Contracepting Children Is Like Contracepting Christ

Peter Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and prolific Catholic author spoke in Immaculate Conception, Tuckahoe, NY conference on Humanae Vitae on an incontrovertible witness.

A husband and a father, he also is a spiritual father to many of his students whom he guides in the most important of questions: What is a Christian?

He said his students seem to be lost in understanding the basic-ness, or the essences of things. They answer by what a Christian does or acts: love. But a Christian is first and foremost a person who followed Christ, walks with and transforms his life in Him after being touched by Him in baptism. 

Prof. Kreeft had the most striking quote enlarged in a table centerpiece which says that abortion is demonic, anti-eucharistic as the satan has appropriated the same language, the Mass’s highest point—“This is my body”—for the culture of death.

Mr. Kreeft framed his talk on what is the effect of Christ on morality, sexual morality, life and everything, breaking it down, but also answering it sweepingly and in reference to Humanae Vitae issues, but also personally.

He frames this argument that is convincing and deeply moving for me: Christ makes everything new! He gives this as the best message of any movie from all time: when Jesus was suffering on His way to Calvary, Mary asks Him in “The Passion of the Christ”  why must He suffer and Christ replies, “See Mother, I make all things new!”

Christ will transform the individual and the society who will accept Him, believe that He is Lord!

There had been ways where the atheistic philosophers had tried to argue if they are allowed to do everything at all, ex. even kill a parent, like Ivan Karamazov debates in “The Brothers Karamazov.” If God does not exist, everything is permitted. But obviously, everything is not permitted. But I do not believe in God, so everything is permitted.

But even atheists know that from morality, not necessarily religion, everything is not permitted. 

Sarte and the nihilists have tried to make religion and/or morality disappear as guides to a person’s inner life. But what crisis this effects! Camus and the existentialists wanted to be saints—do good—but they cannot be saints without God. 

Knowledge of Christ makes the knowledge of God concrete, personal. Thus the knowledge of "God is love" is incontrovertible in the image of the Cross where Jesus gave of Himself. This now becomes how we must love one another, as well for we are the Church whom Christ died for and is united in marriage, the first and the last sacrament. 

Sex is holy truly. There will be no good to married life if we remove God and His divine plan which is blessing and fruitfulness. 

Peter Kreeft laments that for the first time, society’s formal and informal teachers (media, academia) do not conform to an objective moral reality which creates a rudderless, nonconforming, anything goes, everything is relative society, a culture that was aided by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s statement of people deciding their own truths and happiness. 

The sexual revolution is the most destructive revolution there is, he says. He points out that for every disease or revolution, the Church responds with a dogma or a doctrine. Humanae Vitae, as third speaker, Theresa Bonapartis, points out, is a response to the Woodstock generation and its sexual revolution. 

The greatest miracles: the transubstantiation and the creation of a soul, a new person, can illustrate how contraception is an evil. 

He said that we are tied quantitatively and qualitatively to whom we love. The object of our love becomes our identity. We are not tied, by virtue of marriage to multiple people, but to one, which should make the bond very, very strong. He said that if he had been given two weeks to live, he would be upset, but if he was told his wife had two weeks left to live, he would be very, very upset. As he has come to love her more than he loves himself. 

The greater good seems to have come as a fruit of marriage and self-giving because inherently, sex, the procreative and unitive values which contraception is opposed can be considered biological, personal as well as theological. Sex is the physical coupling of the couple biologically, and then the sense of oneness of the couple strengthened especially in the raising of children. Then there is the theological or divinized view of sex or marriage which is through the sexual act alone does a person fully participate in the creative aspects of God, because the couple participates in making a body which God infuses in a soul, which has a great and beautiful eternal destiny.

He makes emphasis that a person has for her end: the highest bliss in heaven or the greatest despair or horror in hell depending on the decisions we make. Having Christ in our life makes the direction to the former possible, even early on (for in our moral is our eternal  life as well)

Withholding the gift of fertility by onanism or withdrawal ultimately is like a priest who at the opportunity to say the words that will effect the miracle of transubstantiation of simple bread into the Body of Christ. It denies the purpose of the act, it seeks to control God, it is blasphemous and thus has no place in a Christian life. 

Contraception is deeply anti-God and has no justification whatsoever, even cases where one person has an HIV diagnosis, because one cannot use contraception (object) even if the intent—marital union—is good. Contraception makes the quantitative connection more than one and distances the person from God which makes it deeply blasphemous: the prevention of the formation of a soul which God desires to create and love.

Contraception, additionally,  cancels the beauty of a totally gifting marriage, the picture that Christ wants to send out of what divine marriage means (thesis total union with Him). As an earthly marriage is the finest picture of what we can see on earth of a divine marriage, if the “photo” of the earthy marriage is defaced, that is too disrespecting the image and reality of the divine marriage. 

God is Love and God is Truth, Prof. Kreeft says. They are inseparable and God remans us that we tell the Truth because we love—our God, our spouses, and our neighbor whom we must share the Person of Christ and His Plan one person at a time.