1,942
edits
Changes
m
→Hayward article
And you argue this despite the fact that the Church has never condemned limiting the number of births except for abortion. No conciliar decree, no canon. Even the one local Church that has rejected artificial contraception, the Church of Greece, has not forbidden NFP. But somehow even they do not meet your personal, individual standard of what is Orthodox.
Evdokimov cites this definition of marriage from the ''Orthodox Dogmatic Theology'' of Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow: "Marriage is a sacred rite. The spouses promise reciprocal fidelity before the Church; the grace of God is bestowed through the blessing of the minister of the Church. It sanctifies their union and confers the dignity of representing the spiritual union of Christ and the Church." (That was written in the mid-19th c.) And then from Evdokimov himself: "The account of the institution of marriage, found in the second chapter of Genesis, speaks of 'one flesh' without mentioning procreation at all. The creation of the woman is an answer to the statement, 'It is not good for man to be alone.' The nuptial community constitutes the person, for it is the 'man-woman' that is in the image of God. All the New Testament passages dealing with marriage follow the same order and do not mention offspring (Mt 19; Mk 10; Eph 5)" (''The Sacrament of Love'', p. 120).
===Is NFP rightly considered to be a form of "contraception"?===
You are mistaken. Nowhere in ''Humane Vitae'' does the Pope refer to NFP as contraception. The only occurrences of a form of the word "contraception" refer to prohibited techniques. And, "Neither the Church nor her doctrine is inconsistent when she considers it lawful for married people to take advantage of the infertile period but condemns as always unlawful the use of means which directly prevent conception, even when the reasons given for the later practice may appear to be upright and serious. In reality, these two cases are completely different. In the former the married couple rightly use a faculty provided them by nature. In the later they obstruct the natural development of the generative process" (sec. 16). Moreover, it is clear that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops believe that NFP is not a form of contraception. See http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and-family/natural-family-planning/what-is-nfp/why-nfp-is-not-contraception.cfm/ The same is true of Pope John Paul II who, in his Apostolic Exhortation on marriage, ''Familiaris Consortio'', wrote: "In the light of the experience of many couples and of the data provided by the different human sciences, theological reflection is able to perceive and is called to study further '''the difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle''': it is a difference whichis much wider and deeper than is usually thought, one which involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality." Moreover, this is also the explicit teaching of the ''Catechism of the Catholic Church'', which approvingly quotes the distinction between NFP and Pope John Paul II in its Sec. 2370. Also, it adds in Sec. 2399 "The regulation of births represents one of the aspects of responsible fatherhood and motherhood. Legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means (for example, direct sterilization or contraception)."
