Credo
Coray, Anne
Credo as. Because the leaves fall softly when they drop, I will follow the vole's track. Because my blood is the shape of sky, I will look to not man nor woman. A theory of beauty?...
...A rchbishop Burke writes: "the port of entry for the culture of death in our society has been the abandonment of the respect for the procreative meaning of the conjugal act...
...4, In moonlight even the stopped bell rings...
...Humanae vitae taught that contraception is an intrinsically immoral act...
...Because the leaves fall softly when they drop, I will follow the vole's track...
...In this regard, contraception differs in kind from our choices of, say, furniture or toothpaste...
...Popular psychology, coupled with modern advertising techniques, favored these developments, which, not surprisingly, often lacked depth...
...rather, it is a fully human—that is, moral— issue...
...Anne Corny ion in the United States...
...Because my blood is the shape of sky, I will look to not man nor woman...
...Among North American Catholics, especially in communities influenced by seventeenth-century Jansenism and Puritanism, sexual activity came to be viewed as morally delinquent, except, conceivably, in the context of marriage...
...Fairly recently this led me to study the encyclical again...
...This misrepresentation of Catholic tradition was what lay behind my bristling sophomore's reaction...
...A sophomore told me it was Catholic teaching that we must go to confession before receiving Communion...
...4, Assonance delivers soul, consonance is quickened echo...
...I will admit, though, that I occasionally wonder about the current taste for ideology, where opinion can take on the air of absolute truth...
...Here we must also recall the history of the contraception issue...
...Our public culture now accepts, and indeed encourages, sexual experience without marital commitment or openness to new life...
...Several bishops' conferences saw this almost immediately, and welcoming the teaching of Humanae vitae, they referred the married to their consciences—a common Catholic way of suggesting that there is room for venial sin in the practice of sexual intimacy in marriage...
...But even there, passages from Augustine were regularly quoted, out of context, to prove that there really was no such thing as intercourse without at least venial sin...
...Unable to have it any other way, the media have kept insisting that his governing concern is the immorality of contraception...
...Was he still following the undivided tradition, where the sexual sins of married couples were never discussed...
...The only life that seems to count (and it hurts to write this) is the "private" lives of individuals who live as they please...
...In light of the Catholic tradition, Paul VI's major point was that contraception is not a matter of convenience...
...It was prevalent enough for Vatican II to insist on the high human (that is, moral) value of faithful sexual intimacy and love—the central philosophical and theological theme in John Paul II's discourses and writings on marriage as well...
...But I recall a classroom incident in 1969...
...When I told him that this was imprecise, he bristled...
...There is economy that is cold, cold that is the heart's great gladness...
...In due course, I discovered how widely held was the assumption that nearly all people, married and unmarried, were living in mortal sin, since all genital gratification both inside and outside marriage constituted such sin...
...True, but let me add something...
...It took me a moment to notice his resistance...
...Listen: wing and toil, breath...
...Ever since Humanae vitae, I have been listening to younger and older Catholic couples...
...By contrast to the northern Low Countries' stern tolerance, American-style tolerance positively welcomes a variety of opinions...
...So, I am grateful for living, learning, and teaching in this republic, which, constitutionally, neither opposes religion nor supports particular religious establishments...
...hence, it cannot be commended as "a positively good and human thing to do...
...Long before Humanae vitae, our public culture was moving toward an acceptance of the enjoyment of the sexual experience per se...
...All measure is a great swing suspended by the finest thread of air...
...At least one Orthodox theologian told me: "Our moral theology stops at the sanctuary of the marriage bed...
...In Divini illius (1928) and Casti connubii (1930), Pius XI left no doubt that unlimited sexual liberation was abhorrent...
...Aquinas had taught it, we were told...
...What, then, is the issue...
...Commonweal 20 June 4, 2004...
...Naturally, I had found this climate elsewhere, if not at the same pitch...
...Importantly, though, the encyclical stopped short of teaching that every act of marital intimacy blemished by contraception is mortally sinful...
...But Aquinas, I found, never treats sinful sexual acts within marriage...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 11
