, to avoid its primary duty without a grave reason, would be a sin against the very nature of married life." (Allocution to Italian Midwives)
For everyone else who do intend to fulfill these duties, and merely wishes to space out their children's births, the Church requires a much lesser standard which basically involves avoiding injustices and frivolity.
Q. Certain married couples, relying on the opinion of learned physicians, are convinced that there are several days each month in which conception cannot occur. Are those who do not use the marriage right except on such days to be disturbed, especially if they have legitimate reasons for abstaining from the conjugal act?
A. Those spoken of in the request are not to be disturbed, providing that they do nothing to impede conception. (Sacred Penitentiary, Response of 3/2/1853)For just reasons, spouses may wish to space the births of their children. It is their duty to make certain that their desire is not motivated by selfishness but is in conformity with the generosity appropriate to responsible parenthood. Moreover, they should conform their behavior to the objective criteria of morality. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2368)
It has been said elsewhere that these media are generally a moral sewer.
Should a person who professes to be Catholic, Orthodox, or place Scripture in high regard even be watching that on the screen?
Probably not a lot of the drama and sitcom type shows. Even where the action is not lewd, it is still voyuerisitic.
All we see in advertisements, during television shows and on the 'big screen' are then -- mortally sinful?
Some is and some isn't. However, the prevelance of snful activity in the course of an acting career is what caused the early Church in Roman times to forbid Christians to be actors. Acting in the generally offered fair of today appears to be incompatible with a consistent profession of the faith, as Mel Gibson has discovered.
Charting is good for beginners. We don't bother anymore!
Not quite. The kiss only becomes illicit when it is motivated by the pleasure of the kiss itself. A kiss motivated by something else is not illicit. Again, in general, a married couple needn't worry themselves about this principle, because their sings of affection for one another almost invariably have a motive beyond mere sensual gratification, even though they certainly do and may enjoy the sensual gratification they bring.
The same principal also holds true for marital intercourse. Bl. Innocent XI condemned the proposition: "The act of marriage exercised for pleasure only is entirely free of all fault and venial defect."
I'm series :-) Also, less painful too.
I know people who have had experiences like yours. However, this is my 8th baby, and I've had 8-10 months without cycles when I've consistently nursed the others. Of course, at my age, I could always have a surprise hormone change :-).
Very good, again, Hermann!
The difference here, while I intellectually understand, seems to be very fine. You can enjoy the pleasure as long as you don't seek it? But we kiss because it is pleasurable. I cannot imagine having the time to consider whether I am kissing my husband because I love him or because I am ho . . .OOPS, excited, shall we say! The intermingling of these feelings in a relationship makes it hard to separate pleasure, love and, well, horniness. They are all there in varying degrees at any one time.
This is where the differences occur. I have read that we must have a GRAVE reason not to have more children in order to use NFP. It is selfish to only have 4 or 5 children if you make $200k a year, is it not? So just because you have contributed your 4, you can afford more. This assumes no medical conditions that preclude pregnancy, just a feeling that you have "enough".
The difference is very simple I think. Sexual acts performed for pleasure alone are wrong. Sexual acts with other motivations in addition to enjoyment of pleasure are okay.
You must have grave reasons to avoid fulfilling your duty to society by using NFP - i.e. having less than 4 children. You must have just reasons for using it if you have or reasonably intend to have 4 or more children.
It is selfish to only have 4 or 5 children if you make $200k a year, is it not? So just because you have contributed your 4, you can afford more. This assumes no medical conditions that preclude pregnancy, just a feeling that you have "enough".
I think this would depend on your circumstances. A young couple living in Manhattan or Boston or Washington or similar expensive locales will find that $200,000 does not go very far at all. $200,000 is a lot of money out in the country though.
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