Expert: Griff Ruby - 3/23/2008

Question
QUESTION: I have used this site before, but still have come to disagree with many answers given to the topics that i've wondered about. I have been a Catholic my entire life, but my church puts less emphasis on the contoversial issues of the church.

NFP -- I don't understand why birth control in the church is forbidden if the marriage is open to children. Planning is essential for financial and emotional circumstances. Birth control plans children just as well as NFP, and it's not 100% effective. How is birth control any less open to children than NFP. What if you use it to plan..not to eliminate children from the marriage?

Mortal Sins -- It is my understanding of the faith that we do not believe that other Christian religions are denied access to heaven. Many things are considered mortal sins in the church, such as not attending mass on sunday. What if i were to die with a mortal sin on my conscience but lived a Christian life and tried my hardest? What about protestant denominations who don't practice the sacrament of confession?



ANSWER: My extreme apologies for the delay, this being Holy Week and some family crises, etc.
The whole point of birth control is that when one employs it the marriage is not open to children.  NFP was given what permission it was given only because it only reduced the odds, not eliminated the odds, of having children.  Especially in the earlier days when it was done with calendars instead of sensitive and accurate temperature and hormonal tests as it is today, it merely enable the family to grow at a more conservative rate than nature might otherwise seek.
The first and main point of marriage is children.  That it also provides companionship and so forth is secondary, and those merely entering into it only for that, one could argue that they are not really getting married, particularly in the cases where they do not want any children and would not accept any if they arrived.
In the view of the Church, marriage is a vocation, just like being a priest or religious is a vocation, like a Divinely-appointed job, it is our function in life, the reason we are here, what God has put us here to do.  He does not put us here for our own amusement or our own pleasure, though we are allowed such things to help renew us in spirit and refresh us, like rest stops on a long and tiring journey.
In all bygone days, if a married couple did not want any children, they would simply forego that particular embrace which makes them, and such a thing has also always been accepted as part of a mode of prayer and fasting.  It is only in recent decades that permission had been given to use the "less fertile" periods as the times of "not fasting."
Think of a cake.  The bread-like part of the cake is the cake itself, and then there is the icing.  Making children is the cake, and whatever pleasures may come about as a more immediate consequence of the process of making children are merely the icing.  There are those who want the icing without the cake.  This is disordered (not to mention fattening!)  The laws of the Church effectively state that "have a little cake along with that icing, why don't you!"  NFP meets the letter of that law by in effect pulling a single crumb from a cake and dropping it into a giant bowl of icing, and then carefully stirring it in such a way that the crumb is far more likely to end up stuck to the sides of the bowl than coming up in any spoonful of icing.  In my opinion that already violates the spirit of the law, but for certain extreme circumstances this was grudgingly permitted by the Church in certain cases where circumstances arise, for example when a husband loses his job and therefore cannot support any more children, but since he is now earnestly seeking a job he is still entitled to his wife's affections (it is considered acceptable for a wife to refuse a lazy layabout husband, as a way to encourage him to work), and so for circumstances of this sort (or others of equal or greater gravity) the Church has permitted this recourse.
Nowadays you have many couples using NFP, not for such grave reasons, but merely because they feel they won't be able to afford that new boat or vacation or bigscreen TV if they have another child, and this is, to put it simply, a rank abuse.
Other methods however are worse.  Drugs have hormonal consequences such as cancer, and unbalance the natural hormones of a body.  Mechanical contrivances merely get it the way and the use of them is nothing more than mutual masturbation, e. g. sex with a piece of rubber (condom) instead of with another person.  And some of them (the pill, and the IUD) even kill off any that are conceived, effectively causing an abortion (murder).  The whole thing is unnatural and repellant, at least to those whose sensitivities have not been dulled by continued exposure to evil or enslavement thereto.
Interesting thing is, until the 1930's or so, even Protestants equally regarded such things as out of the question for those who would aspire to be good Christians in good standing with the Church.  And in fact, virtually all religious sorts of just about any religion so regarded such practices, including Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and so forth.  Some others still do to this day.
Other religions will not enter Heaven.  However it has always been accepted (at least theoretically) that some scattered few persons within other religions might be saved despite their having been in a false religion.  It amounts to some people being better than their principles.  As for Protestants who don't have the confessional, well then they had just better not sin, for they have no venue for forgiveness.
You talk of someone living a Christian life but with some mortal sin, and that is simply not possible, at least from the standpoint of God, though all humanity could be so fooled.  Imagine getting away with murder, but you are good to your family, and an industrious employee, give generously to charity, and widely regarded as a "pillar of the community," but there is still this murder that you have gotten away with.  No one knows you did it, and no one ever will unless you tell them.  There is no "well, that was a long time ago" or any other such excuse for merely carrying on as if all is normal when one has something like that in their past.  No amount of good a person does will undo the evil, nor even obtain forgiveness for it.  A "perfect crime" in which a person commits a murder and is never found out, is most certainly possible.  But he who succeeds at that must certainly wind up in Hell, for not being found out, neither can there have been any forgiveness or absolution.  And every mortal sin is like that murder in the sight of God.  Why anyone should choose to live that way I cannot comprehend, horrible as the choice would be between turning oneself in and facing the jail sentence (or worse), but obtaining forgiveness, versus "succeeding" at the perfect crime and then going to Hell.


---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: I understand the consequences of mortal sin. However, a mortal sin is defined as a sin that causes one to turn away or be cut off from God and his grace. Murder is obviously a mortal sin, but there are some sins the church sees as grave matter that i do not. For instance, i read an examination of conscience that suggested that passionately kissing someone without being married, reckless driving, etc. were mortal sins. Sins perhaps(?)..but sins that with one occasion will damn me to hell? These lists of mortal sins are outrageous. It is impossible not to sin; we are sinners. But I find it very hard to avoid mortal sin when it is expressed in that way. And leaving the church is considered a mortal sin..so I'm stuck? I've researched about how NFP has caused terrible stress on marriages. How can that be beneficial? I just don't understand. Why does the church not believe that these methods were given from God to provide for the economic situation of smaller families?

Answer
The trouble you (and many people) have here is coming from a corrupt and fallen culture in which many sinful activities are taken as a matter of course.  You grow up assuming that certain things can't really be sinful, or at least not seriously sinful, since "everybody does it," and if any of these things have become something you are accustomed to, then there's a problem.  For then it seems that along comes this God who tells you that this and that which you have already accepted in your life are mortal sins, and that you will be damned unless you repent of them, and it then feels like "how dare He?"  As if God were some kind of killjoy only wanting to spread unhappiness in the world.
But this whole perspective is backwards.  I can only have pity for what it is to come from such a family, town, and world in which sin seems to be a way of life.  Once upon a time there were whole Catholic nations and societies in which these things were clearly not accepted, so those raised in such places need not have ever become addicted to any sins.
Think of smoking.  Imagine being a teenager when it is considered "cool" to smoke, and where everybody who is anybody smokes, and nothing is mentioned as to the health problems it causes.  So, you start smoking.  Now you are "cool" and "with it" and "somebody" because you have a cigarette hanging out of your mouth on every possible occasion.
Then a few years later along comes the doctor who tells you that it will give you cancer that will kill you in 20 years, and how dare he?  So now comes this terrible choice between killing yourself with cancer and dying so soon, or else giving it up and going through all the other stuff people have to go through in giving up smoking, going through life constantly craving a cigarette and constantly having to refuse the temptation.  It gnaws at you like a hunger, though if one stays away from it for a long enough time the temptation does subside and eventually get lost down in the noise of many other stray thoughts easily ignored.
But who here is really to blame?  The doctor who tells you the truth or the teenage kids who told you it was "cool" and gave you your first free smokes just to get you started?  How much better and easier to have been warned from the outset that smoking causes cancer and is never worth the trouble it causes, so then you just never try and never get hooked and never have to cope with that constant desire for another smoke?
And in the same sense, how much better to be raised knowing the truth about what is right and wrong, and also the benefit of seeing that truth lived in the example of parents and other societal figures one encounters!  How much better to learn of the proper use of the procreative faculty from those who understand that its purpose is for the continuance of the race, instead of from slick advertisements and sleazy magazines (and now internet sites) prepared by villains who seek only profit, and from roguish peers who only think it's funny to watch you fall into the same sins as they!  What would be better, to learn about cigarettes from the doctor or from the cigarette companies and their advertisements?
NFP (and total abstinence, which is the other acceptable means for a couple to avoid children) only present a problem for people who are hooked on the pleasures of the flesh and who think they have a right to them.  No one ever has that right.  Married people have the privilege of using the procreative faculty to make children, to become co-creators with God in the creation of human souls, an extraordinary prerogative not given to the angels.  We are not our own but have been bought with a price, the price of Jesus on the Cross, and a part of not being our own means that we belong to God and it is for God to decide what we can and cannot do.
When God is the center of a relationship, the strictures that God places on that relationship as to what may or may not be done and when and how, are received with joy and gratitude.  But when people's lives are centered elsewhere, then the demands of God become for them merely impositions to resent and chafe under.
Being a Christian is not about following certain rules, but about becoming the sort of people who follow the rules with delight and gratitude instead of finding the rules burdensome and ever looking for the furthest one can go within them or even forgetting them and proceeding clearly into various sins.
Yes, one can always find those who will tell you that sinning isn't always bad or who will redefine sin to mean only those particular sins that have not as yet become a part of your life, but what good is that?  The purpose of the Church is to always tell you the truth about what is right and what is wrong, and to assist you in doing what is right by obtaining the graces of God which in turn impart love of God and which makes following the rules a delight.
And it is not that once you have done some one or another of these things you are doomed, for there is repentance, and with repentance there comes forgiveness, and then there is penance by which one undoes the damage.  The main part of any true penance is having to live without whatever compensation a sin used to give one.  And this is what confession is all about.  The sins, even the mortal ones, damn people not merely because they occur, but because the person doing them chooses them finally over God.  For God and sin are strictly alternative.  It's like being married to a guy who will not restrict himself to his one woman.  How would it be to have to share your man with other women?  Would not something in yourself crave to tell him "it's either me or her; you can't have both!"  But God is the same way with sin.  It's either God or sin; you can't have both.