Sex WITHIN marriage? (A Christian viewpoint)

Great Debates
101

I’ve only been a Christian for about two years, although there is a certain group out there who wouldn’t consider me to be a Christian because I’m Catholic.

I believe that sex outside of marriage is sin, but if you’re married, you can swing from the chandeliers if you want to, although I personally don’t recommend it because of the risk of injury.

As for oral/anal sex, personally, I think the whole idea is kind of gross. Ok, so I’m a prude, but dammit, I have a Constitutionally protected right to pe a prude. Anyhoo, if oral/anal is your cup of tea, I don’t have a problem with it as long as it’s just something you do for the enhancement of your sexual pleasure, and not being used as a means to avoid pregnancy.

The trouble with Sir Launcelot is by the time he comes riding up, you’ve already married King Arthur.

102

Let me interject some more Catholic “sex rules.” Impotence, if a man is known to be impotent before marriage the church will not marry the couple even if they both agree this is not a problem for them. If a man becomes impotent in the marriage and cannot have intercourse or some medical condition with the wife prevents intercourse no other sexual contact of any kind is permitted because every act must have the potential for conceiving. Every sexual act of any kind must always lead to intercourse with again the possibility of conception, so a married couple can find themselves in hell for “making out” if they do not follow this with intercourse. Oral sex is permitted only as a form of foreplay, oral sex to orgasm is a mortal sin. There is an exception,
if the woman does not have an orgasm from intercourse after the man is “done” he can try to give his wife an orgasm by oral sex or by touching her, I think. It is very hard to understand these rules the Catholic websites use such theological language it’s hard to believe they are talking about making love and not geometry.

103

agisofia said:

Okay; but then why is the rhythm method allowed? Because there are no “unnatural” devices involved?

104

icerigger? Do you have any citation for your comments. I have seen similar silliness in some of the old fashioned “marriage manuals,” but I have never seen anything like that in either the Catechism or in current Canon Law.

(The part that I would say “sounds” possible is the aspect of a physically impotent man being barred from marriage. However, even there, I have only seen the issue raised as grounds for anullment when a man entered into marriage without telling his wife beforehand. I have never heard of a man being prohibited from marrying for that reason (and I have known several very old men with prostate problems who remarried in their later years).)

Tom~

105

[/QUOTE]
Okay; but then why is the rhythm method allowed? Because there are no “unnatural” devices involved?**
[/QUOTE]

Yep.

The trouble with Sir Launcelot is by the time he comes riding up, you’ve already married King Arthur.

106

TOMNDEBB
Go to http://www.ewtn.com use the search engine and look for any topic regarding sex. Believe me these rules are no joke, I wonder what percentage of Catholics follow them?

107

So it’s okay to interfere with God’s purpose just as long as you don’t use an unnatural device?

108

Um, yes and no. Remember that with the rythm method, you’re still open to the possibility of conception- you’re not placing any artificial barriers in the way of conception, you’re simply exercising a bit of self-control during the period of time that the woman is most likely to be fertile. And the Church does authorize this method as a method of spacing out your children in order to provide the maximum advantage in being able to provide for them. The idea is that you’re not rejecting the possibility of having children.

And remember the old joke-

What do you call Catholic women who use the rythm method?

Mommy.

The trouble with Sir Launcelot is by the time he comes riding up, you’ve already married King Arthur.

109

If two people are married, and want very much to bring a child into this world, yet have problems conceiving, is it wrong to resort to “unnatural means” to conceive that child? Is sperm obtained in the lab unnatural? Is that considered masturbation? Are fertility drugs, used by a married couple whose heart’s desire is to bring and raise a spiritually educated person into this world wrong? If cloning becomes a viable means of bringing a truly wanted soul into the world, would that be unnatural?

110

icerigger, I was afraid that you might have stumbled into something like EWTN. Those folks are Catholic, but they are not The Catholic Church. That whole organization tends to look on Vatican II as an embarrassing little interruption in the life of the Church.

I did check out the site, just to make sure that I wasn’t jumping to conclusions, and discovered a lot of drek that was personal opinion held up as Catholic Doctrine. It’s not.

Among the other problems I found, were people quoting as fact some of the misconceptions about Martin Luther that no honest historian should stand by (and which I have seen corrected in Catholic publications).

They have not provided the site as a joke, but it is still pretty much a joke.

Tom~

111

EWTN does some good work.

Unfortunately, accurately reporting the magisterium is not among their good work. They are not an authoritive source on the teachings of the Catholic church. The Church speaks through her Pope and her bishops.

I like having EWTN as a cable channel choice, but I don’t turn to them for guidance in Catholic teachings.

It is a very understandable mistake, though, to find them via a search engine and rely upon them. There are a lot of people who feel the Church somehow “lost her way” with Vatican II; I fear that many of them have found jobs at EWTN.

  • Rick
112

elelle…

By my understanding of the Catholic Church… the things you have mentioned would be wrong.

According to some fundie pounders who are not also Catholic it is also wrong and is still “playing God”.

This question has been addressed in part at: http://www.leftbehind.com/cgi-bbs/Forum8/HTML/002018.html

Happy reading!! And I would be curious to people’s opinions on that thread!

Beth

113

Wow. At the mention of EWTN, I just spent a while perusing their website and was blown away with some of the answers in the Catholic Q&A section (and I was raised Catholic)!
http://www.ewtn.com/EWTN/Experts/conference.htm

So much of it seems so incredibly arbitrary, like a “Christianity for Dummies” manual. Cosmetic surgery is fine, but in-vitro fertilization is unnatural and evil. Taking communion at a Lutheran church is apostasy. Oral/etc. sex is fine so long as you ejaculate in the normal place; otherwise it’s masturbation and evil. Enrollment in the Peace Corps is not a good enough excuse for Natural Family Planning. You must specifically categorize your impure thoughts (you can’t lump together fantasies about your married neighbor and her unmarried daughter). Driving someone to an abortion clinic is worthy of ex-communication. Deliberately missing mass is a mortal sin.

And those were just the more serious transgressions. With all of the particulars, I cannot even conceive of living a proper EWTN-style Catholic life.

Dumbfounded,
Meara

114

The EWTN view of the world is so bizarre that it seems pointless to even comment on the specifics.

As is evident from Icerigger’s and Meara’s posts, they’re caught up in such an intricate web of legalisms with respect to sex (and probably everything else) that it’s hard to believe they claim to worship the same Jesus who poked holes in the Pharisees’ thicket of rules, or that they acknowledge the apostle Paul who said that we are not under the Law, but saved by grace.

115

Thanks people for giving me feedback on EWTN. I don’t understand how they could give out misinformation, I have seen priests, bishops, cardinals appear. Remember the priest and nun who were disciplined for ministering to homosexuals and not teaching them the evil of their acts? If they (EWTN) were giving false information would not the Vatican shut them down?

Speaking of Catholic marriage manuals I picked one up at a local book fair, published in 1952. Amount other things it warns of the dangers of embracing your spouse if you are not planning to complete the act with intercourse. It’s always “THE ACT” the phase making love never appears. The word obedience occurs 24X, love 6X. The man is head of the house the woman the heart. A wife must put her husband’s needs above her own and her children’s. This was also very interesting:
family planning of any kind is absolutely forbidden. The concept of stating you want say 3 children 3 years apart is seen as interfering in God’s plan. The rhythm method could only be used as a temporary thing if having a child would cause great health problems for the woman. The CC is now pushing NFP but I still think it can only be used in extraordinary situations not as birth control, that’s why they don’t call it natural birth control.

116

The Vatican probably doesn’t care what they teach so long as it doesn’t actually violate the doctines of the Church – EWTN just seems to take everything to an extreme.

I do wonder at what cost though. I am not a Christian, but those sorts of narrow views seem a bit counterproductive to me. It makes faith/salvation into some calculable thing (“okay… I had a fantasy on Thursday and lied on Friday, but I went to confession on Saturday and said my rosary six times, so the priest said I’m fine. I want to fornicate with my boyfriend next Tuesday, but I’ll go to confession the day after so I don’t accidentally die with mortal sin on my soul.”)

Now maybe that’s similar to Old-Testament Judaism (i.e. proscribed atonements), but it seems to go against the spirit of the whole New Testament. It’s almost as though the Catholic Church and it’s trappings and rules have become more important to some people than what it all means.

Now before you call me Martin Luther, I’m not speaking of the entire Catholic Church, just the fanatics who absolutely everything codified in doctrine. Plus, I have plenty of problems with the die-hard “justification by faith alone” folks as well. I’ve actually heard people say “I don’t need to bother with [insert good deed here]. Good works don’t get me anywhere. I know Jesus will save me no matter what.”

In my opinion, either both of these groups are missing the point, or the point wasn’t a worthwhile one in the first place. If I ever become a Christian, it will not be to go to mass every Sunday or kneel down and say (in the spirit of the Left Behind series) “Jesus, I’m scum, save me!” and then announce that all past and future sins have been washed away and I can do whatever I want for the rest of my life since my salvation has been won.

Somehow, as harsh as things were, Old Testament religion sounds better to me - the idea that you try to live by a set of standards, and if you slip up, you atone and move on and maybe get punished a little, but you don’t need to go around proclaiming how guilty and worthless you are, or conversely how you were “saved” so none of it matters.

Then again, maybe it’s better to just go with what we’ve got – namely a conscience and a brain – and arrive at a bunch of the same places without all the fanfare.

Meara

[DISCLAIMER: No EWTN-staff or Fundies were harmed in the making of this message.]

117

Meara-

You seem to have some misconceptions about the Confessional. The Church does not teach that it’s ok to sin (as in your example of saying, I want to fornicate with my boyfriend…but I’ll go to Confession the next day)

Ideally, we should never sin, but God knows we’re, uh, only human, so, if you were out with your boyfriend, not planning to misbehave, but you had a couple of drinks and one thing led to another…

One of the requirements for the Sacrament of Reconciliation ( also known as confession ) is contrition- you must be genuinely sorry for your sin, and resolved never to repeat the offence. So, the confessional is the Church’s way of dealing with human weakness, not a license to sin, with the attitude of, “I’ll do it and go to confession afterward and it’ll be OK.”

By the way, if you have A LOT of questions about Catholic teaching, you might want to invest in a copy of “The Catechism of the Catholic Church”. It’s only about eight bucks, and it has an excellent index so you can look up what you want to know about by topic. And it’s written in plain English, not Theologese.

The trouble with Sir Launcelot is by the time he comes riding up, you’ve already married King Arthur.

118

I didn’t mean to imply that this was the intention of Confession. A good Catholic will truly repent and not plan to sin in the future (and that is, of course, what the Church teaches).

However, it seems that the more it becomes a science (e.g. I go to confession for mortal sin, communion for venial sin, etc.) the more it tempts many folks to think that way. One of the questions on that site was from a guy who ‘knew’ he was committing a sin by regularly fornicating, but had no intention of stopping. He wanted to know if it was still okay to go to confession.

It just seems to me, reading that and a lot of the other questions, that to some, the rules have eclipsed the spirit and salvation is one big calculation. Whether or not they mean to, sites like EWTN’s Q&A encourage that by making arbitrary judgments and giving everything a a points value on some nebulous cosmic scale.

Alright, this is going to sound like it’s straight from Calvin’s mouth, but it’s as though the (conservative part of the) Church has made the cosmic tax code so incredibly complicated that you NEED their help to figure out how to file your return. (i.e. “tell me exactly how I’ve sinned and how to atone and I will do that, since I’m not qualified to figure it out on my own.”)

Wouldn’t it be better to make people spend time contemplating their sins (using their conscience as a measuring stick instead of a set of codified rules)and to teach that they will be forgiven when they have reached a point of true contrition, not just when they hear the magical rite of absolution?

(Just for clarification, I’m not saying that this isn’t the intent of the official teachings, just that it’s not the message that comes across in my experience)

Meara

119

meara-
Your point is well taken. A lot of people get this impression. I think the Church hasn’t done a very good job of clearly teaching it’s doctrines, especially those around the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Interestingly, converts to Catholicism tend have more understanding of the doctrines, because the Church wants to make sure you know what you’re getting youself into before the priest pours the water on your head. Cradle Catholics tend not to pay so much attention, because it’s so much a part of the environment they’re raised in that they kind of take it for granted. They tend not to ask a lot of questions, which is fine with the catechists, because they’re often lazy and don’t want to answer them.

OK, I’m going off on a tangent. I’ll shut up.

The trouble with Sir Launcelot is by the time he comes riding up, you’ve already married King Arthur.

120

Pardon me, I’m running two pages behind and won’t be able to offer much besides an attributation and a recommendation.Polycarpsed:

Said by Lady Sally Callahan, in either Callahan’s Lady (or possibly Lady Slings the Booze) by Spider Robinson. Associated with the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon series, and a must read for SF/F fans (esp. Heinlein folks).

Sorry, all. Back to the discussion.

-andros-