Monday January 7, 2008
Fr. Tom Bartolomeo's Homily
Presented December 9, 2007 at St. James Parish, Rockford, Illinois
Every man innately prizes his own life above everything. No law of nature is as strong as the law of self-preservation and by extension the life of another united to his own. Most parents if needed would sacrifice their own lives for their childrens'. The same is often true in special relations such as the bond between soldiers in combat.
We speak of the family of man. Even in the worst of circumstances, violence and war, human life may be taken but it is never taken lightly. So, too, we extend our highest honors to firemen and soldiers who sacrifice their lives for others. Ask any parent of any new born child. New births, anniversaries and funerals, separations of any kind, a photograph from the past--give us pause and remind us whom we are bound to. Our human sexuality, father, mother, brother, sister reveals our deepest relationships. We call God, Our Father, and his son, our brother.
At a time, a century ago and earlier, when life was more organic, before baby formula, when babies were raised on mother's milk, a woman would not ovulate until she stopped suckling her child - nature's way of maintaining an intimate relationship of mother and child: children immunized from viral diseases, mothers immunized from breast cancer and children sufficiently spaced apart naturally. Imagine that! A woman's body would not release an egg for insemination as long as she suckled her child.
A woman's body has not changed. This remains God's plan for having children, not artificial contraception, chemical or mechanical, and all the health, emotional and spiritual dangers they present.
Sadly medical practice is not as holistic as it once was; now it is driven more by technology, chemistry and making money. Yet this same science can serve humanity by natural means- natural or organic family planning. It requires, however, some personal study and education, in place of supposedly other more convenient means (pills and plastic devises).
Sadly, too, so much of the medical profession is caught up in the trap of expanding internal medicine-prescription pads versus education. When I was recently hospitalized, I was handed by a doctor I did not know a prescription for additional medications I had not had before. I asked my own doctor, why? He explained that the government and the medical industry had decided from a large case study that additional medications may improve the average statistical results. I then sat down and consulted my own doctor, and we decided to maintain my current medication. What is a husband and wife, a man and a woman to do? Is a woman's primary recourse to a gynaecologist instead of her own and her husband's council in matters of sexuality and fertility?
Contraception, contra-conception, trivializes the sacred value of human sexuality - a danger humanity did not have to face a century ago before the advent of modern chemistry and technology, the pill, before or after, and a host of plastic devises.
God built the truth, our guidance, in our bodies - a wonderful process of fertility which, once understood, is the most effective, danger-free, means of growing a family. A woman's individual fertility cycle can be exactly determined by her and her husband's observations in as short as a three month period-for the purposes of bearing or deferring children. There are three indices determining a woman's fertility period: body temperature, the condition of cervical fluid and the cervix.
That's it. Set up your chart and you have the safest and most effective means of deciding when you choose to bear or defer having children. God's plan has always been there for husbands and wives.
The alternative is a wife whose primary relationship resides with a doctor whose appointments she must make and whose costly fees she and her husband must pay. And for what? For the woman to tell her doctor what she does not know about her body so he can make an uninformed decision? And where is her husband in all this? In some subservient position to another man...or woman doctor? A wallet in place of a conjugal mate?
Contracept, take God's plan off the table and you have mayhem. The most important thing in your lives, bearing children, is no longer discussed. It has been permanently removed from the conversation. Done deal. The pill, the IUD, the diaphragm, the sponge, the condom - who is making money here? - have shut down not only the body but the brain. And wives and husbands wonder why they grow apart?
When a man and woman, a husband and wife, share daily this most wonderful mystery of their human sexuality they are bonding as nature and God intended. Artificial contraception drives families apart. Has your wife taken the pill? How do you know? Or has she taken the pill and not told you, how do you know? If she has not taken the pill do you blame her? Has the husband had a vasectomy...in secret? How do you know? Who is responsible for the means of contraception? Do you resent your part or his part in the decision making? So sex is reduced to pleasure. What Christ had warned had happened in the days of Noah, "They were eating and drinking, marrying and remarrying" in the days before the flood.
Consider how the pleasure principle, "it feels good" or "it tastes good" has skewered our popular understanding of sexuality and nutrition - leaving in its wake an onslaught of sexual and eating disorders, an onslaught of sexual diseases, diabetes and obesity - including children's - which affect more than half our population. After coronary disease and cancer, eating and sexual disorders rank third and fourth as our most serious health issues today.
Their most pernicious effect corrupts the developing sensibility of children and their growing cynicism of sex and marriage. Can a man or boy see, speak or relate to a woman or girl without subconsciously evaluating her as an object of pleasure? The same can be said for women and girls' attitudes towards men and boys. I once heard a speaker who was a paraplegic from his neck down who explained how often women would open up to him and discuss matters with him which they would not ordinarily discuss with other men, because they sensed he was free of any predatorial sexuality.
Chastity, in marriage or in the single state, frees men to relate to woman as people first and women to relate to men as people first. Chastity relieves unhealthy tension and suspicion between the sexes. The liberation and honesty of a brother relating to a sister or a sister relating to a brother. There are no real personalities in promiscuous and pre-marital relations, only a sense of using and being used by the other which never lasts. Why sexuality at creation is a matter of permanency as Christ explained, "From the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother [and be joined to his wife], and the two shall be one flesh."
Good secular instruction books on natural family plan. Use of condoms or other artificial birth control means described in these books are not approved by the Catholic Church:
Nona Aquilar, The New NO-PILL NO-RISK Birth Control
Toni Weschler, MPH, Taking Charge of Your Fertility, revised edition.
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