[Question:]{.underline} Is there a Scriptural foundation for the Church’s teaching on contraception?
[Answer:]{.underline} The importance of this question lies in convincing Protestants of Catholic truth on this question. For, if they sometimes see the evil of abortion, in general they approve of contraception.
It is true that in the Bible there is only one explicit reference to the sin of contraception, from which it receives its technical name of Onanism. The text that describes the sin of Onan, the second son of Juda, is found in Genesis 38: 8 - 10. “Juda therefore said to Onan his son: Go in to thy brother’s wife and marry her, that thou mayst raise seed to thy brother. He knowing that the children should not be his, when he went in to his brother’s wife, spilled his seed upon the ground, lest children should be born in his brother’s name. And therefore the Lord slew him, because he did a detestable thing.”
Protestant apologists, however, maintain that the sin for which the Lord God slew Onan was not specifically that of spilling his seed, but spilling his seed so that he would not raise up children to his brother. However, this latter was a grave obligation, promulgated in the Mosaic law, and called the law of the levirate, according to which a man had the obligation of raising up children for a deceased brother by taking his brother’s widow for his own wife, and engendering and raising children in his brother’s name, who would legally be his brother’s. (Dt 25:5-10).
The first problem with this explanation is that Onan lived in the time of the patriarchs, before the departure into Egypt, and 400 years before Moses and the promulgation of the Mosaic law that is described in the book of Deuteronomy. If it is true that the Mosaic law legally acknowledged and approved a much more ancient custom, it cannot be said that Onan’s refusal to observe this custom is a crime punishable by death by law.
A further objection is that even the Mosaic law did not consider the refusal to take one’s deceased brother’s wife as punishable by death. The punishment prescribed in Dt 25:9 & 10 is nothing more than a public humiliation: “The woman shall come to him before the ancients, and shall take off his shoe from his foot, and spit in his face, and say: So shall it be done to the man that will not build up his brother’s house. And his name shall be called in Israel, the house of the unshod.” Canon Clamer has this comment to make on this obligation: “The obligation that arose from the law of the levirate was not so rigorous that one could not escape from it. If for one reason or another a brother-in-law did not agree to take his sister-in-law, the law, without obliging him, allowed the abandoned and outraged widow to inflict upon him a humiliation which became the sanction of law.” (Pirot-Clamer, La Sainte Bible, II, p. 670).
Catholic exegetes dispute as to what degree Onan was punished for breaking the law of the Levirate, and to what degree it was for his use of contraception. Nevertheless, it must be a combination of the two, for it can hardly be considered just for Almighty God to have punished Onan by death for a crime condemned by custom only, and not under pain of death. Furthermore, Onan did not refuse to take Thamar, his brother’s wife, but did actually go into her (Gen 38:10). Consequently, the evil crime that he committed consisted not in his refusal to marry her, but in his refusal to engender children, namely his frustration of the procreative act. This selfishness, inspiring as it did a sin against the very nature itself of the marriage relationship, is manifestly the reason why God struck him dead. Consequently, this text can certainly be used, as it always has been, to establish the biblical foundation of Catholic teaching on contraception.
It ought not to astonish us that other texts on this subject are not found in Sacred Scripture. The reason for this is that it is such an evident and obvious conclusion of the natural law, that it is presupposed for the supernatural revelation condemning sexual immorality. The Church has always taught that contraception is wrong because it is against nature, that is against the natural law. A few texts will establish this. In 1679 Innocent XI condemned the proposition: “Self abuse is not prohibited by the natural law. Hence, if God had not forbidden, it could have been often good and even sometimes obligatory under pain of mortal sin” (Prop. 49, Ds 2149). Self abuse is effectively the same thing as contraception, since it produces a spilling of the seed.
Furthermore, in 1851 the Holy Office condemned the proposition that contraception could sometimes be justified for good reasons as “scandalous, erroneous, and contrary to the natural law of marriage” (Ds 2791). Of the proposition that contraception is not prohibited by the natural law, it stated: “Scandalous, and elsewhere implicitly condemned by Innocent XI’s proposition 49” (Ds 2792). In 1853, the Holy Office repeated its condemnation of contraception, giving as its reason that it is “intrinsically evil” (Ds 2795). If something is intrinsically evil, it is perverse, against the natural order. There consequently can be no doubt that the Church’s firm condemnation of contraception is for this reason.
Paul VI repeats this teaching in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, pointing out the intrinsic evil that makes it against the natural law even if done for a “good” intention: “Excluded is every action which, either 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…It is an error to think that a conjugal act which is deliberately made infecund and so is intrinsically dishonest could be made honest and right by the ensemble of a fecund conjugal life” (§14).
When entering into discussion with Protestants, it is imperative to understand this reason why the Catholic Church condemns contraception. For Protestantism is based upon the philosophy of Nominalism, that denies the common sense and obvious fact that we can know the real natures of things. If there are no natures of things, then the distinction between nature and grace does not make sense; nor the mystery of the Trinity, three Persons with one Divine Nature; nor the Incarnation, one Person having two natures; nor the Real Presence or the whole concept of Transubstantiation, a change of substance. Equally difficult for them to comprehend is the natural law, establish by the Creator, a moral ordering that is inscribed in man’s nature itself, and that he cannot escape from. For them, morality is purely positive; it is simply being told what to do, and what not to do, and then having to abide by it, without anything being intrinsically good or evil in itself.
Protestants will consequently not be convinced of the objective truthfulness of the Church’s teaching on contraception until they have come to understand that there is an objective order of things that we call the natural law. Just as this manifestly exists in the ordering of creation in nature, and can be clearly established, so also does it exist in the moral realm, and it regulates man’s actions and his relationships with others. Once he has understood this, he will see that there is such a thing as an intrinsically perverse act, and that contraception is such an act, taking away from the nature and final purpose of the marriage act, inscribed in nature, which is to procreate children. He will then understand why Almighty God did not repeat in Sacred Scripture this self-evident truth.
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.