(7) Key Terms for a Catholic Sex Life

Joining the inimitable Mrs. Fulwiler for a quick run-down of key terms for a Catholic sex life 

-1- 

Birth Control 

AKA NFP 

NFP has already been covered, but it is something you need to know should you want or need to delay having children by a means other than total abstinence. 

NFP is birth control - that is, a method of controlling births. It is NOT contraception. Therefore, you can truthfully say "I am a faithful Catholic and I use birth control." 

-2- 

The Incarnation 

The Incarnation refers to Jesus (God) becoming man. 

This has a huge affect for our sex lives. If God became man and had a body, then it means that what we do with our bodies is pretty important - because the body has been redeemed! It means we have to reject dualism, the idea that the body and the soul are separate entities that do not affect one another. What we do with our bodies affects our souls. 

-3-

Donative. 

This gets tossed around a lot in official Catholic texts. It is usually used to describe a lovemaking that is about the spouses giving of themselves to one another, as opposed to mutual use. Think like, donate - to give, to gift. It also can be used to discuss the life-giving aspect of sex, that a married couple's mutual donation can result in the gift of new life.

-4- 

Conjugal. 

This word is used in EVERY United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) document on married love ever. It's annoying - like they don't have a thesaurus! It is used to refer both to married sex and to married love in general. I think they use it so much because no one wants 'sexual intercourse' to appear in the bulletin. 

-5- 

Fruitful.

Used to mean baby-making or baby producing. Thus if you see the sentence "conjugal love should be total, faithful, and fruitful" it means your sex life should be a giving of your complete self, not having sex with anyone else, and oriented towards baby-making (even if using NFP to avoid). 

-6-

Just/Serious/Grave

This term is used to describe what kind of reasons you should have to use NFP to avoid. And it is a whole CAN OF WORMS. There are the people who say basically, any reason will do - because only you know what's really hard for your family and who are we to judge, so yes wanting each child to have their own bedroom is a perfectly good reason. These people tend to be imprudent in most of their opinions on matters of sexuality, in my opinion. Then there are those who say you should be dying or living in a (preferably wet, broken) cardboard box before you should ever have sex where you aren't certain to get pregnant. These people tend to be scrupulous. 

The bottom line is the Church leaves this to you, while always encouraging generosity and to openness to life. The Church is not comfortable making broad distinctions for everyone - individual circumstances will vary far too greatly. She is hopeful that you will REALLY pray, seek good counsel (hopefully not from any of those heretical priests floating around that everyone refuses to discipline), and be generous. 

-7-

Magisterium 

This refers to the teaching authority of the Church. So if I ever say "The Magisterium is silent..." it means the Church has not released an official teaching on this within her teaching authority. This doesn't mean that individual priests or bishops or even the USCCB don't have an opinion or don't teach certain things; they very well may. But they are not, individually, the Magisterium. The Magisterium refers mostly to Rome, to official documents from either the Pope, when he is speaking ex cathedra ('from the Chair,' i.e., on matters of faith and morals as the Vicar of Christ), or the Bishops in union with the Pope, defining doctrine at a General Council...those sorts of things. It can get complicated, as there are several categories. 

But the bottom line is this: I will always try to clarify for you when a statement is "official Church teaching," i.e. the Magisterium has spoken about something very clearly, and when it is merely me, trying to "thing from the heart of the Church," that is, going on official Church teaching and then reasoning from there what might be an authentic Catholic approach to a topic. 

As always, when it is merely me, it could be wrong and I am always open to (charitable, reasonable) criticism. 

The Basics, Part III: NFP, or EcoSex in a Polluted World

Natural Family Planning (NFP) is the only form of birth control that does not involve altering sex in any way.  "You're wrong," you might think "because I know having sex on the Pill must be the same as having sex off the pill - physically, the motions are all the same." On the contrary! Everything is very physically altered when contraception is introduced. If you and I were to go on a picnic to a secluded glade in the high mountains, it'd be lovely. You'd set out the plates, I'd get out the tea cups and we'd feast on delicious food. But what if we did the same thing, but we ate poisoned food? Say food that was laced with poison, that would kill us slowly - all the motions would be the same, but would it be the same - physically? In a word: no. 

The non-religious reasons why NFP is a great idea is because it works with the body, and with nature, not against it - and it works to improve our human nature, not tempt it to excess. Any form of hormonal birth control (all types of the Pill, IUDs, Norplant, Depo shots, etc.) alters the woman's body so that she will not ovulate. This is really quite troublesome; a woman's body was made to ovulate every month, and here we are stopping it and declaring that it wouldn't hurt her health. How do we know? And now we do know - we know the Pill is shown to cause blood clots, possibly cancer, cause some women fertility problems down the line after they STOP taking it. And it's no wonder. We decry hormones in our food (rightly so) and question hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women, but we don't question the hormones we encourage women to ingest every month? 

The Pill is listed as a Class One Carcinogen by the World Health Organization - in the same category as cigarettes and asbestos. But even WHO refuses to take its own research at face value and recommend that women not take the Pill. No, instead the WHO recommends women balance this danger (that it certainly causes cancer) with the Pill's attendant benefits. This is playing Russian roulette with a woman's life, quite frankly. Since when is death something that has to be balanced against my sex life? Could they really not think of any other alternatives?

The religious (Catholic) reasons stem from what we already know about sex. If sex is where two become one, wherein we truly accept all and give all, then an altering of our bodies at a chemical level is fundamentally at odds with this complete giving. It is to say to your spouse "yes, I want all of you - except the fact that you can make babies. That I do NOT want, and I don't want to give you that part of me either. Please take a dangerous chemical so that we don't have to deal with that." Likewise, this is why men cannot ejaculate outside of the woman's vagina - because it is a violation of the terms of self-gift. You are not giving yourself to your wife if you 'finishing' anywhere but where you are supposed to. A man's orgasm is necessary to the creation of life and so he owes it to his wife to only experience this within her, where life has the privilege of being nurtured.

The possibility of children defines the sex act: it is always, biologically, its purpose. The fact that we know sex has a far greater reaching implications than creating children is wonderful, fabulous, a great added bonus! But the fact remains that sex is for babies. We know that because when we're having a lot of sex au natural and we DON'T get a baby, we know there is something wrong - something is wrong when two healthy people are having sex and not creating babies. 

NFP allows our biological rhythms to guide our sex lives. It means that we can, at any moment, change our intentions - either to create life, or to abstain from creating life. If we decide, prayerfully and honestly, that we should not create a baby, then we can avoid the times of the month a woman is fertile - which isn't usually especially long. We are free to have sex during the infertile times or - and this does happen - decide that our reason to wait wasn't THAT important and have sex whenever we please. 

If you believe that NFP would not work for certain people, you are ignorant of basic human biology. Unlike men, who are always fertile, women are only fertile when they ovulate. Women ovulate once per month and that egg only lives for twenty-four hours. But it does get tricky because sperm, lover of eggs, can live in a woman's body for five days - so if you have sex on any of the days leading UP to your ovulation time, there is a possibility of pregnancy. All told, if you are following the most conservative rules, there can be up to 18 days of abstinence - or maybe fewer. It does depend on your own personal cycle. (thank you to the anonymous reader who pointed out that there can be more abstinent days than originally thought, especially in difficult times like post-partum).

If there are couples out there who have sex every single day, month in and month out, then maybe NFP would be very difficult for you. For the rest of us, it's more about adjusting our expectations and our mind sets. It is about mutual respect and discussion. Because there are days of abstaining every month, every month the couple must revisit again their reasons for abstaining and ask "are we still sure - is it worth the sacrifice?" Because not having sex with your spouse IS a sacrifice! But sacrifice, not getting what you want, as we already learned, can be good for you. 

This is the context for a faithful married Catholic's life. Having sex with your spouse, for a possible 24 days out of 30 if abstaining, or 30 out of 30 if you want otherwise, with the husband finishing inside his wife. These are pretty much the 'outside' limits - the most definite limits the Church puts on your sex life. Most other conclusions we must arrive at with reason and are NOT spelled out for us. Far from micro-managing us, the Church leaves a great deal to our own reason and prudent decision making. The rest - the grey area - is what, presumably, this blog will be all about. 

For more information on NFP, please see the online resources tab at the top of this page. 

See also The Basics: Parts I and II. 

The Basics Part II: Sexual Morality

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about what the Church teaches about sex. Lets clear those out of the way before we can discuss more of the specifics.

Sex is good. Not many people think the Church teaches that, but in fact, She does. She does so emphatically! The Church teaches that the act of intercourse actually is a foretaste of Heaven - that is, sex feels so wonderful that it should make us think "how awesome is Heaven going to be if Earth is this good??" Even more, the Church teaches that sex parallels the reception of communion (the Holy Eucharist, who is Jesus Christ himself). Why? Well, because as we learn in St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians that marriage is a symbol of the love between "Christ and his Church." The consummation of the love between Christ and his Bride, the Church, is the reception of communion - that is where two become one. And in marriage, the act where two become one, is sex. THAT is how good we teach sex is! 

Sex is precious. Because sex is such a great gift, and is so powerful as to completely unite two people, the Church teaches sex is precious. Because it's precious, it is something to be protected and to protect people from. I know that sounds odd, but to use a popular example - fire is a great gift! But in the wrong circumstances, it could hurt people. We teach the same about sex and everyone knows this to be empirically true - in the wrong context, used by the wrong people, it can be very hurtful. Because of this, the Church teaches that - 

Sex is only appropriate in ONE context - between married persons who are open to the possibility of having a child. If this doesn't describe you, then the Church teaches you shouldn't have sex - not because she's a big meanie, but because it isn't good for you. 

But even this 'simple' concept is so radical for our times that it needs some unpacking. So lets set to it. 

First off, you have to be married. Sex belongs in a permanent union because it is meant to bond people together permanently. Remember, the Church also teaches that divorce is wrong and that marriage forever - the reality that we face today of no-fault divorce is not the vision of the Church. She intends for marriage to be forever. Sex, as a foretaste of Heaven (an eternal - forever - reality), belongs within that permanent bond. 

Secondly, you have to be open to having a child. This is NOT the same thing as wanting to get pregnant, or only having sex to get pregnant. It's saying that you understand that a baby could result from sex and that is a possibility you're willing to accept. Some people think this means that Catholics don't 'believe' in birth control; that is a false statement for three reasons: 1) we believe in birth control - as in, we know it exists, we don't think it's a unicorn; 2) we actually do think using birth control is licit; 3) contraception is what we know to be immoral. 

Contraception - to be contra (against) conception is what we disagree with. We understand that married couples may need to abstain from having children, either permanently or for a time. These decisions are discerned by married couples with the advice of a holy priest. For Catholics who discern a need to abstain, they are free to, using Natural Family Planning (NFP). This term is used to describe broadly several methods, all of which do the same thing: track the woman's cycle, determining fertile periods, and abstaining from sex for those times. 

Next time, we'll talk more about NFP and address some specific questions about that. Hang on - almost done with this groundwork stuff! 

For Part I, see here. 

The Basics Part I: Catholic Morality Generally

I just wanted to get some basic groundwork out of the way in dealing with discussions about sex from a Catholic perspective. I'll do this in several parts, since there is actually a lot of ground work.

The virtuous life is best because it will lead to the greatest joy. This is the foundation of the moral thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, great doctor of the Church, and indeed, of our entire Faith. We do not teach these sexual morals because the Church told us so; the Church told us so because she has discovered they, and they alone, will lead us to greatest joy. 

Objection: I don't feel happy. I can hear you say that now, as you look longingly at your spouse, wanting to enjoy marital love but finding yourself thwarted by whatever is in your way. Yes, but happiness is not the same as joy. Joy is the deep abiding satisfaction of doing what is best for your beloved. If by happiness you mean satisfying your every whim, then, yes Catholicism will never help you achieve that. Which brings me to another point. 

Getting what you want is not always good for you. To be Catholic is to recognize that sometimes you will want things that will not be in your best interest; a second helping of cake, perhaps, or another drink. Maybe even a person or to watch a certain TV show, to sleep in when we ought to get up and work. There are many things that we may desire, but would hurt us if we had them. This is the opposite of what the world teaches, but it is nonetheless empirically true. 

These are the basic understandings you must have in order to engage in a Catholic conversation about right and wrong in any arena, but especially in the arena of sexuality. The modern world teaches us that to not satisfy our sexual desires will lead to mental illness, extreme physical discomfort, and a host of other maladies. Thankfully, none of this is true. People of all faiths have lived by these principles for thousands of years and produced great works of art, literature, philosophy, theology, and science. You can be healthy and not have sex - I promise.