Contraception:
Fatal to the Faith and to Eternal Life

by John A. Hardon, S.J.

On the thirtieth anniversary of Humanae Vitae, it seems only proper to identify what contraception really is. It is at once fatal to the true faith and to the eternal life which our faith promises.

    You might say this piece will be two articles in one. First we shall see how the practice of contraception inevitably leads to the loss of the true faith. Then we shall look at how contraception leads to eternal death.

Contraception Fatal to the Faith

    This must seem like a strange title, “Contraception—Fatal to the Faith.” What does the title mean? Does it mean that to believe in contraception is contrary to the faith? Or does it mean that Christian believers may not practice contraception? Or does it mean that those who practice contraception are in danger of losing their faith?

    What do we mean by the title and what is the thesis of this presentation? We mean that professed Catholics who practice contraception either give up the practice of contraception or they give up their Catholic faith.

    Needless to say, this is a startling statement that many would violently disagree with. They will point out the widespread practice of contraception among many—some would say the majority of professed Catholics in a country like the United States. They will quote from numerous professedly Catholic moral theologians openly defending contraception. They will give you the pronouncements of whole conferences of bishops who claim that contraception is really a matter of conscience.

    Those who sincerely believe that contraception is morally permissible may not be told they are doing wrong; they may not be barred from receiving Holy Communion; in fact, they need not even have to confess the practice of contraception when they go to confession.

    We return to where we began, to make clear what we are saying. We affirm in this article that the deliberate practice of contraception between husband and wife is objectively a mortal sin. Those who persist in its practice are acting contrary to the explicit teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. They may protest that they are Catholic. They may profess to be Catholics. But their conduct belies their profession.

    Someone may object that we are living in a contraceptive society. Moreover, the silence of so many bishops and the overt teaching of so many nominally Catholic moralists defending contraception forbids our saying that contraception and the Catholic faith are incompatible.

    In the light of all the foregoing, let me address myself to the following topics which collectively prove the underlying thesis of this article.

•    The Catholic Church teaches infallible doctrine, both in faith and morals.
•    This infallible teaching is done by the Church’s extraordinary and by her ordinary universal authority or magisterium.
•    The grave sinfulness of contraception is taught infallibly by the Church’s ordinary universal teaching authority.
•    Therefore, those who defend contraception forfeit their claim to being professed Catholics.
•    Consequently, those who persist in their defense of contraception, deprive themselves of the divine graces which are reserved to bona fide members of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Church Teaches Infallibly On Faith And Morals

    There is some value in explaining that the Church’s infallibility covers not only doctrines that are to be believed, like Christ’s divinity or His Real Presence in the Eucharist. No, the Church also, and with emphasis, also teaches infallibly what the followers of Christ are to do.

    In His final commission to the Apostles, Jesus told them to teach all nations, “to observe all that I have commanded you.”
To mention just one infallible teaching in the moral order: the permanence of the marriage bond. Emphatically, the Church’s irreversible doctrines include truths that we are obliged to believe. But they also include precepts that we are universally bound to obey.

    This deserves to be emphasized. Why? Because there are nominally Catholic writers who are claiming that the Church’s gift of infallibility extends only to her teaching of the faith. It does not, so the claim goes, include grave moral obligations like the prohibition of adultery, sodomy or contraception. That is not true.


Two Forms of Infallible Teaching

    What are the two ways in which the Church teaches infallibly? She does so whenever the Pope solemnly defines a dogma of the faith, as when in 1950 Pope Pius XII declared that Our Lady was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.

    But the Church also teaches infallibly whenever her bishops, united with the Pope, proclaim that something is to be accepted by all the faithful. Thus abortion was condemned as murder by the Catholic hierarchy, under the Pope, already in the first century of the Christian era—and ever since.

    It is therefore infallibly true that abortion is a crime of willful homicide. So, too, the grave sinfulness of homosexuality is infallible Catholic teaching.

Infallibly True That Contraception Is a Mortal Sin
We return to where we began. Is it infallible Catholic doctrine that contraception is a mortal sin? Yes!
How do we know? We know this from the twenty centuries of the Catholic Church’s teaching. Already in the first century, those who professed the Catholic Faith did not practice either contraception or abortion, which were commonly linked together.

The people of the pagan Roman Empire into which they were born universally practiced:

•    Abortion
•    Contraception
•    Infanticide
•    Cohabitation of one man with either several legal wives, or with a plurality of concubines.

In contrast with this moral promiscuity, Christians practiced monogamy, one man with one woman; they did not use drugs to prevent conception; they did not kill the newborn children whom they did not want to live; they did not practice sodomy or prostitution; and for the Christian, adultery and fornication were grave sins that might require several years of penitential expiation.

    What do we call the Church’s unbroken tradition in forbidding contraception? We call it her ordinary universal magisterium or teaching authority. This has always been considered a proof of infallibility, or from another perspective, irreversibility.
What do these two terms mean? Infallibility means that God protects the Church from error in her 2000 years of teaching that contraception is a grave sin against God. Irreversibility means that this teaching will never be reversed. Contraception will remain a grave sin until the end of time.

To Defend Contraception Forfeits the Catholic Faith

    As Christianity expanded, the inevitable happened. Once professed Christians lapsed into their former paganism.
We read in the first three centuries about the thousands of Christians who chose to be thrown to the lions, or beheaded, or crucified—rather than conform to the pagan immorality that was so prevalent in the culture in which they lived.

    It is possible to misunderstand the Age of Martyrs of the first three centuries of the Christian era. We are liable to associate professing the Christian faith by refusing to drop a grain of incense before a statue of one of the pagan gods. No, the issue was much deeper and more serious. To be a Christian meant to refuse to conform to the pagan morality of those who did not believe in Christ. To be a Christian meant to reject the pagan immorality of the contemporary world—at the heart of which was the practice of contraception.


The Situation in the Modern World

    Contraception as a general practice is a recent innovation in the western nominally Christian society.
Its rise is partly explained by the medical discovery of drugs which either prevent conception, or which destroy the unborn child in its mother’s womb.

    But the rise of contraception is mainly the result of a widespread propaganda by women like Margaret Sanger and the powerful forces of population control.

    What have been the consequences of this return to prechristian paganism which is now “the law of the land” in once Christian nations like the United States? The consequences are inevitable.

    The once solitary defender of the sanctity of marital relations is now on trial for the profession of its Catholic faith.
In 1968, when Pope Paul VI published Humanae Vitae, the episcopal conferences of one country after another met in solemn session to pass judgment on the teachings of the Vicar of Christ.

    Bishops in what we call the “Third World Countries” stood firmly behind the Pope’s teaching. But the bishops of so-called developed countries, like the United States, or Canada, or France, or Germany, or Austria, or Scandinavia issued long documents that, to put it mildly, compromised the teachings of the Vicar of Christ.

    What followed was as inevitable as night follows day. Once firmly believing Catholics became confused, or bewildered, or simply uncertain about the grave moral evil of contraception.

    The spectacle of broken families, broken homes, divorce and annulments, abortion and the mania of homosexuality—all of this has its roots in the acceptance of contraception on a wide scale in what only two generations ago was a professed Catholic population.


Contraception Fatal to the Faith

   We come back to where we started—by claiming that contraception is fatal to the Catholic Faith.

    By divine ordinance, those who call themselves Catholic must subscribe to the moral teachings of the Catholic Church of which the Bishop of Rome is the visible head.

    This Catholic Church now stands alone in the world as the one universal authority which condemns contraception as contrary to the will of God.

    Within the Catholic ranks has arisen an army of dissidents who speak and write in defense of contraception. The sex-preoccupied Andrew Greeley of Chicago recently devoted a whole chapter of a book entitled, “That damned encyclical,” referring to Humanae Vitae. This priest remains in good standing in ecclesiastical circles.

    When the present Holy Father made his first pilgrimage as Pope to the United States, he pleaded in Chicago with the American bishops to do something over the scandal of so many Catholics on Sundays going to Holy Communion and so few going to confession.

    All the evidence indicates that the core issue at stake is contraception. If contraception is not a grave sin, well then what is? And why go to confession if I am still in God’s friendship although practicing contraception.

    What is the new conclusion? That the single, principal cause for the breakdown of the Catholic faith in materially overdeveloped countries like ours has been contraception.

    St. James tells us that faith without good works is dead. What good is it to give verbal profession of the Catholic faith, and then behave like a pagan in marital morality?

Recommendations

    The single most crucial need to stem this hemorrhage from the Catholic Faith is for the Church’s leaders to stand behind the Vicar of Christ in proclaiming the Church’s two millennia of teaching that no marital act can be separated from its God-given purpose to conceive and procreate a child.

    I make bold to say that the Catholic Church, the real Roman Catholic Church, will survive only where her bishops are courageous enough to proclaim what the followers of Christ have believed since apostolic times. But the bishops are frail human beings. They need, Lord how they need, the backing and support of the faithful under their care.


Contraception Fatal to Eternal Life

    What can this possibly mean? It means exactly what it says. The practice of contraception is a grave sin. Those who indulge in the practice are in danger of losing their immortal souls.

    Difficult or intolerable as the language may seem, it is the truth. My purpose here is to prove that historic Christianity has always held, holds now, and always will hold, that contraception is a serious offense against God. Unless repented, it is punishable by eternal deprivation of the vision of God, which we call eternal death.


Teaching of the Church in Apostolic Times

    Historians agree that contraception is a social practice that goes back to centuries before Christ. Medical papyri describing contraceptive methods are as old as 2700 BC in China, and 1850 BC in Egypt.

    In the Roman Empire of the first century of the Christian era, contraception was universally approved and practiced by the people.

    As might be expected, the followers of Christ were faced from the beginning with a hard choice. If they wanted to remain faithful to Christ’s teaching, they had to avoid contraception.

    In the language of the day, contraceptive practice was referred to as “using magic” and “using drugs.” It was in this sense that the first century Teaching of the Twelve Apostles warns Christians in four successive precepts:

•    “You shall not use magic.”
•    “You shall not use drugs.”
•    “You shall not procure abortion.”
•    “You shall not destroy an unborn child.”

    The sequence of those prohibitions is significant. We know from the record of those times that women would first try some magical rites or use sorcery to avoid conception. If this failed, they would take one or another of then known seventeen medically approved contraceptives. If a woman still became pregnant, she would try to abort. And if even this failed, she and her male partner could always resort to infanticide, which was approved by Roman law.

    Christians were warned not to follow the example of their pagan contemporaries, who walked in darkness and the shadow of death. Christians were absolutely forbidden to practice contraception, which leads to abortion, which leads to infanticide.

From Apostolic Times to Humanae Vitae

    For the next 1900 years, the litany of the Church’s teaching on artificial birth control was never interrupted. Popes and saints and scholars in different words and from different perspectives taught the same thing: Contraception is a grace sin that no one who claims to be a Christian may perform.

    Out of a library of witnesses to this doctrine, St. Augustine wrote a whole treatise on Conjugal Adultery, in which he declared, “Intercourse with one’s legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked whenever the conception of offspring is prevented.”
When recently, the present Holy Father repeated St. Augustine’s statement about contraception as marital adultery, he was crucified by the world media.

    That is why no one should have been surprised at the reception, or rather, rejection, that Pope Paul VI’s Encyclical Humanae Vitae received in 1968.

    Thirty years ago, Paul VI appealed to the conscience of the world when he warned about “the consequences of practicing artificial birth control.” His warning was prophetic. What have been the consequences of contraception in one once-civilized nation after another?

    They have been myriad. But I would give especially seven, which may be listed in sequence.

•    Fornication;
•    Adultery;
•    Sterilization;
•    Homosexuality;
•    AIDS;
•    Breakdown of the family; and
•    Murder of the unborn.

    At the risk of repeating the obvious, let me briefly show how contraception inevitably leads to these seven tragedies that haunt the modern world.

Fornication

    How can we expect unmarried people to practice chastity if married people are allowed to practice mutual masturbation, which is another name for contraception?

    This touches at the heart of sane morality. Intercourse is the divinely instituted means for married person to cooperate with God in procreating children. It is also the divinely provided means of fostering mutual love between husband and wife.
But contraception does just the opposite. It deliberately prevents the conception of a child and it fosters, not mutual love, but mutual selfishness.

    Is it any wonder that our country is plagued with fornicators who indulge their sex passions, while avoiding the responsibilities of parenthood?

Adultery

    How can a husband respect a wife who insists on using contraceptives? And how can a wife respect a husband who refuses to accept the duties of fatherhood?

    The soul of Christian marriage is selfless love between the spouses. Contraceptive relations between married people are a lie. They pretend to love one another. But in reality, they are using one another in what might just well be called prostitution.
The history of mankind is clear. Contraception in marriage leads to infidelity in either or in both partners. Naturally! Why limit sex activity to one’s spouse if no commitment to having or raising children is the consequence of intercourse?

Sterilization

    We do not ordinarily associate contraception with sterilization. But we should.
It is one thing to use contraception as an occasional malpractice. It is something else when people have themselves sterilized to avoid even fathering or mothering a child.

    Yet massive sterilization, in a country like the United States, has become commonplace. Now the discovery of a five-year, synthetic hormone contraceptive gives carte blanche to any female teenager or adult, willing to have it surgically implanted under the skin. One of the largest school systems in America is doing just that—at taxpayer’s expense. The sterilizing hormone
is implanted under the skin in young girl’s arms. No parental permission is needed.

    This opened the door to an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, whose ratio is already sky-high in the United States.

Homosexuality

    The relationship between contraception and homosexuality is seldom adverted to and, in homosexual circles, openly denied. Yet they are connected by the most basic laws of human society.

    Contraception contradicts the most fundamental desire of the human heart: to give oneself in total generosity to another human being. Marital relations are meant by God to satisfy this desire between the married spouses.
But if women selfishly withhold this generosity from men, men will—tragically look for such generosity in other men. And women will look for it in other women.

    As you read some of the homosexual and lesbian literature, you are moved to tears at seeing how a contraceptive society has begotten a homosexual society. In their desperate search for love, men will turn to other men and women to other women. To say they are being deceived is only to emphasize the pity of a sodomistic culture that is starving for love. Contraception deprives married people of the love that they expect to find in a marriage between two people of opposite and complementary gender.

AIDS Epidemic

    With all the published writings and statistics on Acquired Immune Deficiency, seldom a word is given to associate this dreadful scourge with widespread practice of contraception.

    In spite of all the protests to the contrary, the AIDS epidemic has its roots in homosexuality. By now, of course, there are victims of AIDS whose condition is the result of other factors than sodomy. But the radical cause remains. And therefore, we should in sheer justice, associate the physical disease with its moral foundations, which is homosexuality abetted by contraception.

Family breakdown

    The breakdown of stable family life in formerly Christian countries of the Western world is a matter of record. No one who is even dimly aware of what is going on in countries like our own, has any doubt that the family, as known since the dawn of Christianity, is being legislated out of existence.

    I use the word “legislated” to bring out what Pope Paul stated so clearly in Humanae Vitae. In context, he is urging reasons for avoiding contraception. He says:

Consider also the dangerous weapon that would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who pay no attention to moral obligations.
Who could blame a government for applying to the solution of the problems of a community those means acknowledged licit for married couples in the solution of a family problem?
So it has been. Once contraception became widespread, it was only logical for civil governments to impose a contraceptive way of life on all their citizens.
Thus, everything controlled by the government reflects a contraceptive mentality:

•    The majority of employed people, working outside the home, are women.
•    The salaries earned by husbands and fathers make it next to impossible for them to provide for the size and kind of family they would honestly desire.
•    The feminist ideology deprives men of the dignity and respect they deserve and need in the modern world.
•    The number of children of single parent, shall we call them families, has reached gigantic proportions.
•    Countless children are no longer reared by their parents, but by paid personnel in so-called day care centers.
•    Working mothers and under-paid fathers have become commonplace.
•    The very idea of a stable and loving family has become—for millions—a starry ideal.

    All of this, and more, can be traced, as surely as smoke proves a fire, to the contraceptive mania that is destroying the foundations of the human family.

Abortion

    I have saved abortion as the last of the seven deadly consequences of contraception. This, too, is a law of human behavior. Abortion follows contraception like the law of gravity.

    This is obvious. As people come to equate sexual pleasure with the self-gratification, there is no limit to their lustful pride. Contraception has taught them to have their own way. They will stop at nothing to have their way, not even murder of their unborn offspring.

    Respect for human life requires selfless love of human beings. As a nation is nurtured on contraceptive self-indulgence, it becomes a nation that kills innocent children—if they are an obstacle to the self-gratification of those who brought them into existence.

    It has been correctly said that Humanae Vitae divides the Catholic Church into two periods of history. The Church will survive only among those who believe that contraception is deadly to both Christianity and the promise of a heavenly reward.
Normally thirty years is a short time. But in this case it has been long enough to prove who are still truly Catholics. They are those who believe that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ. “If you love me,” Jesus said, “keep my commandments.” The single most tested commandment of the Savior today is that contraception is fatal to the true faith and to eternal life.

Father Hardon is the Executive Editor of The Catholic Faith magazine. © Copyright 1998 Inter Mirifica