AS is well known to all but those who choose not to see, the broken or irregular home has gone from being the exception to
the rule.
The family is the building block upon which all secular and
Christian civilization is built. Marriage is a divine and natural institution
perfectly portrayed by Christ the bridegroom and His Church, the bride. Though
the world has been trying to change both, we find ourselves with a gap between
how the world sees family and marriage and what the Church knows about them.
The Fourteenth General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops took place
from October 4 to October 25, 2015, in Vatican City. While it is inspiring that
the Church fathers are attempting to develop pastoral solutions to the
overwhelming problems we face as a global society concerning marriage and
family, it is rewarding to know the roots of the problems that we face. If we
untangle the modernism on both topics we will discover that the problem lies in
the contraceptive mindset.
As I discuss in The
Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God, after successfully work of
separating rights from duties by the spirit of rebellion, Satan’s most profound
work was to separate the marital act from its primary ends of procreation and
unity. It is a diabolical inversion of reality that the third end of the
marital act, that of the pleasure that flows from the marital act, is claimed
by modern man to be the “new” primary end. This makes God’s primary end of
procreation an inhibition to seekers of the new false primary end, and
therefore something to be eliminated by technique or technology. The modern
world has become obsessed with that task.
My argument in the book is that Paul VI was prophetic in asserting that contraception is at the root of family crises in the
modern age, and this teaching has been obscured by the modern philosophy flowing from the sexual
revolution. In 1968, when he published his encyclical Humanae Vitae, the world was expecting a
change in Church teaching, much like many are expecting changes in Church
teaching from the Synod. The Church’s teaching on contraception is absolute,
because the law against it is divine and natural. It is demonstrated from the
beginning, through the episode of Onan (Genesis 38:8-10) through the Apostle’s first
catechism (the Didache), and re-stated in every catechism
put forth by the Church.
To be continued….
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