Authors: Patrick Coffin
Sex Au Naturel (2 page)
I am very happy to have read this book because otherwise I would have to write it myself. (I write the books I wish someone else would write, but they don’t, so I do.)
This is
exactly
the book that needs to be written today, for:
(1) It’s about the lynchpin and foundation of the Sexual Revolution, which is the most radical and life-changing revolution since Christianity. Without contraception, no Sexual Revolution. The Pill has changed more lives more radically than the printing press, the steam engine, the assembly line, or the atomic bomb.
(2) It’s about the most controversial and controverted Church teaching in history. No official document has ever generated more “dissent” than
Humanae Vitae.
(3) It’s written for everyone, not just for scholars.
(4) But it’s not “popular” in the usual sense of dumbed-down or shallow.
(5) And it’s
complete
. Coffin covers the waterfront. Nothing is missing. (Just look at the Table of Contents.) The author has read and digested all the vast literature on the subject and has served it to us in a meal of well-ordered, edible courses.
George Weigel famously and rightly called John Paul the Great’s “Theology of the Body” a “theological time bomb.” It is the Church’s answer to the Sexual Revolution. It’s profound, and it’s beautiful, and it’s human, and it’s winsome. It’s the Big Picture behind
Humanae Vitae.
The Church has always come up with what the time most desperately needs. Creeds come in response to heresies. We can even thank God for heresies (“O felix culpa!”) because without them, we would not have the Creeds. The Church has always practiced St. Paul’s principle “Test everything; hold fast what is good.” (I Thessalonians 5:21, RSV)
But John Paul’s writings on the Theology of the Body are dense, and long. Christopher West has “translated” them into much more accessible prose. But even his magisterial work is still fairly long and not an “easy read” (though it is deeply rewarding and potentially life-changing). Patrick Coffin has done for Christopher West what Christopher West has done for John Paul II.
Do you think there is nothing but blind obedience and “dead orthodoxy” behind support of
Humanae Vitae
? You won’t think that after you read this book.
Do you want to believe what the Church teaches but find it hard? You won’t find it hard after you read this book.
Do you believe it but merely out of loyalty, without understanding it, either instinctively, or rationally, or sympathetically? You won’t believe in that way after you read this book.
Do you believe it but despair of explaining it to the average “dissenter”? You won’t despair after you read this book. (And you’ll have plenty of opportunities to explain it. For “the average dissenter” means the vast majority of Europeans and North Americans today, Catholics as well as non-Catholics.)
Are you confused and open-minded about the whole issue? You won’t be after you read this book.
Are you bored with the whole issue? (Why have you read this far, then?) You won’t be after you read this book.
Do you think the issue is peripheral, accidental, secondary, dispensable? You won’t think that after you read this book.
Do you think the Church’s instinctive attitude toward sex is a frown? Do you think
The Catholic Sex Book
would be a blank book? You won’t think that after you read this book.
So read this book.
Peter Kreeft
This book began life as notes for a public lecture given at Pierce College in Los Angeles, sponsored by L.A. Jewish Family Services and the Encore-Oasis Adult Education Program. It was then fed and reared by many people, by their helpful criticism of the manuscript, by giving research leads, or by making their formidable brains available for picking: Dr. Germain Grisez; Monsignor Vincent Foy; Jimmy Akin; Lambert Greenan, OP; Dr. Gregory Polito, MD, KM; Dr. Patrick Lee; Domenico Bettinelli; Dr. Terry Vanderheyden, ND; Albert Faraj; Father James Mallon; Judy Savoy; and the indulgent staff at the Joanne D’Arcy Canyon Country Library.
The book’s main title was lifted from a book review by the fine Orthodox Christian writer Federica Mathews-Green of
Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception
(Eerdmans) by Sam and Bethany Torode.
The teaching of the Catholic Church against contraception is winning friends and influencing more people today than its early enemies in the 1960s could have predicted, thanks to a wave of orthodox defenders and teachers of the Catholic sexual ethic. The primal force behind that wave was the late Pope John Paul the Great through his encyclicals, exhortations, public speeches, and particularly through the 129 weekly General Audiences he gave from 1979 to 1984, which became known as the theology of the body.
I have been inspired by the skilled surfers of that wave, and by those who early on defended this perennial teaching of Christ. These include Dr. Janet E. Smith, who loved
Humanae Vitae
before loving
Humanae Vitae
was cool and who has done more than anyone in the English-speaking world to make it better loved; Christopher West, the exuberant ambassador of John Paul II’s theology of the body; Canadian philosopher and pro-life lion Dr. Donald DeMarco; the late Father John McGoey, SFM, of Toronto whose writings about emotional and sexual maturity should be required reading for all serious Catholics; the dynamic duo of Scott and Kimberly Hahn, for their contributions to a new familial explication of covenant theology; John and Sheila Kippley, pioneering founders of the Couple to Couple League and promoters of the Sympto-Thermal Method of natural family planning; Dr. Thomas Hilgers, MD, discoverer and developer of NaProTechnology and the Creighton Model FertilityCare™ System; and Drs. John and Evelyn Billings, original co-developers of the Ovulation Method, the first truly modern natural family planning technology.
To change the surfing metaphor, the above individuals hacked through layers of thick underbrush with their respective machetes to reveal a serene and beautiful clearing known as the Catholic sexual ethic. My small contribution to their hard work—efforts that were sometimes derided when they weren’t being ignored—is merely to show up and point out the gorgeous scenery.
The late Sister Therese Moore, SC, professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was the first to turn my love for words into a love for stringing them together. The weaknesses in the following strings belong to me alone.
A special word of gratitude goes to Shannon Minch-Hughes, Regis Flaherty, and all the staff at Emmaus Road Publishing for shepherding “this little piggy to market.” If publishers were medals, you’d be gold. Special word of gratitude to Devin Schadt for his beautiful cover design. Lest I forget, thanks as well to Mary Melton for her holy persistence in getting me to introduce
Humanae Vitae
to a non-Christian audience in the first place.
Finally, without the support of my wife Mariella, the encouragement of my parents Jack and Marian Coffin, my sister Cindy, and the unutterable patience of my daughters Mariclare and Sophia—who are glad that Daddy finally finished his “boring book for big persons”—what follows would have remained only a good idea.
If a contest were held for Most Misunderstood Teaching, the Catholic Church’s rejection of contraception would run away with the blue ribbon.
Famously re-articulated in 1968 by Pope Paul VI in the encyclical
Humanae Vitae
(“On the Regulation of Human Life”), the teaching is easy to understand but hard to explain. The explanation challenge is compounded by the fact that two generations of Catholics (along with everyone else) have been conditioned to see birth control as an instrument of women’s liberation, a panacea for marital strife, a fuel injection for sexual ecstasy, and a triumph of human ingenuity over cruel “Nature, red in tooth and claw.”
Birth control is bad for people? One might as well stroll up the beach in August shouting into a bullhorn that sunscreen is bad for people.
Today, birth control is no longer argued for; rather, it is widely assumed to be a blessing. A sunny, almost whimsical view attends it. Condoms are a staple of late-night TV monologue jokes, they are sold next to
Cosmopolitan
in the grocery express lane, and they are part of the typical orientation tote bags given to college freshmen. The Pill (the only pill to win a “the” in front of it) is dispensed by the tens of millions to ever younger and younger women, often without their parents’ consent. Large families are no longer viewed as signs of God’s blessing, to say the least.
This whole attitude has been the cultural default opinion for some time.
For all the bluster about celibates in Rome having no right to dictate what couples do in the bedroom and the pleas for an alleged “primacy of conscience,” most people have no clear idea why the Catholic Church is opposed to contraception. Do you? Archbishop Fulton Sheen famously said that millions hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church. Millions also wrongly hate what they believe to be her teaching on contraception. If you disagree with this claim, try out this true or false quiz:
1) Protestants have always accepted contraception.
2) Mahatma Gandhi approved of contraception.
3) Sigmund Freud approved of contraception.
4) Contraceptives have always been legal in the United States.
5) More contraception leads to fewer abortions.
6) One can be a faithful Catholic and still contracept in good conscience.
7) The Pill is now medically safe for women.
8) The Rhythm Method is now called Natural Family Planning.
9) The Church teaches that women should have as many babies as possible.
10) The Catholic Church is opposed to all forms of birth regulation.
11) The Bible is silent on the matter of contraception.
12) Catholic teaching against contraception is fixed and cannot change.
(
Answers found in Chapter Seven
)
If you agree with the teaching of
Humanae Vitae
, that “each and every marital act ought to be open to new life” (no. 11), then, in the grand tradition of preaching to the choir, this book will hopefully provide ammunition for those “friendly discussions” with family members or friends who think the teaching is nonsense (or worse). If you’re not sure where you stand, what follows will hopefully help you see this distinctive Christian teaching with a new set of eyes.
Or, if you’re among those family members or friends who think the teaching is bogus, the arguments set forth in these pages may not put a dent in your resolve. In this delicate arena, intellectual arguments alone are generally useless in the persuasion department. The subject of this book relates more to the will and to the heart than to the intellect alone.
For Catholic teaching against birth control asks that one be willing, when the occasion warrants, to keep in check one of the most imperious, at times unruly, appetites within the human person—the sexual urge. Our culture routinely fails to differentiate sex from love, as if the former were the sole infallible proof of the latter. Given the inherent pleasure in sex (thanks to God’s design) we willingly fool ourselves about what is and is not “love’s highest expression.” As Frank Sheed humorously quipped, “In no area is autokiddery so active than in the sexual.”
1
To keep some of our appetites in proper order, we need extra help from the good Lord.
Therefore, this book has an evangelistic purpose. Given the bent of human nature toward its own cravings, its dread of admitting wrongdoing, and in consideration of our increasingly pornified culture, I believe the message of
Humanae Vitae
barely stands a chance of being understood, let alone embraced, without a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. Without the help of His grace, the deck is heavily stacked against seekers of truth. Yet the Truth Himself is always ready to teach, to open the door when we knock, and to let Himself be found when we seek Him (Jer. 29:13; Lk. 1:9–10).
Jesus is not an abstract Savior, as Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body teaches us. He is most accessible. Solid. You can throw your arms around Him. At the Last Supper, Jesus did not say, “This is my soul,” or “This is my spirit” or “This is my teaching.” He said, “This is my body—which is given up for you.” He saved us in and through His body and we ultimately join Him in and through ours. Our sexual identities as men and women are swept up into His bodily redemption and made whole.
So the teaching of
Humanae Vitae
is not proposed in a vacuum, isolated from the whole body of Catholic sexual ethics, which itself may be likened to the popular game Jenga. The game begins with a tower built of levels of slender wooden blocks, three blocks per level. The object is to remove a block from an established level and place it on top of the tower without toppling the whole structure. The tower becomes increasingly instable, and eventually topples. You never know if you’ve taken out a vital block until it’s too late.
Humanae Vitae
, with its insistence that sex always retain its natural ordination to new human life, is like a wooden peg at the bottom of the tower. It looks small and out-of-the-way, but remove it and the whole structure comes apart. If it stays where it is, the tower remains standing strong. It’s the key-peg, so to speak.
In other words, if
Humanae Vitae
is right, then all other uses of the sex instinct that are shorn from its natural connection with conception— masturbation, sodomy, adultery and fornication, bestiality, and the like—are objectively wrong. But if the encyclical is wrong, on what moral grounds and with what consistency do we argue against any of these other behaviors? The logic of perversion is fixed and unrelenting. The norms taught in the encyclical, and the whole body of Christian teaching on sex that precede and complement it, have as their most basic building block the idea that intercourse should never be unnaturally robbed of its procreative potential.
This book was written primarily for practicing Catholics, although Evangelicals and other believers in Christ may wish to discover the depth of the biblical roots that support the ancient Christian rejection of contraception. As we will see, a growing number of Protestants are coming to appreciate the “Catholic position”—itself a misnomer insofar as it was the position of all of Christendom until eighty years ago. In theory, all human beings regardless of religion have a stake in the teaching since all of us gained our existence through the sexual embrace.
2
Even the most rabid dissenter admits of one exception to his dissent: the occasion of his own conception!
