A friend of mine, a former Anglican actually, brought up an issue that I hadn’t thought about with respect to the new Anglican rite: contraception. In 1930, the Lambeth Conference declared that contraception was not always immoral, and could be used (for serious reason) to regulate the number of children that a married couple had. That declaration prompted a negative response from the Roman Catholic Church”“the encyclical Casti Connubii, which declared that the use of contraception was never morally permissible. As most people know, that stance was reaffirmed by Humanae Vitae.
Now, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the prohibition against contraception is not a matter of “rite” or religious practice”“it is a matter of natural law, binding not only upon Catholics, but upon all persons. So Anglicans who join the Catholic Church will be expected to conform to the prohibition There is no such thing as a dispensation from the strictures of negative moral absolutes. It’s true, of course, that many Roman Catholics make their own decisions about this matter, and come to their own private peace with God in the “internal forum” of their conscience. But the new influx of Anglicans will include people who will not be able to come to a purely private peace”“the married members of the clergy, who will be required to follow Humanae Vitae no less than other married persons.
As far as I am aware, however, the morality of contraception under certain circumstances has been more or less a settled issue among Anglicans”“even traditionally minded Anglicans. How will this change work out?
Contraception is an Anglican experiment that has caused a disaster in our culture…like a grade B movie monster that escapes from the laboratory and destroys everything in its path.
Contraception has helped the devil to corrupt souls and destroy the sacred act of procreation, the sanctity and value of human life and the holy covenant and institution of marriage.
I imagine that lay married anglicans will be as faithful or as not as lay current catholics.
Married Anglican priests, if they wish to become catholic priests will need to learn how to use natural family planning. This does require self discipline (one has to “fast” from sexual intimacy during periods of the month, however the success rate is about 96%, with compares quite well with hormonal birth control’s 98%, and with condom’s 90%.
It certainly is a settled matter in this Anglican clergy house: no contraception because it is immoral. In fact, a lot of Anglicans, clergy especially, take their moral cues from Rome because of the failure of Anglican leadership to give firm biblical guidance in so many areas.
Hey, cari amici en Roma … you no play-uh dee game, you no mayka dee rules. Capiche?
Clueless got it; what percent of Roman Catholics *don’t* use birth control? By the way, the “Family planning” approved of by Rome IS controlling births, therefore…..Well. Dead issue. The Anglican converts will be just as comfortable as the cradle Catholics. It will be a comforting shock to hear a bishop say abortion isn’t a sacrament. You simply can’t find a pro-life ECUSA bishop.
Nwlayman I think is correct. I think the new Anglican RCs will honor that church teaching about as much as other RCs do. I’m afraid that horse is well and truly out of that barn, and frankly I don’t think there is much the Church is going to be able to do to change it – particularly since the stats I’ve seen estimate that 80-90% of Catholic couples use contraception. While many/most RCs are anti-abortion, it is pretty unusual to find couples, particularly married ones, who choose not to use artificial means of contraception. I think this one is a losing and perhaps a lost battle.
[i]4. nwlayman wrote, “By the way, the “Family planning†approved of by Rome IS controlling births, therefore…..Well. Dead issue.”[/i]
Ah, but there’s a difference in controlling births by abstaining from sex now and then and using the pill or prophylactics. Even then, the Catholic Church teaches that natural family planning is /not/ to be used as an ongoing attempt to avoid the procreative act. And of course, there’s always the fact that chemical contraceptives are known abortifacients.
I think this, and marriage discipline, will be an issue in such dioceses as Fort Worth where a good few parishes might otherwise wish to move to full communion with the See of Rome. Bishop Iker noted at the recent Forward in Faith UK conference (http://www.forwardinfaith.com/news/na09-10.html) that many of his lay folks are former RCs who often became Episcopalian, in part, because of the current Episcopalian disciplines on marriage and contraception.
Cathy Kaveny makes some excellent points here and am glad to see this article posted. Once upon a time in the days of the “wild west of T19) I used to comment on natural law from time to time. It never went very far. I think the evangelical Anglicans just could never bring themselves to consider moral reasoning on any but a scriptural basis. It will be important for the new Anglican Catholics (Sarum Rite Catholics ??) to study Natural Law reasoning and see how it harmonizes with revealed moral teaching.
Natural Law reasoning has the benefit of prividing a basis for moral and legal judgments without reference to scripture which is particularly important in the public square. Scriptural arguments are meaningless in the secular world even if they may be convincing in a Christian environment. If evangelicals in the US were conversant in Natural Law reasoning, we would have no gay marriage in this country today.
Anyway, she makes good points about contraception, too. However, I dont think having only 2 or 3 children is proof of artificial contraception use. If NFP is as good as the numbers she cites, based only on method there would not be a noticeable difference in family size, would there be?
Implausible. If the natural law arguments put forward by Catholics have been insufficient to protect marriage, then having evangelicals use these same arguments, instead of the ones they do use, wouldn’t do a thing to convince the secular. world
Toral1,
The the secular world did not hear a consistent argument with a unified voice. It has been all too easy for them to marginalize all Christian opposition to gay marriage as based on biblical fundamentalism seeking theocracy. If Evangelicals had learned another set of arguments and forced them to deal rationally with the subject, it would have come out differently. Scripture quotes in the public square are self marginalizing. They do not force the opposition to engage rationally and invite a dismissive attitude, even if they are right.
Anyway, you have proven my point about the refusal of Evangelicals to engage in any conversation outside their own pattern of reasoning.
[Please address the thread topic and do not divert it on to other subjects. Please also do not make personal comments about other commenters]
RE: “And of course, there’s always the fact that chemical contraceptives are known abortifacients.”
Um — no they’re not. There are one or two that are — and of course Christians should stay away from those.
It is true, though, that one of the “slippery slope” charges that various Anglo-Catholics and Continuing Anglicans have claimed is that “it all began with approval of chemical contraception” in TEC — which occurred long before WO.
That claim, however, is not as popular made *publicly* for reasons that I expect are obvious. ; > )
Thank God for contraceptives — a great blessing and one of medicine’s many 20th century advances! God is good.
I have conflicted feelings about this – on the one hand, there are contraceptives that are abortifacients that should always be avoided. But the bigger problem that I see, is that a Christian church (the Anglican Communion being the first to do so in 1930 for very compassionate reasons (sounds familiar, doesn’t it, to recognizing same-sex relationships)) by embracing contraception opened the very wide door to abortion. Once contraception is seen as allowable (and sanctioned by one’s own church), then what happens when that contraception fails – as it often does? All of a sudden, it’s not the responsibility of the man and woman, it’s the fault of the technology – of the contraception. And human nature being what it is, the human beings involved want the problem to go away – a problem they thought they had avoided by using contraception. So what to do? Well, they didn’t want a baby – they were being “careful” by using contraception, so they shouldn’t have to deal with its failure – so time to get rid of the result of that failure, the baby.
I guess I figure what a couple individually decides should be informed by their church, and if they go against church teaching, between them and God, but the Church needs to remain steadfast in her belief and understanding of what God wants for us, and I think that means natural family planning, not contraception.
I think it won’t be hard for Anglicans to adopt a hardline position on abortion, but except among those who are already taking their theological cues from Rome, I don’t think hardline teachings on contraception are ever going to get much traction. As others have pointed out, Catholics in Europe and N. America just don’t take this prohibition very seriously. Anglicans have criticized Rome’s reasoning on the issue from the start; for my part, the distinction between the natural and the unnatural is defensible. It is “unnatural” (in some sense) to regulate fertility at all; in another sense the human awareness of sexuality and procreation makes the issue of nature moot, for it could be said that it is natural for couples to control their fertility.