Contraception is intrinsically evil

THE reason bishops and many others are up in arms against the RH Bill is because that proposal, while packaged beautifully with all sorts of benefits—even being touted as the ultimate solution to our poverty—is simply immoral.

And it is immoral because again, in spite of its many good points, it is blind to the intrinsic immorality of contraception. Rather it presents contraception in fact as an expression of freedom, the so-called freedom of choice, which simply worsens things, adding fuel to the fire.

To me, this is the very germ that spoils the whole RH Bill package, the poison that corrupts the cake. It betrays a certain dangerous ideology, a spirit of the world if not of the devil that inspires it and that simply cannot be compatible with Christian faith and morals.

Because of that, certain features of the RH Bill manifest a malignant character. The provision on sex education even to little children is one. That of companies forced to enforce family planning to their employees is another. That of punishing those who may speak badly of the RH law is still another.

Then Hillary Clinton herself declared that RH would include abortion as one option. So, even if the pro-RH group tells us there is no abortion in the bill, we have reason to answer back, “Tell it to the Marines.”

Contraception is an intrinsic evil. There’s no ifs and buts about that. And that’s simply because, even without bringing yet the context in which it is used, whether in marriage or outside it, contraception is already a clear abuse of our sexual and procreative faculty.

It’s explained all over in many Church documents like the Humanae vitae, Evangelium vitae, Veritatis splendor and, of course, the Catechism. To cite one doctrine, we have the following from the Catechism. It’s kind of long, so I beg for my readers’ indulgence—

“Every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible is intrinsically evil.

“Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other.” (2370)

That’s quite clear and categorical, isn’t it? Similar teaching is repeated in many other documents.

It’s disquieting and disturbing to learn that even some Catholic theologians do not buy this doctrine. Not only that, but they also admit, whether openly or in secret, and even teach that the RH bill is ok.

To justify their views, they make strange appeals to the voice of their conscience, to the temper of the times and the situations, to historical and cultural conditionings, etc. They cite as examples and pieces of evidence the supposedly altered attitude of the Church toward issues like slavery, usury, marriage, death penalty, etc.

They claim that they are not for moral relativism. But nothing seems absolute to them other than what they like to believe and not what the Church teaches. They actually make things relative to them.

They are quite selective, often distinguishing between their conscience and Church magisterium to give priority to the former over the latter. Of course, they don’t run out of arguments to support their position of conscience over magisterium.

They continue in their fishing expedition, scouting for more evidence of supposed Church changes in attitude if not in teaching on certain issues, in the hope that the Church teaching on contraception would change also, not only on the surface, but more on the core, on the essence.

They conveniently ignore the teaching on the homogeneous development of doctrine in theology and in the Church. This teaching simply states that the deposit of faith entrusted by Christ to the Church is in its objectivity already complete. It’s in our understanding of it that involves growth and development but in an organic and homogeneous way.

And to think that many of these so-called theologians are teaching in seminaries and Catholic schools! We have to brace for future troubles when sooner or later we will have more priests and others openly saying that contraception and the RH Bill are just ok.

I salute an old religious priest who boldly declared that those teachers in the Catholic school put up by his order who are for RH are free to go. He said they have no right to teach what is clearly against the law of God.