**Chronos **said that I was completely misrepresenting Church teaching, but you seem to be supporting what I said. 
“Less of a sin”? Do you mean a *venial *sin, as opposed to a *mortal *sin?
I think you meant “‘having sex with a condom’ is less bad than ‘having sex without a condom.’” True?
IOANNES PAULUS PP. II
VERITATIS SPLENDOR
Recent Popes are deadly serious about this: No birth control. Ever.
Less of an evil perhaps. But that in no way implies less of a sin.
That is indeed the case that I knew of, and I would dispute that it “doesn’t really count”. They might not intend to have contracepted intercourse, but they do intend to prevent conception if it should happen that they do have intercourse.
ThelmaLou, the Church has not changed its positions on this in any notable way in your lifespan. The Church has always held sex (specifically, marital sex) to be very important: Sex within marriage is unnecessary only to the extent that marriage itself is unnecessary. Within Church teaching, a sexless marriage is a contradiction in terms, since sex is itself part of the sacrament of matrimony.
Nor does the Church believe anything so absurd as that every ejaculation must carry the possibility of pregnancy. The hierarchy of the Church is well aware of the existence of involuntary ejaculation. In fact, being composed entirely of celibate men, it’s be a miracle if they weren’t aware of it.
Every VOLUNTARY/INTENTIONAL ejaculation, then.
My still-future sister in law would risk her life if she ever got pregnant. She had her tubes tied yoinks ago; as soon as the medical establishment agreed that she was old enough to know her mind about it, which which seems like a very stupid attitude when hello, you doctors are the ones who told her “you get pregnant, you die”. They’re planning a Church wedding, she’s been a catechist…
Note that, despite her medical problems, not only are they open to having children: they’re in the middle of adopting one. They met the kid this same month, hopefully my new nephew will be here around Christmas. So, even though her medical problems means she really, really, really shouldn’t have “children of the body”, they follow the instruction to be “open to children”.
Normally, you don’t go and ask for permission from anybody, much less from the bishop. The bishop doesn’t have more authority in this than any other priest. You either Just Do It or speak with your confessor, but birth control is something people don’t go announcing in the street, you deal with it privately. And note that on one hand, you’re supposed to not use certain methods of birth control, but on the other you’re supposed to be a responsible parent and that includes not having more children than you can responsibly raise… so a lot of people eventually get either her tubes or his tied, and if anybody has the bollocks to get their panties in a twist about it, claim Responsible Parenthood.
The only well-known situation that I know of is the story of the Belgian nuns stationed in the Congo during the revolution. This story is more likely than not a Catholic urban legend.
When questioned about the birth control and the Zika virus during a flight earlier this year, Pope Francis mentioned the nuns and said that Pope Paul VI “permitted” the Belgian nuns to use birth control. However, no evidence exists that any such thing happened.
What seems to have actually happened is that in December 1961, the i Italian journal Studi Cattolici (“Catholic Studies”) published an article in which three Jesuit theologians argued that use of contraception could be justified by the nuns. Paul VI did not become pope until 1963. Since the journal carried the imprimatur of the Catholic Church, people claimed that this meant that the Church approved of the Jesuits’ conclusions, ignoring the fact that academic journals approved by the Church often contain scholarly debates that are not considered Church doctrine.
It should be noted that it was unlikely that the contraceptive pill was available in the Congo in 1961 (some retellings of this story stretch the date of the alleged dispensation as late as 1964 to compensate) and the pill was not legalized in Belgium (the home of the nuns)until 1965.
Later, in 1993, another theologian, Fr Giacomo Perico SJ, wrote another academic paper defending the use of birth control by potential rape victims. Using another truly bizarre line of reasoning, a British newspaper ran an article with the headline “Vatican acts over Bosnian rapes: Birth control ban eased for women at risk.” The article reasoned that the Church did not stop the theologian from publishing his paper in the journal Civillta Catolica, therefore the Church was granting permission to other potential rape victims to use the pill. In my searches, I found many references to an alleged dispensation for potential rape victims were based on this article, without producing any other evidence that the Vatican had OKed birth control.
And there are many other articles that assume that the original dispensation to the nuns in the Congo is an undisputed fact and go from there.
But maybe you know of another dispensation that I did not find. Is there any actual hard evidence that this ever happened?
Even if it didn’t actually happen, the fact that the Pope thinks it did is surely sufficient evidence that it could be allowable.
In regards to using NFP, you have to have very serious reasons for using it, you can’t just say we only plan to have two children spaced three years apart and stop.
I love reading Catholic rules on human sexuality, so romantic.
Sure. I still don’t think that qualifies as an exception, though, because the sin of contracepted intercourse doesn’t lie either in the act of “taking a pill to make oneself infertile” or “having sex that one foresees to be infertile”, it’s in the conjunction of the two. The position of the Catholic Church is that it’s wrong to separate the unitive and procreative aspects of the sex act, but since the potential rape victim isn’t intending to have sex, she isn’t intending to separate the unitive and procreative aspects of any sex act, and since intent matters in Catholic moral reasoning, I don’t think this qualifies as a sin against chastity in the relevant sense.
(in the case everyone talks about, nuns in the Congo were involved, and as nuns they certainly weren’t intending to have sex with anyone).
The citation of Veritatis Splendor here is not well grounded. There is a huge different between undertaking an evil act so that good may result, and undertaking a morally neutral act with the intention of procuring a good result, even though an unintended secondary effect may also result.
Wearing a condom is not, in and of itself, an evil act. What makes putting a condom on sinful in Catholic understanding is the intention to subsequently engage in the marital act but prevent the transmission of life. An astronaut using a “condom style” catheter, to choose a good illustration, does not act sinfully. The sin is not enclosing the penis in a wrapper. It’s doing for for the purpose of preventing conception in the context of the marital sex act.
I don’t think that disputes anything I said. It’s certainly correct that the Catholic Church has always condemned artificial control of fertility in a general sense, and that it’s more specifically condemned the Pill, the condom, etc., since Paul VI. I don’t foresee that changing any time soon. I do think there’s legitimate debate here about which kinds of immoral acts a Catholic is supposed to view as worse than others. Pope-Emeritus Benedict hinted at something along those lines when he said, if a prostitute is going to have sex with a client it’s better to do so with a condom than without, but of course the only genuinely morally good course would be not to have sex at all.
(N.B. I’m not Catholic so this is all academic to me, but while I disagree with Catholic sexual morality I don’t think it’s self evidently silly. The conclusions follow logically from the premises, and the conclusions that the Catholic Church draws, given their premises, are generally fairly thoughtful and humane ones).
+100. Bricker says what I was trying to express regarding the Pill and rape victims, but more succinctly.