Birth Control vs Labor Rights?: Bridging the Culture Wars through a Sacramental Consciousness

Birth Control vs Labor Rights?

Bridging the Culture Wars through a Sacramental Consciousness

I. Introduction

II. Sacral Sex, Openness to Life, and Birth Control 

III. The Minimal Requirements of a Christian Civilization

IV. A Sacramental Matrix for Harmony and Healing Division                   

V. Conclusion

Introduction

In the treatise Cosmic Evangelization one thing we discussed was the rebellious modern principality, the economy.  This power may have been tamed to submission in the souls of some Christians, but it runs amok in the cosmos, drawing believers’ trust and fidelity away from God and toward itself.  Because of its dynamistic nature cosmic evangelization through calculated ritual has barely been conceived concerning this principality.  

The social justice tradition of the Church has sought to keep this power in line by moral reasoning.  But given the powerful rise of this god in the post enlightenment west, there has been pushback among members of the Church concerning moralities based on the common good.  Those who push back usually do so by refocusing on moral issues in a more personal light, and instead of moralities based on common good, they offer moralities based on personal duty or personal purity.  

There seems to be a division in the Church between those who push for the taming of the economy, also known as “the social justice crowd” and those who push for personal responsibility and personal purity.  Division is a power of The Deceiver, not a virtue in the Church.  It is always better to seek concert of virtues such that our picture of human existence can be full and Catholic.

The purpose of this treatise is to bring into concert two seemingly distinct life issues in Roman Catholic moral thought, the Church’s teaching concerning artificial birth control and the Church’s social justice teaching concerning the preferential option for the poor and worker’s rights as they develop through basic human rights.  When making a casual review of internet comment sections one can see a divide between those whose main concerns are for economic justice and those whose concerns revolve around personal morality, especially as it concerns sexual purity.  This divide generally does not present as a simple preference of interest, but a contentious argument that seeks to devalue the “other side” as not sincere.  This division is unacceptable and draws attention away from that fact that these two teachings work in synchronicity toward an experience of Christian joy through the grace of Christ.  The matrix under which we will attempt to bring harmony will be the sacramental life of the church, particularly the sacrament of marriage.  When the two moral concerns work in concert, they facilitate the ability to cooperate with the grace available in a sacramental marriage, especially in the most fundamental sacramental sign of married life, sacral sex.         

In the first section we give an overview of basic sexual morality in Catholic thought and develop the concept of sacral sex.  It will begin with an overview of the two purposes of sex and marriage, unity and openness to life.  After this explanation the section will review certain failures in the sexual education programs of modern Catholic schools.  These failures concern an underdevelopment of the concept of purity and an over reliance on the pragmatics of chastity, especially as these judgments assume calculations of the modern secular world that are dangerous to the culture of life.  This section will end with a speculative section concerning why a modern Roman Catholic may engage in artificial birth control tactics even though they may theoretically agree with the Church's teaching.

The next section will begin with a discussion of poverty and distinguish two ways to achieve the “blessing of the beatitude “blessed are the poor”.  One is the contemplative way of reason, the other is the experiential way of suffering.  After this the treatsie will give an overview of worker and human rights in the Church's social justice tradition beginning with an understanding the “preferential option for the poor”.  

The final section of the treatise will attempt to synchronize the need for the Church’s teaching against artificial birth control with the Church’s teaching concerning social justice.  This will all take place is a matrix of sacramental cosmology.  We will first discuss how the interplay between the so called secular world and the seven sacraments.  We will then take up the task at hand by focusing on sacral sex and artificial birth control.  By use of Maslow's hierarchy of needs we will seeking to demonstrate how the social justice teaching of the Church gives the basic requirements for a fuller participation with the sacral grace of the marital act, and determine that the use of artificial birth control out of a position closed to life is an ineffective and damaging stop gap measure to deal with the already sinful situation of social injustice. Both of these situations must be rectified in order to set an environment such that one can more easily cooperate with the sacramental grace of marriage.   

Christ’s body was broken and divided on the cross for our salvation.  At his ascension The Holy Spirit bound the Church to be his mystical body on Earth.  Divisive arguments and preferential moralities driven by the prioritization of values inflamed by an external culture war seek to break that body again.  But Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient to bring salvation, and there is no more need for division in his body.  The better able we are able to come together as a Church the better able we are able to bring that unity in Christ to all peoples of the creation.

Sacral Sex and Birth Control

Sex Happiness and Procreation

Pope Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body has sought to put sexuality in a positive light.  His noble effort has begun slow a shift in thinking about sexuality in the greater Catholic Church.  People are cautiously beginning to move away from a “thou shalt not” mentality to a “this is why we do” mentality.  One view is driven by litigious denial and the other harmonious cosmology and teleological fulfillment.  Even as this reluctant paradigm shift plods along, there are already some who seek to excitedly hijack the pontiff's rather moderate message of sexual acceptance through proper teleology and turn it back to a morality of personal guilt and shame.  This type of hijacking often happens by a rhetorical maneuver of using  moral justification for teleology to end the conversation with “thou shalt not” statements.  So what any affirmation of Theology of the Body becomes is a justification for some sort of moral condemnation and the lists of condemnations quickly outpace the explanations of affirmation.  

The Catholic Church has many beautiful things to say about sex and sexuality, but it is better known for its sexual condemnations and has a reputation among nonbelievers for sexual repression.  One of the most confusing condemnations in the modern times is the teaching against the use of artificial birth control.  The modern mind cannot grasp how the Church could condemn this seemingly extremely useful technology.  It’s worth pointing out that all Christianities condemned birth control up to the invention of the pill.  When the only means available were prophylactic barriers and abortions it seemed obvious that these things were an affront to both procreation and the beautiful union of sexuality.  They seemed to obviously go against the two purposes of marriage and sexual activity.  

The pill and other “more effective” means of artificial birth control came into existence alongside a cultural and economic shift that replaced the security and joy offered by a large family with the security and joy offered by money and the material goods it could supply.  Our desire to end material suffering through scientific advancement has shifted to finding meaning and happiness in material goods. This shift is coupled with a consumerist economic outlook where we seek to sell each other happiness in order to buy happiness for ourselves.  This is why a cosmological and teleological approach to sexual morality is far more effective than a litigious approach to the issue.  Previous to this shift in attitude, a well lived life and security were more likely found in family.  This is why Abraham is so concerned with procuring descendents.  Children are seen as the ultimate security and joy of any human.     

  Americans bought into this cultural shift away from progeny and toward economy hook line and sinker and the American Catholic laity were not much of an exception.  Paul VI points out in Humanae Vitae that,

There is also the fact that not only working and housing conditions but the greater demands made both in the economic and educational field pose a living situation in which it is frequently difficult these days to provide properly for a large family.

The shift to an economic understanding of security and happiness comes at the expense of a familial based understanding of meaning and joy.  Couple the new attitude toward happiness with the way the economy has taken shape and large families become detrimental to happiness.  In the same introduction Paul VI makes a provocative assertion about why he is writing this now famous encyclical, 

the recent course of human society and the concomitant changes have provoked new questions. The Church cannot ignore these questions, for they concern matters intimately connected with the life and happiness of human beings.

It seems at odd with most common understandings that the point of the teaching against artificial birth control, and sexual morality in general, is intimately connected with happiness.  Yet, this connection is thematic of Church teaching.  Pius XI writes Casti Connubii in order

that men's minds be illuminated with the true doctrine of Christ regarding [marriage]; and secondly, that Christian spouses, the weakness of their wills strengthened by the internal grace of God, shape all their ways of thinking and of acting in conformity with that pure law of Christ so as to obtain true peace and happiness for themselves and for their families.              

Happiness is not the stereotypical word associated with Catholic sexual morality.  Generally the view is a Church that is against almost any sexual expression except “traditional sexual activity”, and that activity is so regulated in its occurrence as to be almost impossible to properly engage in.  When it is engaged in, the activity should never be enjoyed.  Much of this misunderstanding was countered in the treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton.    

The attitude may spring from the tone of magisterial documents that deal with proper exercise of sexual activity by married laity, compared, for example, to proper exercise of liturgical responsibility by clerics.  Liturgical guidance is usually comes in the form of rubrics for action and the assumption is those actions will be carried out appropriately.  Sexual guidance comes in the form of moral pedagogy with an assumption of abuse and gross ignorance on the end of married laity.  There is also a hyper focus on the procreative end of sexual activity, which makes sex seem like a “duty”.  This focus is very noticeable in  Casti Connubii.  In this encyclical Pius XI is seeking to shore up the Church’s teaching on marriage as it is being redefined by society.  It reiterates that marriage is a divine institution that is participated in by the will of humans.  It also asserts that there are three blessings of marriage as noted by Saint Augustine.  Those blessings are, procreation, conjugal faith, and the sacramental life.  But the way Pius explains  “sacramental life” is through the language of marriage indissolubility.  While indissolubility important to sacramental marriage, to read the entire sacramental nature of marriage through that fact only without extrapolating further on the sacramental nature of marriage through that fact demonstrates the narrowest nuptial tunnel vision imaginable to a sacramentally invested married person.  

When speaking of “conjugal faith” Pius and Augustine refer to it as the “faith of chastity”, bolstering the sexual restrictive reputation of Catholic sexual morality.  Yet Pius does go on to expand conjugal faith to other aspects of married life.  

Pius gives procreation the place of primacy when discussing the blessings of marriage and seems to couple procreation with child rearing as the summation of married life.  Procreation and proper rearing of children is indeed a great responsibility in the vocation of marriage.  This combined with natural law arguments developed in the Church the understanding of sexual activity as being so intrinsically connected to procreation, that every single act must have an openness to the possibility of procreation.

In Humanae Vitae Paul VI has a less procreatively heavy handed view of sexuality that Pius XI.  He seems far more apt to acknowledge the unitive function of sexual activity.  Yet he stays true to the teaching concerning every sexual act being open to procreation,                

The sexual activity, in which husband and wife are intimately and chastely united with one another, through which human life is transmitted, is, as the recent Council recalled, "noble and worthy.'' It does not, moreover, cease to be legitimate even when, for reasons independent of their will, it is foreseen to be infertile. For its natural adaptation to the expression and strengthening of the union of husband and wife is not thereby suppressed. The fact is, as experience shows, that new life is not the result of each and every act of sexual intercourse. God has wisely ordered laws of nature and the incidence of fertility in such a way that successive births are already naturally spaced through the inherent operation of these laws. The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life. 

Again there is often a hijacking of the affirmative sexual morality of the Church in order to turn a cosmological and teleological positive focus into a litigious negative.  Thus, “sex is to be open to life”  becomes “don’t engage in all these actions that don’t live up to that.” Through all of this the Church teaches a balanced and mutually supportive purpose to sexual activity composed of both the unitive and the procreative.  Casti Connubii seems to assert that the procreative purpose of sexual activity and marriage is primary to the unitive.  

Thus amongst the blessings of marriage, the child holds the first place. And indeed the Creator of the human race Himself, Who in His goodness wishes to use men as His helpers in the propagation of life, taught this when, instituting marriage in Paradise,        

But Pius XI does not assert that procreation is in any way a priority or necessity.  Such an assertion would contradict the afore quoted passage from Humanae Vitae.  Pius XI asserts that procreation is the greatest “blessing”.  In fact the unitive and procreative function and purpose of sex and marriage are harmonious, mutually edifying, and equal in importance.  As we noted earlier, generally magisterial documents have expressed the unitive purpose in terms of “indissolubility”.  Once one realizes this one can see that the twenty fourth session of the Council of Trent, which discusses doctrines of marriage, speaks only of unity and completely neglects procreation.  

Indeed it would seem that if there were a preference between the two union would be the prefered purpose.  As Paul VI pointed out, an infertile marriage is valid, it is a complete and beautiful sacramental expression of God’s love.  However a child born out of wedlock indicates illicit action on the part of the parents, because they were not properly united.  If procreation were somehow a priority, this would be backwards.  Infact neither is a priority over the other, both unity and openness to life are necessary for fully moral and sacramental sexual action.  Both are wrapped up in what we will call “sacral sex”.  

Sacral sex is sexual activity that takes place in a sacramental marriage and most effectively channels the grace of the sacrament through the chief sacramental sign of the union.  The chief sacramental sign is sex.  As we have discussed in the treatise Sacramental Cosmology each sacrament has matter (something physical) and form (some kind of words).  The form of marriage is the willful exchange of consent through sacral vows.  The matter of the sacrament is the two bodies in union, that would be sex, or consummation, which is necessary for a valid sacramental marriage.  The sex is the outward sign.  The vocational sacraments are instituted, in part, to invest our very being with meaning and invest human bodies as channels of divine grace.  In them we live out, analogical and anagogical, the divine mysteries.  Hence as was discussed in Sacramental Cosmology , for Christianity to survive part of the material needed is three human bodies, 

The first male body is the ordained body, which stands in persona christi in the sacramental system as sacramental matter.  So, for example, the priest's body and the body of the sinner are the only matter needed for the sacrament of confession.  The priest’s body will be needed to mediate the presence of Christ according to how the sacraments work as calculated rituals.  A  male and a female body are needed to perform the sacrament of marriage, their bodies in sexual congress being the matter of the sacrament.  In this sacrament they image the invisible triune God as was the case in the first creation story.      

When not engaged in sexual activity, the indissoluble nature of the union is spiritual.  However, the matter of the sacrament is the two bodies come into communion through sexual activity and become one reality, so the sacramental nature is especially expressed in that act. In the marriage in general the bodies become a sign of trinitarian existence in that the man and woman abide in a relationship of nuptial love which is indissoluble, just as the Father and Son aide in the loving relationship of the Spirit.  Each partnership is bound by a relationship that make three realities one reality.  In the sexual act especially, this union is clear.  In the sexual act the two become one biologically and spiritually in a complete sense.  Hence it is the chief sacramental sign.  

This is the unitive end, the procreative analogically is played out in that God’s love is expansive and was freely spread outward toward creation.  The process of creation and of the sustenance of the cosmos is, from beginning to end, the process of God’s expansive love.  Hence when a sexual act is closed to procreation, it is as if God’s love were not total and expansive, but instead sufficient to be self contained.  

So what we have in sex, as we discussed in Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton, is half of a dual system of communion and sustenance as humanity images God  whereas eating communally binds and individually sustains, sex individually binds, but communally sustains.  Thus it is imperative for sacral sex, that is sex that is fully invested in the sacramental nature of the action itself, to possess an openness to the life generating power of the action.  Openness is an attitude, not a technology or lack thereof.  Technology and/or technique cannot be open or closed to life, they are only such when used with  certain attitude.  This is why when one is using “birth control” for necessary medical purposes, it is no longer birth control.  It is simply a medicine, with an unfortunate side effect.  Despite this, the church’s discourse on this openness has taken the almost exclusive tact of discussions on technique and technology.  This tactic in one of several pastoral tragedies that are occuring chatechetically regarding sexual activity.  We will now discuss two of those tragedies, an underdeveloped sense of purity which is replaced by a discussion of technology and technique and the modern sexual education structure that takes on a pragmatic stance.

Two Tragedies of Modern Sexual Education             

Sexual education in the Catholic Church is couched in terms of chastity, not to be confused with celibacy.  Chastity is performance of sexual activity appropriate to one’s age and station in life.  Thus it varies between children, consecrated, cleric, and married. 

There are basically three reasons for chastity as a Catholic.  The first is often touted by the pius as “purity”, though the pius don’t seem to have a great explanation as to what that means.  The ill use of the concept of “purity” is the first sexual education tragedy in the Catholic school system.  Again, something cosmologically and teleologically focused on a positive seems to be turned into a litigious denial.  It’s not that we should not use the concept of purity, it is just that we use it in damaging ways instead of edifying ways.

Purity is taken from the Levitical code, where certain actions render one ritually impure and unable to participate in the calculated ritual laid out in the Hebrew Scriptures.  “Impurity” seems to indicate some sort of personal moral failing, but it is as probable that in the levitical code “impurity” is part of the communication symbology of the system of ritual.  When this language is taken into the realm of Christian sexual morality, it does seem to take on an air of personal moral failing and “pollution”.  So, purity, which in Christian sexual morality is the beauty of sacral sex as explained above, is used as a grand shaming mechanism revolving around attitudes, actions, technology, and techniques that instill pollution and impurity.  What purity should indicate is the singularity of focus in the sacral life as a positive and an exploration of how those engaging in these activities can beautifully express oneness and diversity as well as procreation.  Not to mention how the sacramentally married couple, through sacral sex present the image and likeness of the trinitarian God in their mutual life.  As the Catechism states, “married love is caught up in divine love.”  

The second reason to engage in chastity is for moral purposes.  If purity concerns are a focus on one’s sacral life with one’s partner and how one’s marriage images God the partners and the world, moral concerns are a focus on how one’s sexual actions affects the world and one’s neighbor absent the sacramental import.  Paul VI originally couches his arguments in Humanae Vitae in purity concerns that revolve around how married love and sexual action are written into the nature of humanity according to God’s plan and he extols a chastity of purity by reminding the reader, 

The marriage of those who have been baptized is, in addition, invested with the dignity of a sacramental sign of grace, for it represents the union of Christ and His Church.

                     

But Paul VI goes into much greater detail when he expounds upon the moral concerns he has regarding the use of Artificial Birth Control.  These concerns are social, not individual, and revolve around how the technology and the attitude the technology facilitates can lead to moral problems for society.

Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

 

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

 

His two major concerns have to do with the moral degradation of general society by the further objectification of women by men and the abuse of this technology by governments in order to control population.  These concerns are not sacramental and teleological, but deal with the cause and effect nature of morality.  

These two avenues for exploring chasity are rarely effectively embarked upon in Catholic sexual education.  If purity is explored, the exploration is usually couched in the negativity of impurity and pollution.  The moral consequences of sexual activity are rarely mentioned at all, except for possibly hurting your neighbor emotionally, or through unintended consequences.  Most of Catholic sexual education is modeled on secular methodologies which focuses on the third, and most base, reason for chastity, pragmatism. This leads to the second great tragedy of Catholic sexual education, the over focus on the pragmatic, which is already improperly founded exclusively in secular values, some of which are good and some of which are antithetical to Christianity.  

Secular sexual morality generally sells young people on a self interested “carrot and stick” model of morality that says, if you do it wrong, you will suffer.  Since secular thought is about alleviating suffering in this world, suffering is to be avoided at all costs, so if you buy into the secular assumptions all this makes perfect sense.  Coach Carr’s famous speech in sex ed class is a caricatured summation the methodology, 

At your age, you're going to have a lot of urges. You're going to want to take off your clothes, and touch each other. But if you do touch each other, you *will* get chlamydia... and die. . .Don't have sex, because you will get pregnant and die! Don't have sex in the missionary position, don't have sex standing up, just don't do it, OK, promise? OK, now everybody take some rubbers           

The easiest way to get people on board with anything it to appeal to their self interest.   Because sexual activity is being performed younger and younger in our society we are having to educate younger and younger for the protection of the youth.  Yet in their youth they only understand rewards and punishment.  For Coach Carr self interested is presented as a “stick”with regards to STDs and the horrible prospect of pregnancy. At the same time the self interest is presented as a carrot with the offer of a “safe” alternative allowing the students sexual pleasure, if they take the necessary precautions. The rewards of chastity for the sake of sacramental purity are extremely abstract and exhibit seemingly impossible examples of delayed gratification to the tween mind.  Hence again, the easiest way to sell purity to a young mind is self interested.  “You don’t want to be polluted or impure do you?”  which is taken by the tweens and teens to mean “you don’t want to be a slut” (this is typically aimed at girls).  

Couple the shame of impurity with the secular pragmatism of fear involving sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancy and you have the typical sexual education modus operandi of the American Catholic Church.  But when the secular education system uses pragmatism, it couples it with the “reward” of quick pleasure of sex, if it is properly carried out “with protection”.  The Catholic Church offers only long term reward, a fulfilling life and fullness of sexual joy down the road, yet it makes no good attempt at explaining how that is reached.  

In the Church’s sexual education program artificial birth control is also disparaged, but that disparagement along with the poorly mingled Christian/secular sexual education model leads to an absolutely in adequate presentation of Catholic teaching concerning artificial birth control.

Again, something positive (openness to life) is framed as a negative (no artificial birth control) and the resulting effect is a pastoral trainwreck.  The seeming need of the Church to constantly discuss technology and technique over purpose and beauty is the true failing.  But that failing is coupled with the convoluted misunderstanding of the teaching of the Church by educators because of their personal investment in secularly founded pragmatism makes the Catholic sex education classroom a place where many fall away from the faith because what is being taught is so ridiculously inconsistent.

Do not think that this treatise is asserting that Catholic doctrine is inconsistent.  What is inconsistent is the way that sexual morality is being taught.  Openness to the possibility of life is taught as a matter of technology and technique as opposed to a disposition of the soul.  Therefore what one receives in the Catholic classroom is a set of technologies and techniques that are licit and illicit.  But the general assumptions of the secular world concerning small families and material comforts through economic proficiency is still the backdrop of the conversation.  So what one gets is conversations about how artificial birth control as a technology is “closed to life” but natural family planning as a technique is “open to life”.  At this point invariably some student will point out how their aunt used natural family planning and now has fifteen unplanned children.  Then the teacher will talk about how it is more reliable now and if you use it correctly it is as effective as artificial birth control.  Which then leads the student of average intelligence to ask, “so how come artificial birth control is ‘closed to life’ but natural family planning works as well and is ‘open’?”  This leads to some sort of sophistry concerning the natural rhythms being being more in tune with “God’s plan” than chemicals. Or that it’s not “as closed” as artificial birth control, at which point the student body is lost.

As a church and as catechists, we should not be afraid to assert that openness to life is an attitude, not a technology or technique.  We would hopefully be able to sell this openness as a good thing, in the best interest of the person (pragmatic).  We should also sell the Church’s sacramental cosmology better, as well as the sacramental nature of marriage such that purity makes sense as a positive as opposed to a mechanism of shame.  

All that being said, there is one more thing to be discussed before we move to the next section.  Are married Catholics as prone to be pro-artificial birth control?  Is it really the case that married Catholic laity would rather have small families period?  If the answer is “yes”, then we may have a culture of death problem that needs to be solved.  It means that married Catholics have bought into the idea that one finds security and joy in small families (if any at all) and consumeristic economic acumen.  

Sadly such a resistance to children is bolstered by the modern catholic sexual education system.  As we noted this system instills shame as well and a desire to avoid suffering caused by children of the unwed.  If one faces the “get pregnant and die” mode of sexual education, it’s no wonder that they are not properly disposed toward openness to life in sexuality.  Nor would they be disposed to seeing procreation as a means of ultimate security and happiness.  A large portion of their sexual formation has told them that children are the unwanted consequence of sexual activity, which will only bring hardship and suffering because they are “not ready”.  This unfortunate formation happens in both the secular and Christian sexual education of children and is a general assumption of the culture.

Because of this, when American Catholics go into marriage, they are terrified of children because they have been taught to be at every turn.  It is at this point that their priest or bishop says, “don’t forget to be open to life” even though for a decade or more generation of life has been seen as a horrible consequence of illicit sinful and shameful activity as well as an overbearing burden. 

Despite what sounds like a perfect storm of the culture of death, there are ways to overcome this tendency.  One is to understand something about “redemptive suffering”, that even if children are “a hardship” that hardship leads to great grace.  This seemed to be implied by some of the previously quoted encyclicals.  Yet the Church is pro-life and it cannot be imagined that the Church would want to label children as “hardships”.  Would it not be better to seek a cultural change that allowed for children to be seen as a blessing in  the same way that Augustine and Pius XI saw it?       

Fortunately marriage is a sacrament and sacraments are conduits of grace, so any good thing is possible when engaging in them.  As a personal experience I went through this exact type of sex education in the Catholic school system, and entered my vocation with these same apprehensions.  It was only the grace of marriage that allowed me to undo the damage done.  Only having our first child allowed me to break free of my fear of children.  Only having our first child allowed me to let loose of an amorphous fear and anxiety that inhibited the unitive function of our sexual congress.  Interestingly this freedom was first noticeable during sex as we were pregnant.  The first sense of “the damage is done” yielded to a grace of union founded on “we are doing this correctly”.  After that, we began to see openness to life as a true facilitator of grace in our marriage that allows for the unitive experience which help us participate in divine love.  We were better able to live our sacral analogy.  

That amorphous fear that seemed to bog down the free flow of grace in our sexual lives as spouses is definitely rooted in the transition described above from finding happiness and stability in children and family to finding happiness and stability in economy.  In modern America we have the opposite sexual obsessions as the ancient patriarchs portrayed in the Bible.  Abraham and his sons are procreative obsessed, to the point of allowing for bigamy, which never works out well for them, and using their wives bodies as mechanisms of fecundity.  They had little regard for the unitive aspect of sex and marriage.  Today the best narratives of sex and marriage we have focus almost exclusively on the loving relationship (unity) and not at all on child making.  So when people of this generation enter into marriage and licit sexual relations, there is an inadequate matrix for understanding the beauty of fecundity.  The only voices trying to sell that beauty are the Catholic Church and various pagan dulas.  Again, on the Catholic end the “beauty” is couched in litigious discussions of acceptable and unacceptable technology and technique.  This is hardly an effective pastoral methodology.

Since we buy into the economic foundation of happiness, licit sexual techniques, technology and even attitudes bring anxiety, because children, and especially multitudes of children, do not make economic sense given how our culture is constructed.  This anxiety inhibits the flow of sacral grace in marriage.  It inhibits the ability to fully experience unity as a couple because the procreative openness, which works in concert with the unitive experience, is debilitated or limited.  In short, the economic foundation for happiness brings anxiety about procreation, which weakens the ability to cooperate with the grace of sacral sex, the summative sacramental sign of married life.  Given that, God’s grace is perfectly resilient, and my spouse and myself have been greatly aided by having children, they are truly a blessing.  

As we move into this part of the section, a leading question is, “is it really true that married Catholics don’t want a lot of children, period?”  If you had asked that of myself and my spouse early in our marriage, before the influx of God’s grace, the answer would have been yes.  But as a vocational sacrament, marriage is a life process, and the grace offered develops over a lifetime.  If you asked the same question now, the answer would be “no”.  Since marriage is mostly discussed among clerics and laity in the Catholic Church in pre-cana classes, the data given by engaged and early married Catholic may be a bit biased since the grace of a vocational sacrament takes time to unfold. 

But there are still two possible problems for people in our situation.  One is, often, we still opt for small families.  I teach religion at the highschool level with a faculty of more than a dozen colleagues.  I have been there long enough to be the longest serving faculty member.  Of all the many married colleagues I have had the pleasure of teaching with past and present, most of them have two or three children.  None of them had more than four.  All of them believe in large families and desire them, but at the same time I doubt there is a plague sterility interrupted by rare intermittent fecundity among our faculty.  So is there another way to form a culture that can facilitate the idea of children as a blessing and bolster the grace of our sacral sign as unitive and procreative?  Is there a way that is not the way of redemptive suffering or a way of blind trust in God’s providence such that my colleagues and all married catholics who truly do want life can overcome the powerful temptations of our consumeristic culture and its overarching task master “the economy”?  Our aim in the next section is to lay a foundation for facilitating an ease in syncing desire with action when living the moral life concerning fecundity.

In this section we started by exploring the two functions and purposes of sex and marriage, unity and procreation.  We then pointed out that there has been a shift in the idea of how one achieves stable happy life away from large families to economic considerations.  This shift was occasioned and facilitated by the invention of the pill and other means of artificial birth control. We then discussed the synchronicity of the procreative aspect of sex and marriage and used that synchronicity to explore some ideas concerning sacral sex.  Lastly we explored two tragedies of modern sexual education by treating the three motivations for chastity, purity, morality and pragmatism, and how they are used by the secular world and consequently poorly used by the Church in sexual education.  Lastly we discussed how the resulting anxiety caused by a catechesis of fear leads to an inhibition to the flow of sacramental grace in marriage.  

In the next section we will lay the foundation for relief of the anxiety that debilitates the sacramental grace of marriage.  This foundation will take place in the social justice tradition of the Church, especially as that tradition expresses human rights, rights of workers and the preferential option for the poor.  In this we will continue in the last section where we will merge what is seen as a “progressive” Catholic focus, social justice, with what is seen as a “conservative” Catholic focus, the prohibition of artificial birth control, into a harmonious system of mutually edifying grace.              

  

  The Minimal Requirements of a Christian Civilization

       

In the previous section we discussed sacral sexuality, the unity it brings and the openness to life that it requires.  We began with the problems that modern consumerism bring to the openness to life that is required by effective sacral sex.  We then discussed how the hybrid of sexual negativity and consumeristic presumptions is causing serious problems in the sexual education given by the Church at the classroom level.  We ended with the fact that there are, perhaps, many Catholics who might like a large family and a sacral life open to life and bereft of artificial birth control, but they fear the reprisals of an economy that is constructed for small families.  

In this section we are seeking the foundation for way to combat the pastoral problems the Church is having regarding the prohibition of artificial birth control.  This foundation will be laid in an unexpected place, the social justice teaching of the Church.  We will begin with an analysis of the beatitude “blessed are the poor”.  We will use this analysis to begin a discussion on the preferential option for the poor and then lay out the minimum requirements for a Christian society.

From there the last section will bring this and the previous section into synthesis in an attempt to open a way for better catechesis concerning the Church’s teachings regarding artificial birth control and openness to life.  This section will seek to bring into harmonious accord two theological foci that are often held individually by Catholics as better or worse on the political left and right of western politics.  The matrix for this union will, again, be the sacramental life of the Church as it is manifest if the vocational sacrament of marriage.    

Blessed are the Poor for They Shall Receive a Preferential Option . . .   

When one reads the beatitudes, they are not particularly appealing “blessings”.  They do not play off the strengths necessary for how most people define success.  The first is probably one of the more disturbing to the modern American.  If one quotes, “Blessed are the poor” from Luke’s Gospel one is quickly redirected to Matthew’s Gospel, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”.  The “in spirit” give us some consolation, and since this changed, Jesus’ admonition concerning how hard it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom can also be altered in our minds, even though it was not altered among the Gospels.  But in reality these two takes on the beatitude hint at release from the same basic problem, the problem of anxiety.  The result of blessing is also a release from anxiety and leads to the social justice principle of preferential option for the poor.  

We are going to explore the blessing of poverty in two different ways, the ways of Martha and Mary.  We will use the standard pius interpretation of this story to discuss the two ways poverty can bring a blessing, the married way and the consecrated way. 

As they continued their journey he entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.  She had a sister named Mary [who] sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak.  Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.’  The Lord said to her in reply, ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.  There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.  

 

Of course the standard interpretation of this story is that Martha represents the secular minded married person who runs around, presumably ineffectively(?), while Mary sits at the feet of The Master and through the contemplation and withdrawal of consecrated life, chooses the better part.  For obvious reasons, given the roots of consecrated life, this story has been used as validation that consecrated life is somehow preferable.  One might  argue given the development of consecrated life, especially over the past three hundred years, that very often this interpretation is no longer applicable.  If one is in a cloistered contemplative order that seeks withdrawal as part of their charism perhaps it applies, but for a Sister of Mercy to do this seems off.  Such a consecrated is as involved in shaping and changing worldly society as any married person, and this is true for most congregations these days.  

There are many valid interpretations of this story that extend it beyond a chastisement of married life.  As with all of the scriptures, this story is meant to bring help to all of humanity, not an elite few.  In this case the help offered is the same asked for in the Embolism of the liturgy.  In that prayer the priest states,  “Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day. In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.”  One may not be able to find a better interpretation of this passage than that.  When Jesus chastises, he does not chastise activity, he chastises anxiety.  To be anxious about one’s control over activity, or one’s ability to get the job one by one’s own effort, or thought control of over others is a serious problem.  In this passage Martha seeks manipulative control over Jesus, in order to specifically control Mary.  Mary, on the other hand is passive and basks in Jesus’ wisdom.  But jobs do need to be done, and passive contemplation should be coupled with detached action.  This is the exact way Mark portrays Jesus in his Gospel.              

This leads to our two different understandings of the blessings of poverty, the married and the consecrated understandings.  For the consecrated and cleric, they are bound by vows to the evangelical councils, one of which is “poverty”.  Married people do not take a vow of poverty, in fact the traditional vows that the couple makes implies the possibility wealth, “for richer or for poorer.”  A practitioner of consecrated life on the other hand does take a vow of poverty and in this they personally own no property.  On the face of it this gives them a harder lot, but as a recruiter for an order once told me, “we take a vow of poverty, but we aren’t poor.”  The simple fact is that most of the married people in the world are poor, because most people in the world are married and most of the world lives in a state of material poverty.  In any given culture the divide between relative haves and have nots puts the vast majority people on the “have not” side, and such people go without material desires and very often without material needs.  

Where as for the consecrated life, one may not get all their material desires, but all of their material needs will usually be met by the order.  It would be rare indeed for a member of a congregation to starve to death unless they were caught in a particularly harsh situation, such as a war or extreme missionary activity.  For example Blessed Gerhard Hirschfelder did starve to death in Dachau, as did other consecrated.  But compare that to the number of laity who also starved to death in dachau as well as the number that starve simply because of the effects of social sin in our economic structure, and one begins to see that the honor starving to death is generally reserved for those participating in the sacrament of marriage.  

The sacrifice of the consecrated is taken when they give up the possibility of ever being personally rich.  For the married the sacrifice comes in every little decision to make choices for your family to survive, to sacrifice for your children who will have to sacrifice for theirs.  Once at a recruitment event a student asked about “getting to do fun things”  The consecrated mentioned that the order gives its members a small amount each month to do with as they desire.  I remember thinking how nice that must be. My family is middle class American, the wealthiest nation on earth, yet still there is very little ability to practice personal discretionary spending.  Almost everything I spend needs to be taken to committee with my spouse or else we will overspend.  Even if the amount allocated to those consecrated members if fifty dollars, that would be more than I would comfortably spend without checking in.  We live an absolutely communal existence with our family money or else we will fiscally perish, and no church body will likely step in to bring us back to the lifestyle we had.  

In my observation the tradeoff  is this: the consecrated personally owns nothing, but also has no financial or material cares, no matter what they will be cared for.  The married path is the opposite, one is able to own goods, but the vast vast vast majority of married people in the world experience material need and often true poverty with no safety net.  One is commitment to the idea without the experience, the other is the constant experience without commitment to the ideal.  

This leads to two different experiences of the blessing.  The consecrated experience is an experience of rational detachment.  If cultivated in prayer this detachment should foster a freedom from anxiety.  They are able to bask in the beauty of Christ because they already free of material worry.  Yet at the same time someone does need to serve dinner.  The fifth precept of the church makes clear whose job that is, “The faithful also have the duty of providing for the material needs of the Church, each according to his abilities.”  Given this precept, clerics and consecrated have no need to worry.  

The married experience of poverty is one of anxiety.  This is perhaps why “Mary chose the better path”, anxiety is not preferable.  But the path of Christ leads to the garden and the passion, both of which are fraught with anxiety.  When one experiences poverty, as opposed to contemplating it, one experiences how material goods and money will not save you.  Only God will.  The blessing of being poor is the blessing of knowing where to place your trust, because money, goods, and the political system have all failed you.  To be “strong in spirit” means that you can take matters into your own hands and presumably manipulate these things, money, goods, the political system, to your advantage.  This as the tact of Martha in the parable, and the reason for Jesus’ chastisement.   When you are poor in spirit, you realize that things other than God are of no avail and always ultimately betray.  When you a poor, you experience that these things are of no avail and always ultimately betray.  Each of these types of knowledge leads to the same realization, reliance on God and detachment from material goods.     

In times past consecrated were more likely to starve, because starvation happened as a result of famine, crop failure.  In those times, lay peasant and cloistered consecrated suffered together.  The shift of Western culture from finding security in family to finding security in material things was a sub current of a larger shift away from God’s created good toward the false god of the economy.  The true indicator of when this false god was truly bowed down to the great depression, when the “problem” was too many crops for the economy to bear.  People starved because there was “too much”.  This counterintuitive situation is explainable only when economy takes precedence over God’s good reality.  This inversive nature speaks to the diabolical.  This inversion of reality also seem naturally observable to one invested with a Catholic worldview when looking at the issue of artificial birth control.  What seem naturally good does not fit economy, thus the natural good is regulated to serve economy, the false god.  Since, being a false god, economy does not have the staying power, it will not protect us from all anxiety.  Now when people are starving to death it is not the consecrated who are subject, because their mode of life, detachment without experience, allows them to remain fed.  It may be a bit scandalous that they have fallen under the protection of this false god to the absence of their aim, rational poverty, and a bit of that anxiety through experience may do them good.   

In the last section we criticized the secular culture for changing the desire to end suffering through scientific advancement to the consumerism of finding meaning and happiness in material goods.  But the former is nobel.  To alleviate suffering is worth trying, otherwise, Martha would have had the better path.  The social justice teaching of the Church is sometimes labeled as new fangled, yet it is not.  It keeps in the Christian tradition of the just king versus the tyrant.  One need only  pursue the kings who have become saints to see that all of the virtues they are attributed, peacemaking, care for the poor, concern for justice, are the tenets of catholic social teaching.  The social justice tradition as “started” by Rerum Novarum is simply an updating of this hagiography into modern terms for modern economy and politics.  Always the Church has expounded Christian power dynamics where the greatest serves the least, as was discussed in the treatsie The Onesiman Interface (among others [2] [3]).  The inversion of Christian power dynamics seeks to counter our human tendency to favor the advantaged.  This inversion is aim of the preferential option for the poor is just this, to see society from the point of view of the most impoverished and seek to construct a Christian society that caters to their physical as well as spiritual needs.           

How does this look in practice?  Well to listen to any show that deals with economic analysis it is clear that a healthy economy is when businesses are doing well.  But “businesses” are a conglomeration of paperwork and items.  This sleight of hand makes the fact that an economy doing well actually means that the owners of the business are doing well.  In an economy where everyone effectively owns businesses this is may be a way to practice economic analysis with a preferential option for the poor.  But in our economy this type of analysis effectively leaves out the vast majority of the populace, who only nominally hold “ownership” in various businesses according to their corporate sponsored retirement plan.  

How would the show change, how would our economic policy change, if the health of our economy was based on the lowest or least of stakeholders as opposed to the highest?  How would the show change, how would our economic policy change, if when jobs numbers were discussed, the question wasn’t ‘how is this going to affect the ‘economy’? (a term synonymous with stocks and business owners and their money), but ‘how is this going to affect the lives workers and the unemployed?  How would the show change, how would our economic policy change, if we were as obsessed with wages as we are with profits?  What if we were more obsessed with wages than profits?  How would the show change, how would our economic policy change, if the end analysis was always to the benefit of the most impoverished?  

The aim of such an exercise is the aim of any just king in the past, to alleviate the suffering and allow the populace to live without anxiety.  In as much as a “divine right monarch” is doing this he is doing his job according to the Embolism.  In an age where we scoff at the idea of divine right monarchy and favor the entire populace presenting God to one another, democracy, the social Justice teaching of the Church offers a guide for how this is done in society.  The ability to view economy through the lens of Christian power dynamics and the preferential option for the poor would allow all people can have the “better path of Mary”, an experience of poverty that is contemplative.  For as Saint John Paul II says in Centesimus Annus, “Love for others, and in the first place  love for the poor, in whom the Church sees Christ himself, is made concrete in the promotion of justice.” . .This is the end goal of the preferential option for the poor and the foundation of the social justice teaching of the Church.

The Rights of Workers and Basic Human Rights

All recent Popes and the output of the Magisterium in the ordinary form have been solidly behind the basic assertions of the social justice teachings as they were framed by Leo XIII.  Yet when one looks at those teachings and compares them with prevailing American attitudes,  it is hard to believe that America will achieve even a modicum of this.  America’s libertarian philosophical outlook and service to the economic false god disallow many American Catholics to even assent to this as a true teaching, just as the same tendencies disallow us to see assent to the teachings on artificial birth control.  Very often the lack of acceptance of each of these falls upon political lines and allows each side to take the high ground, because they align with church teaching, while disparaging the other side who does not allow for an “assent of faith”.  Yet when it comes to the social justice teaching there is a further difficulty.

When hiring people to teach social justice, I often give them a warning. When teaching social justice in a Catholic school in America there is a particularly difficult pedagogical maneuver, and the difficulty involves parents.  The fact is that atheists, agnostics and the “more progressive” possibly less religious elements of our culture tend to fall on the pro-social justice / pro-artificial birth control end of the spectrum.  That being said, even these “progressives” are no where near as progressive as the teaching of the Church, because the Church does not bow down to economy.  When such an exclusive secularists send their child to a Catholic school they give pat advice, “look there are things we disagree with at this school, like the artificial birth control thing, just keep your head down and get good grades.”  This would be true even of progressive Catholics, because in America progressives are painted as irreligious even if they are religious, and they become comfortable with that.  

Conversely, when an American conservative sends their child to a Catholic school, they assume that everything they believe will be bolstered because America tends to paint the conservative as the religious believer.  It is among this crowd that the “social justice agenda” of the Church is seen as not “authentically” Catholic, but only among those who cared to know that such a thing even existed.  The rest are blissfully unaware.  Thus when they hit the social justice curriculum, they are shocked and horrified that such “heresy and communism” is taught in a Catholic school.  Far more angry letters are sent to administration over social justice than over the historical accuracy of the Bible or even the nature of the Church’s teaching on conscience.  Such libertarians cannot believe that their laissez faire economic beliefs as well as their particular understanding of the separation of church and state is not only not amoral, but is actually antithetical to the stable teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.  They always viewed themselves as the guarantors of religious survival in our ever secularizing world.

The most shocking thing to such conservatives in the social justice tradition begins the foundation concrete implementation of our preferential option for the poor and that is the Catholic Church’s teachings on the rights of workers.  These basic rights are laid out time and again in the magisterial teachings of the Church and especially in the laws and experiences related in the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Church asserts that if the dignity of work is to be protected, then the basic rights of workers must  be respected.  Workers have the right to productive work.  To work is so ingrained in human nature that it was present in the Garden of Eden, and may therefore be presumed to be present in the Eschaton.  Economies should be structured such that all people have the dignity and reward of productive work.  Also all work that benefits humanity should be accorded respect, the “low jobs” such as service industry or sanitation as well as those jobs that serve beauty, arts and recreation.  All of these things are far more useful to deep human nature than advertising and stock broking, yet we afford more dignity to the needlessly high paying jobs because of our disordered economy.    

Workers have the right to decent and fair wages.  Not long ago, service industry workers were striking for a living wage.  In the vitriol against such perceived hubris on their part, the rejoinders were expected and hackneyed.  “Those jobs are meant to be temporary and for kids in schools!”.  Of course whether they were meant to be or not, that is not how they are used.  Such jobs employ adults who must work several of them in order to maintain themselves and their families.  Such long hours makes the next response, “Why don’t they get an education and better themselves!” impossible.  They must work multiple jobs because of the low wage and staggering hours in order to survive and maintain their families.  “Maybe they shouldn’t have had children” at a biologically appropriate age.  This last argument show where the conservative starts to buy into the culture of death, that one must wait until the correct economic time to have children, as if economy not God dictates life.  “They aren’t even skilled!”, but they are necessary enough that in a culture bereft of loyalty, the management has not issued mass layoffs in order to invest in some sort of technology.  If you need the labor, the labor is worth a fair wage, or else your business model is by definition exploitive.  “Ambulance drivers and armed service members make less than what they are demanding!”  So?  Maybe they should be paid more too . . .  

All of these calculations place economy over people and prioritize “the haves” and their profits over the have nots and their lives.  They reek of our concupiscent dispositions that exhibits greed. And they lead to the last right, the right to protection from employers especially though the organization and joining of unions, and the right to private property.  If communism is evil because it is godless and the state becomes the god, capitalism is evil because it manipulates the name of the one true God in order to draw worship to the god of the economy and bestow the benefits of that god to those who serve him most, the wealthy.  The Catholic Church is obviously against godlessness and worship of the state.  This is why many “politically conservative” criticisms of “the left” in America make good sense from a Catholic point of view.  But that does not negate criticism of the opposite extreme.  Any attempt to bring up collective bargaining, or even that workers have rights, seems often to be met with harsh denunciations of communism.  In point of fact,  These positions are as Catholic as the teaching against artificial birth control, in that the seek the joy and happiness of all people and are open to life. 

The political conservative is shocked by the Catholic Church’s view of labor rights and often they are seen as an unnecessary modern adornment of magisterial teaching.  Yet this still is not the most shocking or politically progressive stance the Church takes.  These rights of workers are founded on the basic human rights the Catholic church believes we all are entitled to by our dignity as creatures made in the image and likeness of God.  These basic human rights are the minimum that a civilized Christian society, whether monarchy or democracy, should supply its citizens.  Once one realizes that these basic human rights are the foundation and the rights of workers spring from them, one begins to see just how much society should protect its people from all anxiety.  In fact these basic human rights are supplied to the consecrated by their orders, though they are rarely if ever supplied to married citizens. 

The basic human rights demanded by the Church are the right to life, and the means for its development and the right to social services, that is the right to be looked after from cradle to grave.  When a politically conservative hears “right to life” they may get excited because this is their issue, abortion.  But the Church does not say, “the right to be born” that is only the beginning of the right to life.  It is not just the right to start life, but the right to sustain it.  So for the Catholic church, the right to life includes, the right to the means of the development and sustenance of life.  That is, the right to food, clothing, shelter, necessary medical care and rest.

When an American conservative hears that there is a right to food, clothing, shelter, necessary medical care, they immediately cry communism.  In fact these things as “rights” would probably not sit well with many American “progressives” given how libertarian this country has become.  Especially given the Church's stance on the right to social services despite ill health, disability from work, widowhood, old age, enforced unemployment anything beyond a person’s control.  Americans are very much concerned that people “earn” what they have.  But God is not as concerned with this, or none of us would have anything.  

Add to this the imperative for rest and you have a counterbalance to the ever encroaching American work ethic which is anti life and anti family.  Rest is required under a regular schedule, such as the sabbath, as well as for sickness, and to develop family and religious life. As these words are being written an article called Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you has been making the rounds on the internet.  The reasons spring from the Church’s teachings as we have discussed them.  The response in online comment feeds has been overwhelmingly anti-rest and anti Christian.  They often cast suspicion on the rest afforded our ancestors because of a perceived lack of technological advancement during the time period, as if these two things had anything to do with each other.  If anything it should bolster our resolve for more rest since technology is supposed to be labor saving.  Or commentators deride people for not managing their time appropriately, or having the right job.  Rest is a command of God.  It rejuvenates the body mind and soul and is a requirement of a just society.  

The ability to rest gives one the ability to appropriately prioritize and allows us protection from anxiety.  Freedom from the worry of needing to earn food, clothing, shelter and medical care for one’s self protects from anxiety.  The rights of workers are layered on top of this to allow for an economic system that serves people instead of vice versa.  If Christian societies offered these basic human rights, people would not work to sustain themselves, but to enrich themselves and society.  Then whatever anxiety citizens felt because of material possessions would very obviously be anxiety about things that “don’t really matter”.  This would allow for married laity to traverse the path toward poverty in spirit without the suffering and anxiety of material poverty, just as consecrated do now.  

In our last section we discussed the Catholic Church’s position concerning sacral sex and the openness to life.  In that section we lamented some poor catechetical techniques, especially revolving around the Church's teaching concerning artificial birth control.  We discussed the underdeveloped sense of the concept of purity, where the classic turing of a positive into a negative seems grossly manifest.  We also discussed the over stress on the pragmatics of chastity, especially when those pragmatics take on some assumptions of the secular sexual education method that are dangerous to the Catholic pro-life position.  Lastly we posited the question, are Roman Catholics who use artificial birth control totally buying into the secular culture of death, or are they hedging their bets?  Do the want large families?   

In this section we have changed gears and discussed anxiety and the beatitude concerning the poor or poor in spirit.  Using the situation of Martha and Mary we discerned two understandings of the blessing of poverty, one contemplative and reasoned, the other garnered by experience and suffering.  We used this overview to move into an understanding of the Church’s social justice teaching, starting with the preferential option for the poor followed by the rights of workers and the basic human rights a Christian civilization should afford its citizens.

In our next section we will bring into harmony the Church’s teaching concerning openness to life, including the prohibition of artificial birth control, and the Church’s teaching concerning human rights through a developed understanding of the sacrament of marriage.  This section hopes to defuse some vitriol that occurs along the Western political divide.  If the harmony of these teachings can be recognized then perhaps Catholics can put off the habit of asserting that these on the other side of a political divide  are “not real Catholics” and begin to see that it is the political divide not the people that is the problem.   

A Sacramental Matrix for Harmony and Healing Division                   

Thus far in this treatsie we have reviewed the two natures and purposes of sex and marriage.  We analised the sacramental nature of both sex and marriage and discussed how use of artificial birth control does not allow for full participation in with grace of the sacrament.  We also criticised modern sexual education in the Catholic school system and offered in our rebuke the some of the methodologies there facilitate this poverty of cooperation.

In the next section we discussed two understanding of the beatitude “blessed are the poor”, a blessing of contemplative detachment from avarice and pride, and an experience of suffering that leads to a detachment from avarice and pride.  These two understandings are reflected in the differing versions of the beatitude in  Matthew and Luke as well as the diverse paths to sainthood taken by Martha and Mary.  We used this as a launching point to talk about the Church's social justice tradition starting with the preferential option for the poor followed by the rights of workers and the basic human rights a Christian civilization should afford its citizens.

At this point we will attempt to synchronize the need for the Church’s teaching against artificial birth control with the Church’s teaching concerning social justice.  This will all take place in a matrix of sacramental cosmology.  We will first discuss how the interplay between the so called secular world and the seven sacraments.  This interplay flows in both directions each affecting the other.  We will then take up the task at hand and focus on sacral sex and artificial birth control seeking to demonstrate how the social justice teaching of the Church gives the basic requirements for a fuller participation with the sacral grace of the marital act, and determining that the use of artificial birth control out of a position closed to life is an ineffective and damaging stop gap measure to deal with the already sinful situation of social injustice.         

    

Secular Reality and the Sacraments

In the treatsie Sacramental Cosmology we discussed how the Church is foundationally sacramental.  The Onesiman Interface discussed how the sacramental nature of the Catholic Church and the sacraments themselves allow for the individual to act, as an individual, out of concern for social justice.  If the question for The Onesiman Interface was, how does one act for social justice in a “sacramental” way?  The question for this treatise is why act for social justice when regarding the Church as “sacramental” in nature.  When a magisterial statement concerning a social justice teaching comes out, a line that often appears in the comment feed run’s something like this, “can’t the pope (or Bishop or USCCB etc.) just stick to saving individual souls!”  Interestingly, this line only seems to come up when the position is one that is politically opposite of the commenter.  No politically conservative person would say such a thing in reference to the March for Life in Washington.  No politically progressive person would say it in reference to environmental concerns.  That the pro-life political agenda concerning abortion and artificial birth control is necessary seems to be taken for granted by Catholics, especially politically conservative ones.  When the social justice teaching of the Church is brought up, politically conservative appeals are made to the libertarian ideal of “separation of church and state” on the Church end, a fascinating cognitive dissonance.  That cognitive dissonance is mirrored by the politically progressive who appeals to libertarian ideals of individual choice when artificial birth control is brought up, the same ideals that would sink any attempt to implement social justice.  

Our goal is not to decry libertarian philosophy, but to expand the harmony of Catholic sacramental cosmology.  The divides we face are an imposed culture war that is taking place amid secular politics.  It is acceptable if we as Catholics align in this culture war as a matter of focus in our faith. But if we as Catholics align in this war in such a way that we value those political divisions over their faith and love of God the Church suffers.  In such a case a pious person may interject that we are all bound together by the eucharist.  It is the assertion of this treatsie that this may be the best response, though not only the Eucharist, but the entire sacramental system of the Church, which Christ established for us, informed by our sacramental cosmology.  The political conservatives may have a better claim to importance of their focus considering the issues of secual morality, for example artificial birth control, which has a sacramental manifestation given they are sexual.  Sex is the sacramental matter of the sacrament of matrimony.  But as we will see in this section, even though there are seven sacraments consistently defined by the magisterium, where they begin and end with regards to the grace they offer and how well one is disposed to cooperating with that grace is not as clear cut.  Thus, it is through the sacraments that we can reclaim our common ground as Christians.

Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment discussed how conscious ritual investment assumes that the entire world was constructed to find meaning in the sacramental nature of the cosmos, yet as we abide in postlapsarian reality, it is difficult to see and corruptions and aberrations of our ritual life as humans have developed as a result.  If thing operated rightwise, whatever it is that we call the “secular world” would be nearly indistinguishable from the sacred.  The lingering effect of this even now in our postlapsarian world is that all of our most cherished secular action find meaning in the sacraments. Ways of understanding this were discussed at great length in Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton concerning both sex and eating.  Again, The Onesiman Interface discussed how the sacramental nature of the Catholic Church and the sacraments themselves allow for the individual to act, as an individual, out of concern for social justice.  So there is most certainly a flow from the sacramental system of Catholicism out toward the world.  We are invited at the end of mass to “go in peace to love and serve the lord.”    

It is now our purpose to discuss how the secular world effects the sacramental world of the Church.  Again, if in The Onesiman Interface the question was how does one act sacramentally toward social justice, now our question is why act for social justice at all. To understand how we will make a parallel between the effect of personal moral action and personal on the ability to cooperate with the graces of the sacraments and social justice and social sin as they affect one’s ability to cooperate with the graces of the sacraments.

For example, when one is in a state of grace, one may still have venial personal sins that poorly dispose one to cooperation with the graces afforded at mass.  When one is in a habit of often committing venial sin (as most of us are) it wears down one's will and character blinding one to the graces of God and placing one in a state of uncomfortable relationship with God.  This uncomfortable relationship is nowhere near as bad as being in a state of mortal sin, being in open rebellion against God and unable to accept his grace because of the disposition of your will.  On the flip side one who practices personal morality is blessed with proper intention and is in the practice of a mindfulness that will attune one to God’s will and open one to the graces of the sacraments. 

That personal morality affects one's disposition to reception of grace is not shocking to anyone who has undergone rudimentary catechesis.  But what may be harder to understand in spiritual or theological terms is that the state of society also affects one’s ability to willfully participate with the grace of the sacraments.  For personal sin, the effect is mitigated because of an internal disposition of rebelliousness.  For social sin the effect plays out in as an internal disposition of anxiety about life.  This anxiety is exactly the thing Jesus warned Martha about, and why Mary was seen as having the better part, she was anxiety free.  Martha on the other hand needed to struggle.  The fact that she is a saint shows that such anxiety is not an absolute barrier.  It is the beatitude focus of Luke, “blessed are the poor”, which is experiential, not Matthew, “blessed are the poor in spirit” which is contemplative.  To fight for social justice allows all who live in a society the ability to engage in the sacraments in a contemplative way, free from anxiety.  This is why clerics and consecrated take a vow of poverty, but have little experience of it.  It frees them in every way from the anxiety of money and the material, such that they can more freely focus on their spiritual lives and cooperate with the graces of the sacraments.   

To work for social justice allows us to do God’s work, to bring God to each other, by setting the conditions for protecting each other from all anxiety and granting peace in our day.  A society that is justly ordered allows for all of its citizens cleric consecrated and married to have the same opportunity to approach the sacraments and Christ himself with contemplative detachment because our societal anxiety has been mitigated.    Such order allows for a matrix the offers freedom from anxiety and is social facilitator of cooperation with grace the same way avoidance of sin and practice of virtue is a personal facilitator of cooperation with grace.  This brings us to the final conclusion of this treatsie, the harmony of the social justice tradition of worker’s rights and the Church's teaching against artificial birth control.                                        

Social Justice and Sacral Sex in Harmony

This last part of the last section of this treatise draws together the many seemingly disparate parts of this treatsie.  But by this time the hope is that the connections are quite clear.  As we noted above, sacral sex requires an openness to both union and procreation.  We discussed how our economic structures are a result of our redefinition of “the good life” and security away from a large family and toward acquisition of money and material goods.  This has formulated an economy that propels the modern sexual participant toward small families at best and possibly no family.  This in turn creates a social structure which is unjust for the rearing of a large family.  Society is simply no longer structure in such a way that a nuclear family with many children can economically survive.  This causes great anxiety for parents, even those who are extremely open to life.  Pius XI noted this very phenomenon long ago in Casti Connubii, “We are deeply touched by the sufferings of those parents who, in extreme want, experience great difficulty in rearing their children.”  

Because of this anxiety it is extremely hard to self give in sacral sex.  It is hard to experience the fullness of union, because the gift of self is held back because of an anxious openness to life that is theoretical but not joyful in experience.  Maslow's Hierarchy of needs reminds of that for self fulfillment certain things are needed.   The first need to be met is the physiological, food, water, warmth and rest.  The second need to be met is safety.  These two together are the basic needs, and without them no kind of self fulfillment can even be contemplated.  For our purposes “self” fulfillment consists of that tiny amount of effort God asks of our intellect and will in order to cooperate with his grace.  Yet what is tiny compared to God’s effort is phenomenologically gargantuan for us.  These basic needs set the foundation for the psychological needs of esteem and belonging, but any attempt to foster the psychological needs without the establishment of basic needs is totally ineffective.  The social justice tradition of the Church, as it is framed for the modern mind in the seven principles seeks to establish the environment one needs to fully participate in sacramental grace.  They also set up a social matrix for better individual expressions of love, because they can be expressed without the anxiety that comes when the basic needs aren’t being met.  

If one reviews the first three chapters of Genesis, it is interesting to ponder why the first parents would need to be expelled from the garden.  This aspect of the story reminds us that environment matters.  In Eden, “environment” cannot be social environment, there are only two people. What is offered is harsh labor, and unforgiving land.  This equates well with the harsh labor conditions of modern people and the fickle nature of money regarding its yield.  Thus one may counter a social justice program with the fact that the expulsion and labor was a just punishment, working to “fix” it works against the justice of God.  However, the standard Catholic interpretation is that concupiscences was also the punishment.  This does not excuse us from seeking to better our personal moral lives and our personal relationship with God.  This argument also counters the entire end result of the punishment of labor, which is life.  At the end of both laborious farming and laborious child bearing, life, its generative and sustaining forms are presented.  The theodicy is; we sought the knowledge of good and bad, what we got was a phenomenological experience where struggle generates life.  Life could be bio-life or spiritual fulfillment.  Either way, the personal struggle runs alongside a social or environmental struggle. The struggle is to get back into good relationship with God, through moral struggle and that is bolstered by the struggle to set good environmental conditions for achieving this. Neither of these things is in our power.  The struggle to do so is in our power, and it is by the struggle that we achieve humility and grace.

          

When it comes to the sacrament of marriage and sacral sex, many Catholics would love to experience the fullness of unity and openness to life, but anxiety about basic needs is a mitigator to participation with the graces involved.  Married people cannot afford to have many children and not wind up destitute.  If they can afford them, they will not have the time make their home “the first school of Christian life and "a school for human enrichment” as the Catechism requires of them.  The joy and happiness that Catholic sexual morality revolves around is lacking because of social injustice, much like the joy of the mass is lacking if one goes steeped in venial sin.

There is also the fear and anxiety that comes with the projected suffering of one’s children.  It may be easy for a celibate priest or consecrated to disparage such fear and anxiety as a lack of faith in God.  Yet our path is not that of the contemplative blessed are the “poor in spirit”.  Because of the absolute injustice of secular society’s economic structure it is not a matter of whether or not one’s children will suffer want for most married people, it is a matter of how much want they will suffer.  To see this coming and then be told that one must be open to bringing in even more children time and again, each time exponentially increasing the kind and quality of suffering can become unbearable if one is unsupported.  Married Catholics do not want to impost the experiential path of beatitude upon their children.

 Thus what ends up happening is a stop gap measure.  Married couples opt for artificial birth control.  These mitigating circumstances may lessen culpability, but they do not make the fact that this option is closed to life less real.  The point is not to cast judgment, but to point out the tragic fact that these people are not experiencing the true joy of sacral sex, and are cut off from it’s greatest blessing as a result of a calculation that must be made because of economic injustice.  This is a perfect example of the spiral of sin, and the compounding nature of evil.  

The answer to the problem of married Catholics using artificial birth control in large percentages is not waiving around magisterial documents and judging decisions made in hard circumstances.  Oddly, to a person over invested in Western culture wars, the answer is to work toward implementation of the Church’s social Justice teaching concerning basic human rights and particularly workers rights.  If his were the case many Catholic who would gladly be open to abundant life would be free from the harsh calculations foisted upon them by the secular world.  They would be afforded the opportunity that our consecrated and clerical brothers and sister are afforded, the basic needs of Maslow’s hierarchy would be met.  They would have the opportunity for meaningful work, be afforded fair wages, have the right to protections against the exploitation of employers,.  They would have the right to life, and the means for its development through the right to food, clothing, shelter, necessary medical care and rest and lastly the right to social services, that is the right to be looked after from cradle to grave. With these rights supplied, any gain to be afforded by work would only be needed for enrichment.  These right supply the basic human needs, which are the foundation of human self enrichment and fulfillment.  The sacrament of marriage  itself fulfills the psychological needs by binding union, as does the brotherhood of priests and consecrated as well as the entire ecclesia.  Given the fulfillment of these conditions, there is little left to do but attempt self fulfillment, that is, attempt to recognize God’s grace, and seek proper methodology to cooperate with it.  One would not see this as a moral duty, but a joy to engage full on.  

For our example, the teaching on artificial birth control, the anxiety of basic survival relieved, sacral sex that is truly unitive and truly open to life would be much easier to engage in.  For any married person who was minimally open to the teachings of the Church, the use of artificial birth control would not make sense.  With the implementation of a just society, the conditions for cooperation with the graces that come through marriage (or any sacrament) would be as open as they would be to an individual person’s soul who was in a state of perfect grace.  Neither a perfect state of grace nor a perfectly ordered society are likely to be achieved.  Yet, it is our Christian duty to strive for perfection.  It is in the preparation for full participation in the sacraments and the ability to receive and cooperate with their graces that both individual morality and social justice find synchronistic meaning.  With such a synchronistic view one would see the parsing of artificial birth control as “closed” and natural family planning as “less closed” or better because it is ineffective as so much foolish sophistry.  The fact is the Church teaches an attitude, openness to life.  The obsession with technology and technique has bogged the teaching down in foolishness.  In a justly ordered society the wisdom of the teaching would be much more clear, and would not become a doctrine to be accepted against evidence and reason.

If a Catholic person wants to focus on one issue or the other and work toward a better acceptance and practice of that issue for the advancement of the faith that’s fine. But, we need to be aware of how to find harmony with all the issues in the Church and cease the needless infighting caused by adherence to secular political parties and philosophies that do not care about how the Church expresses the unity of the virtues.  The division of secular politics as expressed in the western culture wars are not divisions in Christianity, only divisions of Christians who place culture over God and good theology.  Instead of focusing on where Christianity agrees with our personal cultural position, we should instead look to Christ, and as importantly look to the sacraments he founded in order to bring us to himself, and find our commonality.  In these sacraments we have the greatest expression of the sacramental cosmology we abide in, and the matrix for finding healing in a divided world and a divided church. 

Conclusion

The purpose of this treatsie was to bring into concert two seeming distinct life issues in Roman Catholic moral thought, the Church’s teaching concerning artificial birth control and the Church’s social justice teaching concerning the preferential option for the poor, worker’s rights, and basic human rights into harmony in order to demonstrate how the sacramental structure of the Church is the binding agent for all the teaching of the Church.  Divisions in our church fanned by exterior culture wars and dangerous aspects of secular philosophy are unacceptable and draw attention away from that fact that the two work in synchronicity.  When the two moral concerns work in concert, they facilitate the flow of grace in a sacramental marriage, especially in the most fundamental sacramental sign of married life, sacral sex.         

In the first section we gave an overview of basic sexual morality in Catholic thought and develop the concept of sacral sex.  It began with an overview of the two purposes of sex and marriage, unity and openness to life.  After this explanation we reviewed certain failures in the sexual education programs of modern Catholic schools.  These failures concern an underdevelopment of the concept of purity and an over reliance on the pragmatics of chastity, especially as these judgments assume calculations of the modern secular world that are dangerous to the culture of life.  This section ended with a speculative section concerning why a modern Roman Catholic may engage in artificial birth control tactics even though they may theoretically agree with the Church's teaching.

The next section began with a discussion of poverty and distinguished two ways to achieve the blessing of the beatitude “blessed are the poor”.  One is the contemplative way of reason, the other is the experiential way of suffering.  After this we gave an overview of worker and basic human rights in the Church's social justice tradition beginning with an understanding the “preferential option for the poor”.  

The final section of the treatise  attempted to synchronize the need for the Church’s teaching against artificial birth control with the Church’s teaching concerning social justice.  This took place in a matrix of sacramental cosmology.  We discussed how the interplay between the so called secular world and the seven sacraments, which flowed in both directions, each affecting the other.  We then focused on sacral sex and artificial birth control.  By use of Maslow's hierarchy of needs we attempted to demonstrate how the social justice teaching of the Church gives the basic requirements for a fuller participation with the sacral grace of the marital act, and determined that the use of artificial birth control out of a position closed to life is an ineffective and damaging stop gap measure to deal with the already sinful situation of social injustice. Both of these situations must be rectified in order to set an environment such that the sacramental grace of marriage can be easily cooperated with.

Much of this treatsie attempted to mitigate damage done to the beautiful and harmonious teaching of the Church by an exterior culture war in the West.  This war often forays onto the digital continent where it garners a worldwide audience and has the potential to do damage far beyond our local situation.

The internet is a great tool of communication and yet a great cloaking mechanism for the truth.  This paradoxical fact is brought about by the theme of clothing and nudity in the book of genesis from the nakedness of Adam and Eve to the brilliant garments of Zaphnathpaaneah contrasted with his shepherd brothers standing before him.  

My fear is that more often than not the internet has the same effect that the paint has for Jack in Lord of the Flies.

Jack planned his new face. He made one cheek and one eye-socket white, then he rubbed red over the other half of his face and slashed a black bar of charcoal across from right ear to left jaw. . . . "Samneric. Get me a coconut. An empty one."

He knelt, holding the shell of water . . . He looked in astonishment, no longer at himself but at an awesome stranger. He spilt the water and leapt to his feet, laughing excitedly. Beside the pool his sinewy body held up a mask that drew their eyes and appalled them. 

Do we use the internet to come into communion with each other or as a mask to vent our most horrid inner self.  Reading internet comment feeds on Catholic news and information sites one often gets the sense that it is the latter.  We must learn to put aside our worst self and come together in a spirit of fellowship.  The sacraments informed by sacramental cosmology of the Church, is our best hope for such communion.