Birth Control

EWTN, Global Catholic Radio, and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s, and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the Word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. The subject about to be discussed is birth control. The words are not very proper, first of all, because those who believe in it actually believe neither in birth nor in control. Therefore, we shall never use the words again. They are finished. We propose first to answer one or two objections or false philosophies about the subject of the purpose of marriage. The first is this. Married couples will often say, we cannot afford more children, therefore we have a right to fumble with the levers of life. Those who make a statement of this particular kind probably never think of the terrible principle that they are enunciating, namely, the primacy of the economic over the human. Now just suppose one put that into practice in other walks of life. Suppose a family had five children, but they had enough money to buy only four hats. Do you think that they would be permitted or should be permitted to cut off the head of a child in order to bring the economic to the level of the human and the human to the level of the economic? Suppose a husband says that he can no longer support his wife. Ought he be entitled to shoot her? What is forgotten here in giving the primacy to the economic is that we receive blessings as we put ourselves in the area of God's love. A waif on the street does not receive food, clothing, and shelter as a child in the family because that waif is outside of the environment of love. So too to the extent that we put ourselves outside of the environment and the area of God's love, we exclude those divine assistances that would otherwise come to us. Those who put the primacy upon the economic are really not interested in saving or earning. They are interested in spending, and it is that which dictates the frustration of life. There's a brood of idle passions and a desire for more credit and more clothes and more selfishness which dictates their philosophy. They believe that they are free therefore, as we said, to manipulate life apart from God's laws because it is only Catholics that are bound by the laws of fruitfulness of marriage. So they say that Catholics are opposed to any frustration of human life and marriage. That indeed is true. But it must be remembered that those who are not Catholics are no more free to violate God's natural laws than anyone else. It just happens that the Church is defending here a natural law. And because we are about the only ones who are defending it, there are some who are let into the error of believing that the opposition to the frustration of love is purely and solely a Catholic doctrine. We could conceivably reach a stage in the world where Catholics alone might believe that two and two make four and that grass is green in the springtime. These are principles that belong to the natural order. So is the principle that marriage is destined to be fruitful. Just suppose that a vast majority of people went around with their eyes blindfolded and their ears plugged up. We would very soon have a papal encyclical which would oppose that. And the Church would say, it is not right to blindfold your eyes or to plug up your ears. Does not reason, does not the natural law tell you that the eyes were made for seeing and that the ears were made for hearing? Therefore you must allow these organs to work out the function for which God created them. There indeed would be many that would say, oh, the Catholic Church is opposed to eye control. The Catholic Church is in opposition to ear control. Certainly, because reason tells us why these organs were made. So too, a husband and wife were made in a certain way and God created male and female in a certain way and therefore these organs are to be permitted to function according to the way that God made them. Where are we going to make this world? A universe in which we pick up violins and bows and never produce music? A universe in which sculptors pick up chisels and never touch them to marble in order to create a statue? Are we going to have trees blooming but never any fruit? Creating posts that lead nowhere? Is life and love to be reduced to a kind of an epidermic content and contact without any fruit or purpose? But that is all negative. We must always take the positive position. And on this particular subject of the fruit of love, we will describe and enunciate two sublime teachings. One, love in marriage creates the deepest kind of unity. And secondly, that deep unity of love, by its very nature, tends to an incarnation. We said that love in marriage creates the deepest kind of unity of love. We might also say, by the way, that this particular point that we are to develop proves also that there is not to be a union of sexes outside of marriage. Have you ever noticed that scripture nowhere speaks of marriage in terms of sex, but always in terms of knowledge? Why is that? Well, first of all, let us prove the point. The book of Genesis, for example, said, And now Adam had knowledge of his wife Eve. And she conceived, had knowledge of her. And the angel Gabriel announced to the Blessed Mother that she was chosen to be the mother of our Blessed Lord, as she asked, How can this be, since I have no knowledge of man? Notice here that there was no question of the ignorance of conception, but of some deeper mystery. So St. Paul says, Husbands, possess your wives in knowledge. Why is marriage spoken of as knowledge? Well, for this reason, because one of the closest forms of unity in the natural order is that which comes from knowledge. You look out on a flower or a tree. You know these things. They enter into your mind. There begins to be a unity, and the closest kind of unity in the natural order, between the knower and the thing which is known. You cannot think of anything more close than the union of your mind and that which you know. So Sacred Scripture compares marriage to knowledge because marriage produces a unity, and it demands fidelity. When a man knows a woman, there is a unity that is created between the two, that is like to the union of the mind and that which is known. That unity is so close, so intimate, that it may be known, may be used rather over and over again, but it never again may be reacquired. They are two in one place. From that point on, there is nothing that happens to a woman that does not happen to the man that made her a woman. He made her a woman. She made him a man. And just as you are always indebted to the one that gave you the knowledge about Shakespeare, namely your alma mater, so too one is always indebted to the one that created that unity between the two. The resulting psychic changes, indeed, are great, but they are great also in the order of the body. The woman can never again return to virginity. The man can never again return to ignorance. Something has happened to make them one, and from that one comes fidelity, so long as either has a body. They can never put themselves back into a state that they had before, and therefore it is not just an experience, it is a bond that continues to exist as long as life itself. Now, in married couples, this union is very deep, and that brings us now to our second point, that all love tends toward an incarnation. Thus far we have spoken of the love of husband and wife creating a deep bond of unity, unity of love. Now we want to show that this love naturally tends to diffuse itself. Everything that is good diffuses itself. The sun is good, it diffuses itself in light and heat. The flower is good, it diffuses itself in perfume. Animals are good, they diffuse themselves in a generation of their kind. Man is good, his mind is good, and his mind diffuses itself in thoughts. God is good. God diffuses himself not only in creation, but from all eternity. God has an eternal son. The source of all generation is in God. Let not, therefore, husband and wife be told that procreation is an imitation of the beasts of the field. It is rather an imitation of God, who from all eternity has an eternal son, the son to whom he can say, in the agelessness of eternity, Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee, this day without beginning nor end. Now this power of generation, which is eternal in the Godhead, is communicated to man's mind, it is communicated to the body of a husband and to the body of a wife. God himself said, shall I that make others bring forth children myself be barren? Therefore the power of generation is not a push from below, it is a gift from above. Not only do we find, therefore, that the motive power to begetting children is in the Trinity, but it is also in the Incarnation, because all love ends in an Incarnation, even God's. God so loved man that he became enfleshed in human nature. Love is our blessed Lord, but God's love incarnate, God's love walking this earth in the form and habit of man. You see how beautiful love is? If one could give a definition of love in the light of the Trinity and the Incarnation, it might be that love is mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery. It is mutual self-giving because no one is good unless he gives. But if love were just mutual self-giving, it could end in exhaustion. Therefore love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery. In the Trinity there is the giving of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Holy Spirit, and there is the self-recovery in the sense that just the Trinity, I mean the Holy Spirit, is the bond that unites Father and Son, the unity of love, and so too it is with husband and wife. There is a mutual self-giving of husband and wife, and that mutual self-giving ends in self-recovery, which is the child. The thrill of a farmer as he sees a grain of wheat he planted coming into life. The joy of seeing a geranium bud in a tinful of earth on a tenement windowsill. The ecstasy of a saint as seeing a sinner dead in sin responding to prayer and beginning to live in Christ. All of these are earth's witnesses to the inherent happiness that comes to anyone who sees life springing and sprouting or aborning. Love does not mean just the joy to possess, it means to the will to see a new life born out of that love, to see someone created in one's own image and likeness. And what is the child then? The child becomes the bond of union between the husband and wife, and the child unveils fatherhood in the husband and motherhood in the wife. Because the new relationship created. Not only did the father make her, his wife, a mother, but the child made him a father. You see, love becomes a kind of an ascension from the sense plane and goes back again to God. The children are almost like bees in a rosary, finding together the love of husband and wife. Love always demands something unrevealed, it flourishes only in mystery. No one ever wants to hear a singer hit her highest note, nor to hear an orator carry passion to tatters, to very rags. One never wants to see the infinite denied, or life's urge still, or a passion glutted. One wants to see an unfolding and enrichment and enfleshment of love. And that is what happens in marriage when there are children. One distinct mystery after another is unfolded. There is the unfolding of the mystery of the body, and then there begins to be the unfolding of a new mystery, the mystery of motherhood and the mystery of fatherhood. Then when the children have to be trained, there comes the mystery of father craft and mother craft. New areas of exploration are opened up. There is never dullness. Indeed, a husband, after a time, may become dull to the wife and the wife to the husband. But when the children are born, the first boy, well, he begins to be the new life of the husband all over again, and the wife becomes very pretty once more, and the daughter. And as each child is born, they bind together, husband and wife, as a reflection of the binding love of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. Then because each child has a soul to save, then there becomes an awakening of sweet responsibility in the father and the mother. As Kahlil Gibran wrote, when he spoke of children, he said, your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself. They come through you, but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love, but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies, but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you, for life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and he bends you with his might that his arrows may go swift and far. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite. Let your end bending in the archer's hand be for gladness, for even as he loves the arrow that flies, so he loves also the bow that is stable. And that is the story of life. God sets up the target. You are the bow, and your children are the arrows. They have a messianic mission in your life. They represent the conquest of love over the ego. They symbolize the defeat of your selfishness. They represent the victory of charity. Every child begets sacrifice, tends toward an incarnation, and every child becomes for you a pledge of your own salvation. And how happy you will be on judgment day when God says to you, your love has borne fruit. And if God did not bless you with children in any case, you can always rejoice that you never buried love in a napkin. You sent it back again to God, from which it came. God love you. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the U.S., call 818-331-3549. And please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio. How happy you will be on judgment day when God says to you, your love has borne fruit. And if God did not bless you with children in any case, you can always rejoice that you never buried love in a napkin.