Given from the Catholic Broadcasting Station 2SM Sydney Australia
Choose a topic from Vol 4:
Yes. The Catholic Church teaches that marriage was intended by God primarily for the propagation of the human race. The companionship, affection, privileges and consolations of husband and wife are secondary purposes, subordinate to the primary end, and deriving their meaning from that primary end. As a matter of fact, these secondary aspects are not strictly speaking ends, but rather means towards securing the fulfilment of the primary end, attracting people to the married state that they may produce children and thus continue the human race.
Yes. In May, 1944, when other opinions began to be put forward by leading Protestants to justify laxity in marriage relationships, Pope Pius XII solemnly condemned the teaching of those who "deny the primary end of marriage to be the generation and education of children or teach that the secondary ends of marriage are not essentially subordinate to the primary end, but are equally principal and independent." In the light of assertions which are becoming more and more popular outside the Catholic Church, that declaration of Pope Pius XII is of the utmost importance.
By appealing both to the natural law and to divine revelation. From the viewpoint of the natural law, it should be obvious that the sex distinction between male and female is for the biological purpose of reproduction. Sex-differences would not exist were it not for their reproductive functions. When we turn to divine revelation, we find God Himself giving the main reason for creating male and female in the words: "Increase and multiply, and fill the earth. Gen., I, 28. In the Book of Tobias we find the idea stressed by the prayer of Tobias: "Lord, Thou knowest that not for fleshly lust do I take my sister to wife, but only for the love of posterity, in which Thy name may be blessed forever." (VIII,9). Tobias, of course, did not marry his own sister. He married the daughter of Raguel, a relative, the term sister being used in Hebrew to cover various degrees of relationship. In the New Testament we find St. Paul saying: "I will, therefore, that the younger women marry, bear children, and be mistresses of families." I Tim.,V,14. Earlier in the same epistle he had written: "She shall be saved through child-bearing, if she continue in faith and love, and sanctification with sobriety." (11,15). In other words, one of the means of salvation and sanctification of the good Christian wife is the fulfilment of this primary end of marriage.
That I deny. Most of the non-Christian world would stand to the natural moral law. Advocates of birth-control, or of "planned-parenthood" as they prefer to term it in their efforts to seem respectable, are finding that the greatest obstacle to their propaganda. As for Christendom, you forget that, with her 425 millions, the Catholic Church alone constitutes more than one half of Christendom; and there are multitudes of non-Catholic professing Christians who share the Catholic outlook.
He did. But the helpmate He provided for Adam was of a different sex from Adam. This was obviously a means towards the more important end of reproducing the human race. That end God stressed when He said: "Increase and multiply, and fill the earth." Gen., I, 28
To insist that the procreation of children is the primary end of marriage does not exclude other purposes in keeping with the dignity of human beings as distinct from mere animals. The permanent companionship, mutual assistance, the expression and the fulfilment of the personalities of the parties concerned - these lawful secondary purposes of marriage are specifically human, lifting marriage far above the purely animal and biological level.
I agree. But we do not divorce physical sex from love and see only its utilitarian purpose. The lawful secondary purposes of marriage safe guard love and all proper human ideals in mutual companionship. People who divorce marriage from its primary end, and who exclude the procreation of children, are the ones who reduce it to the level of physical sex-indulgence, justifying contraceptive birth-control and substituting lust for love. Probably the best of your Protestant moralists,' the Anglican Bishop Kirk, of Oxford, rightly says: "Any view which tolerates sexual intercourse in which the possibility of offspring is prohibited is a view which treats the sex-life, if not as that mere sale and purchase of favors- which we call prostitution, at all events as a recreation." "Personal Ethics" p. 46. In other words, the repudiation of the generation of children as the primary end of marriage robs it of its true dignity and turns it into a mere plaything.
Lord Jowitt's judgment in this matter was as wrong as his published assessment' of the famous Hiss Case in America, which leading jurists both in England and America proved to be full of fallacies. Lord Jowitt should have noted that the very word "matrimony" is derived from two Latin words, "matris" and "munus," meaning the duty of motherhood. As for his assertion that the procreation of children "does not appear to be the principal end of marriage as understood in Christendom," one is tempted to ask whether Lord Jowitt takes the narrow and insular view that Protestant England is the whole of Christendom! The Catholic Church outnumbers all Protestant and Greek Orthodox Churches taken together; and all Catholics, as also many in the Protestant and Greek Orthodox Churches, repudiate his ideas on the subject.
That was not the opinion of those who composed the Book of Common Prayer in the first place. The Book of Homilies, published in 1562, makes it clear that the main purpose of matrimony was held to be that the parties might bring forth fruit in children to increase the membership of the Church on earth and that the children might attain to everlasting happiness in heaven.
That the procreation of children is the main purpose of marriage as such cannot be disproved by the citing of what is obviously an exceptional case. The Catholic Church readily admits that people may marry for the secondary purposes of marriage, even though through no fault of their own the primary end cannot be attained. But such exceptional cases do not alter the fact that the primary purpose of marriage is the generation of children; and in all cases where this is possible the positive exclusion of that primary end altogether would render a marriage null and void.
His opinion is opposed to the natural law, divine revelation, and the whole of Christian tradition. Fluman beings have to be, before they can be happy. And the primary purpose of marriage is to enable human beings to come into existence. Sanctified friendship and mutual consolations are secondary purposes of a state primarily intended by God for the basic biological need of reproduction of the human race.
The unfortunate and misleading thing is that an Anglican Bishop should proclaim such a doctrine. Whilst deploring the breakdown of Christian marriage and professing to uphold it, he teaches a doctrine calculated to undermine and destroy it. By making the comfort and consolation of the parties concerned the chief end of marriage, he paves the way for divorce as soon as the parties tire of each other; and by reducing the procreation of children to a secondary end he paves the way for contraceptive birth control. Among the greatest enemies of the Christian religion are those who distort its teachings even whilst continuing to profess it.
"THAT CATHOLIC CHURCH
A Radio Analysis"
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