The Catholic Church’s teaching against artificial contraception is one of its most controversial, but it’s vitally important for supporting marriages and families, Bishop Andrew Cozzens said on a “Practicing Catholic” radio program set to air at 9 p.m. July 23.
Playing devil’s advocate as Natural Family Planning Awareness Week approaches July 25-31, “Practicing Catholic” host Patrick Conley asked: “Why in the world would the Church teach against something like contraception, artificial contraception?”
It might seem, Conley said, that artificial contraception is a good thing, as it would appear to allow people to make choices for themselves and responsibly rear children.
Acknowledging that it’s one area where general society looks at the Church and says, “You’re just crazy. That doesn’t make any sense,” Bishop Cozzens said there is an entirely different perspective to consider.
Viewing the world through the lens of faith, and revelation, “and who we really are,” and the purpose of sexuality, it becomes clear that “when we act against God’s gifts, it ultimately brings destruction,” the bishop said.
Even secular society would have to admit that, since the advent of artificial contraception and, really, the birth of the sexual revolution, the results in society have not been good, Bishop Cozzens said. He encouraged people to read Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on contraception and reproductive ethics, Humanae Vitae, in which the pope made several predictions.
“He said if contraception becomes widespread, there will be a general lowering of sexual morality and that will have extremely negative effects on society,” Bishop Cozzens said, “and especially on women.” For example, the pope predicted that if contraception became widespread, the divorce rate and abortions would increase, as would pornography use and things like sex trafficking.
“Why? Because he showed us that it actually transforms the way we see sex, and that this incredible, sacred gift which has been given to us, which is one of the highest human natural goods, which is the expression of covenantal love between a husband and wife,” the bishop said. “When we corrupt that expression, we corrupt what is a great thing. It destroys something in us and it destroys something in our world and in our culture.”
If people don’t see why this is wrong, the bishop said, they might look across society and think about what’s happened to families, women and sexuality. “These are not good things in our culture,” he said. “And when you look across society, you have to say, maybe, based on its fruits, we should be taking a second look at this (Church) teaching on contraception.”
Bishop Cozzens also referenced Mark Regnerus’ book “Cheap Sex.” One message in the book, the archbishop said, is that “we’ve made sex cheap, and contraception is what did that.”
Church’s position
Placing the Church’s fundamental argument in what he called “succinct terms,” Bishop Cozzens said, “We believe that every act of sexual love should be the full expression of what that means. That is, the total ‘self-gift’ of two people to each other, and that total self-gift involves the gift of (one’s) fertility.”
“It involves openness to whatever God wants to do in that act, and that when we are not acting directly against that gift, then the gift has its full effect,” he said. “Really, we speak about the two aspects of that gift of sexuality.”
First, it’s unitive, Bishop Cozzens said. “When a husband and wife unite in the act of sex, it unites them in a powerful way, physically and spiritually — unites not just their bodies, but their souls.”
Second, it’s procreative. “That means it’s open to life,” he said. “And that means we’re capable in that moment of partaking with God in the creation of an eternal soul.
“And the fact is, whenever we destroy one of those essential acts of sexuality, we end up corrupting the other,” Bishop Cozzens said. “And so, when we block intentionally through contraception, sterilization … the procreative aspect of sexuality, we make it less unitive and we in fact become more ‘using’ another person, or it lends itself toward that possibility much more.
“‘I’m using you for my own physical pleasure’ versus ‘I’m making a gift of myself for you.’”
Bishop Cozzens recalled a young woman whose marriage he officiated and who later worked in a marriage tribunal. Her job included reviewing the cases of people who had divorced and sought annulments.
“One of the things we ask a couple when they get an annulment is ‘Did you ever have sex that was open to life?’” — so not using contraception. How a couple responded could be a sign of a fundamental flaw in the marriage, he said.
If a couple is not open to life, then it’s not a covenant, the bishop said.
And as a young, newly married person, she realized that the divorced couples had never experienced what she had — total openness to her husband, to say “I love you so much, I’m open to whatever comes from this act,” the bishop said.
“It just made the point for me that there is a holding back when using contraception, and that that is destructive to what sexuality is supposed to be,” he said.
Natural family planning is a great gift, Bishop Cozzens said, because it teaches about the goodness of one’s body and the goodness of sexuality, rather than treating one’s body and fertility as a problem to be solved. “Rather, this is a gift to be cherished,” he said. “And sometimes in reverence for that gift, we abstain out of reverence for the power of this gift.”
Bishop Cozzens said he finds it interesting that many people love “natural water” and want no food with GMOs, yet so many women put “false chemicals” into their body and live with “this kind of false, chemically induced state” and somehow think it’s going to be naturally good for them.
“NFP is natural,” he said. “It’s exploring the gift of God, the way God made us. And it also helps many women who struggle with infertility because, by learning the natural cycle, you can cooperate with that, also, to achieve pregnancy, not just to avoid pregnancy.”
NFP is also easy to learn, Bishop Cozzens said. “It’s an art and it requires both the man and the woman to be involved in marriage. But the fact is … couples who practice natural family planning have much stronger marriages.”
Marriages in which spouses practice NFP have a 99 percent success rate because sexuality “becomes this gift that I reverence and not something that I abuse,” he said.
Conley suggested that questions could be raised about the permissibility of using NFP to avoid pregnancy.
But the difference is found in a very important distinction, between destroying the good and cooperating with the good, Bishop Cozzens said.
God made women so they’re not fertile all the time, he said. Therefore, it’s possible for people to use science. “Science is a good thing,” he said. “And to cooperate with the way that God made us. But the key is this: Even that could be done for selfish reasons,” so couples need to discern whether they have a good reason not to be open to life at a particular time.
“Because the general disposition of a married couple is ‘life is always a gift,’” Bishop Cozzens said.
“Another child is the greatest possible gift I could give to the world and to my spouse,” he said. But there might be reasons — psychological, financial, societal, living through a difficult time — why someone can’t be open to life at a particular time.
And for that reason, people might have to cooperate with their natural cycle, he said, which is very different than acting directly against the natural cycle or destroying a good. “This is cooperating with the way God made us,” he said.
To learn more about natural family planning and upcoming classes, people can visit archspm.org/family.
Bishop Cozzens also mentioned places in the archdiocese where women struggling with their cycles can get help, such as Alpha Family Clinic, which he said is a pro-life, pro-Catholic, pro-family medical clinic in the Twin Cities.
To hear the full interview, listen to this episode of the “Practicing Catholic” radio show. It airs at 9 p.m. July 23, 1 p.m. July 24 and 2 p.m. July 25 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM.
Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also includes interviews with Bridget Busacker, founder of Managing Your Fertility, who discusses fertility awareness and natural family planning, and Mike and Ann Cerney, who talk about Twin Cities Retrouvaille, a program that offers help to couples in troubled marriages.
Listen to all of the interviews after they have aired at:
soundcloud.com/PracticingCatholic
tinyurl.com/PracticingCatholic (Spotify)
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