Libido Redux: Sex or Marital Act?

Whenever I refer to sexual intercourse in teaching my classes, I refer to it as “the marital act,” largely because sex is unitive and marriageis about union. Truth about human sexuality sees that its unitive nature completes husband and wife as persons, as couples and as a people. Likewise, to live it incompletely renders us incomplete and divided.

My review of Humanae Vitae centered on the reality that sexual intercourse between husband and wife is both unitive and procreative. In my experience what Catholics and others fail to understand is that in recognizing the unitive nature of sex as different from its procreative nature, Humanae Vitae did not separate the two. The Holy Father wrote that the traditional doctrine taught within it “… is based on the inseparable connection … between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act”. As outlined in TheSmoke of Satan, dissenters from Humanae, lay and clerical separated the two, claiming the unitive nature of sex remains genuine when distanced from the procreative. Quite simply, the Pope’s point was that sex that is not open to procreation, sex that is shut off from its very nature, cannot be unitive. Just look about our overexcited sexualized world and see—there is no intrinsic unitive value in sex divorced from its natural end. Humanae Vitae posits truth in connecting the unitive nature of sex to its procreative nature. A marriage that accepts in every marital act the possibility of a child with its own needs, changes the nature of a relationship into something more than the husband and wife. In considering the yet to be conceived child, a man and wife subordinate their lives to another. Their love for each other is no longer solely about themselves but a gift to their child not yet conceived. It is this love, rooted in the creative nature of the sexual act, that makes it unitive.

Untying the procreative nature of our sexuality from its unitive nature, as we have done, extinguishes the very thing that makes it unitive. Contraception fundamentally changes the marital act, changing it into something completely different. Sex open to new life and deliberately sterile sex are wholly different acts. Using “sex” to refer to both of these is deceptive, for intercourse open to life changes the lives of husband and wife beyond themselves.

Comments

Dancing With Mr. D: Grooming the Little Children

A former pro-transgender activist said she regretted her previous work in pro-transgender activism, adding she felt she was "indoctrinated" on gender ideology in an interview with Fox News Digital. "I started to realize that what I had been doing at my job at the LGBT Center, it was grooming," Kay Yang, a former employee of a location in New York, said. Grooming in this context means "to get into readiness for a specific objective." Kay works as a 'deprogrammer' to help parents and children who have been 'indoctrinated' by the 'cult-like' transgender agenda. Yang herself previously went by they/them and worked as a 'trans educator' in schools for years. Listen to her testimony.

The Dysfunctional Nations

From time to time a local pastor fires us up with fortitudinal e-blasts, of which this is his latest: Dear Parishioners, Every Catholic should be angry about this. Please take the time to read the editorial below that recently appeared in Investor's Business Daily . Cheers in the Lord, Fr. Tony United Nations Scolds Catholic Church On Human Rights Anti-Religion: Ignoring abhorrences such as China's one-child policy and atrocities condoned by Shariah law, a U.N. committee tells the Vatican to deal with abusive priests and change its teachings on abortion, contraception and homosexuality. That the report issued by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child would mention the instances of abuse of children by priests in the United States is not surprising. What is surprising and unfortunate is that the U.N. would act as if the Catholic Church had done nothing about it and use the report as a ...

Are We in a War?

Power Line POSTED ON NOVEMBER 22, 2020 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS , LIBERALS , SOCIALISM FIGHTING WORDS, BY DAVID HOROWITZ Our friend David Horowitz wrote this essay, which he titled “Fighting Words.” It is a call for freedom-loving Americans to fight back against the totalitarian Left. By now it should be obvious – even to conservatives – that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help the Communist enemy win the war in Vietnam, but they stayed to expand their influence in the Democrat Party and create the radical force that confronts us today. The war that today’s Democrats are engaged in reflects the values and methods of those radicals. It is a war against us – against individual freedom, against America’s constitutional order, and against the capitalist engine of our prosperity. Democrat radi...

On the Universalist Heresy

Universalism is the speculation that we can know with certainty that every single human being or possibly every creature, including the devil himself, will be saved, and was condemned in 543 by the Church. It dates from the time of Origen in the third century, with his defense of what he called “Apocatastasis,” the notion that all things will be all in God—everyone shall be saved. I dare say it is a belief well-established among Catholics today, supported by some Catholic theologians predisposed to this view. Universalism stems from doctrine of hell, the idea that people might be separated from God for all eternity and endure eternal conscious torment because of this alienation. Universalist theologians, following Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar say that Universalism represents the triumph of hope over biblical evidence. Yet t he Church has taught from the beginning that both heaven and hell exist, and there are two possibilities for each of us: eternit...

Blogging Disciples!

To promote a book I spent years in writing , I began this blog. I am a baby boomer who knows all too little about blogging and the latest techie stuff. As I was perusing various Catholic blog sites, I noticed a post by Fr. Longenecker entitled, "The Smoke of Satan." If one troubles oneself to read Fr.'s quite accurate assessment, and becomes interested in just exactly how, according to the Pope who coined the phrase "Smoke of Satan" the Devil made his entrance into the post-Vatican II Church in the U.S., then my book is just what the Savior may have ordered, so why don't you!?

Libido Redux: A Case of Mistaken Identity

Back in June of this year I wrote about Pope Francis' view of Gender identity : " Gender ideology is demonic!’” said the Holy Father. One thinks of this statement wonders what the New York Times thinks of t his statement by a Pope they admire after running this piece on gender identity . The article tells of how there are not only man and woman, but also other ‘genders;' furthermore: every person can choose his or her gender . Fr. Longenecker stands this on its head: " Well, call me old fashioned, but remember Humanae Vitae? The underlying teaching was a defense of the essentials of human sexuality. Basically “sex is for babies” and if you separate sex from babies all sorts of monstrous things will come about. When sex becomes more about recreation than pro creation people become confused about what sex is for, and if they’re confused about what sex is for, then they soon become confuse...

The 21st Century Must Come Into the Church

Continued from September 14.... T hrough the Church’s teachings, God has also revealed his truth on how humanity can live happily. What is so little understood by Catholics and Christians is that doctrinal revelations that come through the Church come out of God’s very Self. They are not tied to culturally constructed norms! Read Vatican II’s Dei Verbum : “by divine revelation God wished to manifest and communicate both himself and the eternal decrees of his will concerning the salvation of humankind.” Our Lord’s Church derives its basic vision not from mere human speculation, which would be tentative and uncertain, but from God’s own testimony—from a historically given divine revelation. Thus Catholics believe that just as God himself is immutable, so, too, are His teachings as revealed through the Church because they come from him. As I discuss in my book, although the Church does not change its central teachings, we do see the theological principle of “devel...

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D: This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor

Tucker Carlson: The Biden Scandal Is Real And Not Going Away Posted By Ian Schwartz On Date October 30, 2020 TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: It's been obvious for decades now that the Biden family has gotten rich from selling influence abroad. Joe Biden held a series of high level jobs in the U.S. government. Based on that fact and that fact alone, Biden's son and brother approached foreign governments and companies, sovereign wealth funds, energy conglomerates, Third World oligarchs and dictators, and they offered to exchange favors from Joe Biden for cash. The polite term for that practice is influence-peddling. Sometimes it is legal under American law, sometimes it is not. But it has always been the economic engine of the Biden family. They've never done anything else. Until recently, no one debated this fact. Several liberal news organizations, in fact, have written detailed stories about the Biden secret business dealings over the years. Look them up, assuming you still c...

Novus Motus Liturgicus

From The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God: In 1959, Pope John XXIII saw a true need for liturgical renewal within the Roman Rite in accordance with the metaphorical principle of organic development, the aim of the Liturgical Movement endorsed by Pope St. Pius X. In authentic organic development, the Church listens to what liturgical scholars deem necessary for the gradual improvement of liturgical tradition, and evaluate the need for such development, always with a careful eye on the preservation of the received liturgical tradition handed down from century to century. In this way, continuity of belief and liturgical practice is ensured. As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote at the time, the principle of organic development ensures that in the Mass, “only respect for the Liturgy’s fundamental unspontaneity and pre-existing identity can give us what we hope for: the feast in which the great reality comes to us that we ourselves do not manufacture , but receive as a gift. Organic de...

Search This Blog