Month: March 2013

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Sex is not a sport

“Get fixed and score like a stud.” That’s the primary text of an ad at the bottom of the sports page in the Cincinnati Enquirer on Monday morning, March 11. The implications are obvious. Male readers of the sports page are invited to view themselves as studs, understand women as mares for their potential scores, and regard sex as a sport.   So, do the wives of these vasectomy doctors regard themselves as mares? Do they communicate by neighing and whinnying?

This ad by The Urology Group is irresponsible on several counts.

First, sexual intercourse is intended by God to be a marriage act, a renewal of the faith and love promised by the spouses in the marriage covenant. Sex is not a sport. Men should not be encouraged to violate the Fifth Commandment by having a healthy organ rendered non-operative, and they should not be encouraged to violate the Sixth Commandment by viewing themselves as studs and women as targets for their scores.

Second, vasectomy has been reported to greatly increase the risk of prostate cancer. In 1993 a research article in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) reported that the overall risk of prostate cancer after vasectomy increased 56 to 60%, and after 20 years the risk increased to 89%. I realize that any particular study may not be the last word, but the JAMA study was reported by multiple authors and conducted through the Harvard Medical School.

Third, if you repent after the fact, it is expensive to repair the damage and the procedure will most likely not be covered by your insurance.

Gentlemen, you do not want to increase your risk of prostate cancer, and I hope that you do not want to increase your risk of losing your soul by regarding yourselves as studs and women as mares for your potential scores.

Lastly, when you consider the dignity that God intends for the marriage act, if a man thinks of himself as a stud, isn’t he demeaning himself as well as the women he thinks of as scores?

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The next Pope and Humanae Vitae

The media folks tell us that the Catholic world is filled with opinions about what the next Pope needs to do, so here is my take on it.

What the Church needs is a Pope who will have an agenda for attacking the sexual revolution right within the Church. Blessed John Paul II made the teaching of Humanae Vitae the principal focus of his teaching for the first ten years of his pontificate, but he never developed an agenda for getting it taught all throughout the Church. More people learned about the encyclical from secular newspapers than in their parish churches.

It seems to me that the Church needs to require engaged couples and all of those working in parish and other ministries to be well instructed about Catholic teaching on love, marriage and sexuality. A US Bishops’ committee in 1989 urged that all engaged couples should be required to attend a full course on natural family planning, but 23+ years later only six or seven dioceses have adopted that course of action. And those may be using a program that basically teaches “Catholic birth control” without teaching ecological breastfeeding, morality, and the parts of Humanae Vitae about needing a sufficiently serious reason to use systematic NFP.

We have had the teaching of Humanae Vitae at the papal level for 44+ years, but mere repetition cannot be expected to accomplish the needed change. We need a Pope who will propose and do his best to enforce an agenda for persuading the acceptance of Humanae Vitae as the positive counterpoint to the sexual revolution that is destroying both Church and State in the West.

The bottom line: the Church needs to require the right kind of courses as preparation for marriage and ministries. Such courses will include ecological breastfeeding as the first and foremost way of natural baby spacing. They will also include an easy to grasp theology such as the covenant theology that was so helpful to Scott and Kimberly Hahn, and the right kind of courses will teach the need to have sufficiently serious reasons to use systematic NFP.

For more on this, see NFP International at www.NFPandmore.org.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality
Battle-Scarred: Justice Can Be Elusive
Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach
The Seven Day Bible Rosary

 

 

 

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Religion and morality in the public square

This is my first blog at this WordPress site. I have selected the quotation of our first President, George Washington, as the tag line of this site. He provides excellent proof that the Founding Fathers of the United States of America believed that religion and morality played not only an important but even an indispensable role in our national life.

Almost everyone says he or she want peace, but what is peace? The best definition comes from St. Thomas Aquinas: Peace is the tranquility of due order. Morality is about the due order that ought to exist between us human beings.

In the 1920s sexual theorists who called themselves progressives and revisionists thought that efficient contraception was a key to marital and social happiness. In 1929 secular humanist Walter Lippmann did not answer them with the Bible; he simply appealed to common sense by noting that their theories followed the logic of birth control but not the logic of human nature.

Future blogs will review current events in the light of these and other working principles.