Men and Contraception: The Responsibility of a Man’s Moral Authority

“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the Husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church, his body, and is himself its Savior. As the Church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her, that he may sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present the Church to Himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church, because we are members of His body. ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is a profound one, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church; however, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband” (Ephesians 5:21-33).

We may not have done this for our wedding, but my wife and I get the chance to do this every year at our parish. Source.

When my wife and I were planning our wedding, we spent a considerable amount of time choosing the hymns and readings for the nuptial Mass. This passage was about the only really easy choice we made for the readings [1]. It may be an easy choice for a wedding, but to live this out in a marriage is at times difficult.

Among other things, it confirms that the spiritual and moral authority of the domestic Church ultimately falls upon the husband/father. I could certainly get used to the idea of a wife who must submit to my authority—though this would ignore the opening verse in which we are told to be subject to one another—but the part about loving my wife as Christ loves the Church is, not to put too fine a point on it, very hard.

It begins with the statement that the wives should be subject to their husbands in the same sense as the Church is subject to Christ. Here the moral and spiritual authority of the family is granted to the husband, just as “all power on heaven and on earth” belongs to Christ (Matthew 28:18). But then this statement of authority is turned on its head by noting that the husbands is therefore called to do for his wife what Christ did for His Church, which means to lay down his own life for her.

“The Crown of Thorns” by Gustave Dore.

The authority conferred on the husband is ultimately the authority to lead his family through the hard times, through the sacrifices that they must make. Christ’s crown was of thorns and not gold, his throne a cross and not a royal chair: so it is to be for husbands as the heads of households. And just as Christ’s sacrifice was for the sanctification of His Church, so too must a husband make sacrifices of his own for the sake of the family.

In my previous post, I wrote that

“Christ carried our sins for us when He carried the cross to Calvary: He laid down His life for us then. He showed us that it is indeed possible to lay down one’s life for his friends, even when those friends did not understand (see Matthew 16:22-23). The contraceptive culture of death—and its widespread acceptance by women—presents us our own challenge. Here we are challenged to lay our own lives down for our wives, that they (and we) might be holy and without blemish.”

The is a sense in which the husband is called to carry the sins of the family by making a sacrifice of his own suffering for the sake of his marriage. Some qualification is needed here since it would otherwise seem that I was saying a man can save himself or others from their sins. We are saved from our sins through the suffering and death and resurrection of Christ, through the breaking of His body and blood; so I am not saying that a husband’s sacrifice is a replacement for God’s grace, but rather that it is a participation in that grace.

Thus, when I say that a husband is responsible for trying to save his family from their sins, I mean that he has a duty as head of the household to help his wife and children to avoid sins as he is able. At times it may seem a thankless task or a deplorable duty, but that is the first responsibility of husband and father. One particular place in which this duty is discharged is the marital bed. Now, on the one hand St. Paul instructs us to submit to one another in a marriage—and there is something to be said for marriage as a safeguard against concupiscence—but I think that it is another sense in which he admonishes wives to submit to their husbands.

Marriage is like a dance. Image source.

To use a simile, marriage is like a dance, but in a dance there must be leads and follows and, unfortunate as it may seem, the men have been given the role of lead, the women of follow [2]. Now, in a dance the men are the leads, but they have the task of first and foremost finding the rhythm of the music to which they are dancing, and then sticking to that rhythm.

Marriage is in some ways like this, both in that there is a literal rhythm set by the woman’s fertility cycle [3], and that there is also a sort of music which underlies it [4]. Morality is thus an unpacking of this music, the method by which we keep time with the music to which we are dancing.

Just as in dancing, we can get away from the music when we decide to do our own thing, as it were. Just as a discordant note might ruin a symphony, do too does ignoring the music and dancing to our own tune ruin the dance. Concupiscence—the temptation to sin—is so many deliberately discordant notes woven into the music by bad (or even evil) members of the orchestra [5]. The various sexual sins—fornication, pornography, contracepted copulation, adultery, etc—are so many ways in which we get off-rhythm.

How, then, does the husband save his family from these sins? How, that is, can he lead his wife away from them? First of all, he want not engage in any of them himself. He can certainly not suggest that the two engage in any of these together. And he might take one step further by refusing to engage in such activities as contracepted copulation for the sake of his family’s sanctity. It can be a hard sell since there is a certain amount of sacrifice involved in saying “no” to the contraceptive mindset of the culture of death.

Indeed, the first step to making this a real sacrifice comes when the husband says, “No, I will not participate in the culture of death, even so little as to use contraception,” and then backs that promise with actions. In some cases, these actions mean merely abstaining during fertile periods of the month if you are not ready to add a new member to your family. In some ways, this is the easy route, since it assumes that both the husband and the wife are at least somewhat on board with NFP. The intellect assents, though the will might desire otherwise: “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41).

Why don’t more people make this sacrifice for their marriages?

It becomes more difficult still when the intellect also dissents or when the wife insists on contraception. The husband is then forced to choose between contracepted copulation and abstinence entirely—between leading in suffering by abstaining, or following silently into sin by acquiescing. It is a difficult decision which I am not fit to further judge than to say again that the former is a cross to bear and the latter a sin [6].

With that said, in his Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis tells us something about healthy pleasures—and about unhealthy pleasures or addictions—and how they may be used to tempt us. The experienced demon, Screwtape, writes giving advice to a junior tempter, Wormwood:

“Never forget that that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not our. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encouragethe human to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it’s better style. To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return—that is what really gladdens Our Father’s heart” (The Screwtape Letters, pp. 44-45).

What Screwtape is describing—what saddens God and gladdens Satan’s heart—is an addiction. Our culture is addicted to sex [7], and we cannot sate our desires for it. As with many addicts, we have considerable difficulty admitting that there is a problem; and we ultimately admire the enablers of that addiction. The greatest enabler of our culture’s sex addiction is contraception, since it gives us the illusion of being able to obtain consequence-free copulation.

The vision of being able to break the moral-law without consequence thanks to some technological achievement cannot but be a mirage. Moral problems require moral solutions, not technical ones, and technical know-how is no substitute for virtue. The former gives us a mere phantom liberty, whereas the latter can set us truly free.

What he said.

Our previous pope, Blessed John Paul the Great, tells us that “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” Contraception leaves us with the ability to have supposedly “safe” sex—though they will also have a failure rate due to both misuse and defective designs, in short due to so-called “human error.” Contraception also cannot fix the broken heart and broken relationships left in the culture’s wake, as when for example a husband cheats on his wife. That he used a condom or that his adulterous affair avoided pregnancy or STIs does not make up for the fact that it was wrong, nor does it prevent an injury from occurring in the husband’s marriage, even if the wife never finds out.

True freedom is the ability to turn temptation down, to choose to sate a desire—or to deny such satisfaction to our urges. It is the ability to choose to take up our crosses and lay down our lives, not lay down our crosses and take up our lives. It is this former choice which the headship of the household is meant to enable husbands to do: to lay down our own lives, or to insist that the family take up its cross, recognizing that “whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

As with other addictions, getting free from the addiction to sex is difficult, a struggle [8]. On the other hand, it is a struggle which when won leaves us freer than before.

Men, we are called to lay down our lives for our wives and for our families and as disciples of Christ to take up our crosses daily and follow Him. We do both in rejecting the contraceptive mindset of the culture of death. It is, however, worth noting that the struggle is gain (James 1:2-4) and that we must recall Christ’s other words to us: that in Him, the yoke becomes easy and the burden light (Matthew 11:30). Those of us who live contraception free are ultimately happier for it, sacrifices and all.

—Footnotes—

[1] The verse address Ephesians 5:25 is inscribed on the inside of my wedding ring as a reminder of my wedding vows: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her.”

[2] One of may dance instructors would often frame it this way: “Men, you are the leads; good luck, and try to stay with the music. Women, you are the follows; I’m sorry.”

[3] Not to be confused with the “rhythm method” of family planning.

[4] Lest this seem like a stretch, consider that one of the medieval interpretations of creation has God creating the universe according the to rules embedded in the fundamental sciences, which include music. Indeed, a musician’s creating music is a good metaphor for how God creates the universe according to classical theism. Or, read the opening chapter to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion or the account of creation in C.S. Lewis’ The Magicians’s Nephew—the idea that God sings the universe into being is not so far-fetched.

[5] Or, since these evil members are really demons—fallen angels—perhaps choir is a better term.

[6] It is worth here pointing to the document Vademecum for Confessors Concerning Some Aspects of the Morality of Conjugal Life, where we read that

Special difficulties are presented by cases of cooperation in the sin of a spouse who voluntarily renders the unitive act infecund. In the first place, it is necessary to distinguish cooperation in the proper sense, from violence or unjust imposition on the part of one of the spouses, which the other spouse in fact cannot resist. This cooperation can be licit when the three following conditions are jointly met:

  1. when the action of the cooperating spouse is not already illicit in itself;
  2. when proportionally grave reasons exist for cooperating in the sin of the other spouse;
  3. when one is seeking to help the other spouse to desist from such conduct (patiently, with prayer, charity and dialogue; although not necessarily in that moment, nor on every single occasion).

[7] Note well that an addiction can be to a natural pleasure—to a good thing, that is—and not only to a drug or other “abused substance.”

[8] Note again that I am not here saying that all sex is bad. However, there is a matter of trying to enjoy it “at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which [God] has forbidden.” So it is with contraception as a matter of avoiding pregnancy within a marriage (let alone outside of it). The result of such acts are ultimately “an ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure,” as witnessed by such indicators as the high divorce rate among contracepting couples (it’s relatively small among those who use NFP), and for that matter the low rate of satisfaction with contraception or even with sex lives among those who contracept.

Nicene Guy

Nicene Guy

JC is a cradle Catholic, and somewhat of a traditionalist conservative. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in the summer of 2014. He is currently a tenure-track assistant professor of physics at a university in the deep south. He is a lay member of the Order of Preachers. JC has been happily married since June of 2010. He and his lovely wife have had two children born into their family, one daughter and one son; they hope to have a few more. He has at times questioned – and more often still been questioned about – his Faith, but he has never wandered far from the Church, nor from our Lord. “To whom else would I go?”

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16 thoughts on “Men and Contraception: The Responsibility of a Man’s Moral Authority”

  1. I sure hope it is the mark of a good writer and not a desperate last minute shot in the dark. ;-). Though it is true that I’ve been preoccupied with our upcoming trip, and its beginning to crowd out other thoughts.

  2. The Catholic Church already has guidelines for those whose spouse insists on using contraception. (Vademecum for confessors) You may want to read that before inventing your own.

    Oh, and I’m pretty sure “headship” is Protestant, not Catholic.

    1. That’s kind of you to offer some correction (with resources). I’ve added a footnote and link. I have some further questions, though.

      “Oh, and I’m pretty sure “headship” is Protestant, not Catholic.”
      Are you objecting to the use of the word “headship”–which was chosen in part from 1 Corinthians 11:3 and in part from the passage from Ephesians cited above–or to the concept that a husband is the moral head of his household?

  3. The concept that the husband is the moral head of the household.

    I have heard this a lot in Protestant circles, but I don’t think Catholics have this interpretation. The Catholic material on marriage I am familiar with, though recognizing the unique gifts of men and women, is much more egalitarian.

    Do you have a source on this?

    1. Well, the Catechism from the Council of Trent (sometimes called the “Roman Catechism”) says that a husband “is also to keep all his family in order, to correct their morals, and see that they faithfully discharge their duties.” This is from the section on duties of husbands. Incidentally, the duties of a wife includes the complementary role:
      “To train their children in the practice of virtue and to pay particular attention to their domestic concerns should also be especial objects of their attention. The wife should love to remain at home, unless compelled by necessity to go out; and she should never presume to leave home without her husband’s consent.”

      Perhaps some of this is outdated (e.g. wives should not presume to leave the home without the husband’s consent), though it is still pretty good advice for wives to let their husbands know where they’ll be (and vice-versa). On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that the husband has the duty of being the moral head of his household.

      I wouldn’t, however, say that this is necessarily un-egalitarian. Chesterton for example wrote (and I forget the source off-hand) that this staying in the home makes each wife into a sort of queen, whose kingdom is over hearth and home, whereas most men leave to trudge off to work as the modern equivalent of serfs. Actually, C.S. Lewis (yes, an Anglican) made one of the more convincing arguments as to why some headship is ultimately needed, which is that somebody has to make the final decisions–and accept responsibility for those decisions–for each family. It’s not so much an un-egalitarian privilege for men as a solemn duty for husbands (and fathers).

      1. It seems the doctrine has developed significantly since the Council of Trent and even since Casti Conubii.

        John Paul II explains the modern view on the subject:

        The author of the Letter to the Ephesians sees no contradiction between an exhortation formulated in this way and the words: “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife” (5:22-23). The author knows that this way of speaking, so profoundly rooted in the customs and religious tradition of the time, is to be understood and carried out in a new way: as a “mutual subjection out of reverence for Christ” (cf. Eph 5:21). This is especially true because the husband is called the “head” of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church; he is so in order to give “himself up for her” (Eph 5:25), and giving himself up for her means giving up even his own life. However, whereas in the relationship between Christ and the Church the subjection is only on the part of the Church, in the relationship between husband and wife the “subjection” is not one-sided but mutual.

        Mulieris Dignitatem 24

        “Authentic conjugal love presupposes and requires that a man have a profound respect for the equal dignity of his wife: “You are not her master,” writes St. Ambrose, “but her husband; she was not given to you to be your slave, but your wife…. Reciprocate her attentiveness to you and be grateful to her for her love.” With his wife a man should live “a very special form of personal friendship.” As for the Christian, he is called upon to develop a new attitude of love, manifesting towards his wife a charity that is both gentle and strong like that which Christ has for the Church.””

        Familiaris Consorto 25

        According to John Paul II, the husbands leadership role is not one of being “moral head of the household”, but one of service. The submission is not of wife to husband, but mutual (Eph. 5:21)

        Which is probably why your interpretation is not one that is common in modern Catholic circles.

      2. Waywardson,
        Nothing you have said in the comment above (which, for some reason, I cannot reply to directly) contradicts the idea that men are called to be moral heads of household. It is not an inequality in dignity, only a difference and a complementarity. Yes, Catholic doctrine has developed–but this is considerably different than saying that it has been reversed. Indeed, the passage you quoted from our late great pope suggests a continuity in the doctrine (he is, indeed, quoting from St Ambrose, who predated Trent by over a millennium). The passage concerning mutual subjection does not change this (and I very specifically quoted it above).

        I also noted that “I could certainly get used to the idea of a wife who must submit to my authority—though this would ignore the opening verse in which we are told to be subject to one another—but the part about loving my wife as Christ loves the Church is, not to put too fine a point on it, very hard.”

        And yes, I agree that the leadership of men is as servants of sorts. Hence, the picture of a husband washing his wife’s feet in the post above. I have also written elsewhere that

        “Just as the Pope serves the Church as her temporal leader and as Christ’s vicar, so too the husband serves the domestic Church by being the leader of his family. And just as many of the holiest popes–many of the ones who eventually became saints–were also martyrs, so too is the husband called to a sort of martyrdom for the family. Both the Pope for the universal Church and the husband for the domestic one are called to act as Christ would act, and to lead as Christ would lead, that is, to becomes witnesses to the Gospel by modeling it in their own lives.”

        But in juxtaposition with your other quote from St Ambrose (quoted in Mulieris Dignitatem) we would be led to believe that wives are called to be the moral head of the house, which is obviously wrong.

        Rather, there are two kinds of “subjection” being noted in Ephesians. The first is the kind in which both husband and wife are subject to each other, that is, in which each recognized the other’s dignity and that said dignity is equal to his or her own, and through which each puts the needs of the other above his or her own: that is, that each loves the other selflessly.

        The other kind of subjection, the kind mentioned the second time when St Paul tells wives to be subject to their husbands, is a conferral of moral authority to the husband over his household. Indeed, Pope John Paul II does not set aside this authority, but rather emphasizes its limitations and deeper meaning. To stick to your own sources, he writes in Familiaris Consorto that “In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God, a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family.”

        But, as was the point of this article, this authority is not an arbitrary one conferred in a vacuum in which the wife would be subject to her husband’s every whim. Rather, it is a commandment for the husband to be a sort of watchman over the family’s morality, a leader and a suffering servant (compare to Ezekiel 33), and that the role as head of the household be centered in his love for his wife. So while he makes decisions mutually with the wife as best he can, and certainly always with her input, he still has a commission of sorts to help her stay “in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.”

    2. “The Catholic material on marriage I am familiar with, though recognizing the unique gifts of men and women, is much more egalitarian.”

      I think the part I emboldened above presents a problem for you. You would have a hard time convincing me that the Catholic faith has a very deep egalitarian tradition. In fact, I suggest that such a tradition (if it can be called that) runs deeper among Protestants, generally speaking, than among Catholics.

  4. You do realise that wives are also adult women and as such are perfectly capable of making decisions about issues that may arise in marriage and life.
    Your wife may be perfectly happy with you including her along with your children as being dependent on you to make arbitrary decisions on family life but I can assure you most women wouldn’t stand for it.
    My marriage is based on a partnership of equals and we parent our children also as equals,any decisions we make regarding issues that arise in our family we make together. We also make decisions together about the spacing of our children’s births.
    The concept of the headship of husbands in marriage would appear to me to be nothing more than the straightforward example of the infantilization of adult women.

    1. It is very unfair to suggest that the author is making “arbitrary” decisions, as though all depended merely upon his whims and desires, no matter how base. The author makes it abundantly clear that he does not consider himself free to rule based on benefit only to himself, but that the good of the entire family is always at the forefront of his mind.

      Nor did I see anything that suggested decision-making is an isolated process, involving only his will, with no input from anyone else, including his wife. From where did you get the idea that this was so?

      As for the concept of headship infantilizing the one who is subject to another, I presume you also object on a similar basis to an employee’s being subject to his boss’s decision-making, or a private’s being subject to his military superiors in rank? Don’t these arrangements also infantilize according to your judgment?

      1. I’m sure the author of this article is well able to defend himself with regards to anything I have written that he may feel is unfair.
        I consider marriage to be a partnership of equals and not the rule of one adult over another.I have to admit that I fail to see what on earth a marriage has to do with a boss and employee relationship and refuse to even dignify your suggestion of an analogy between military ranking and a husband/wife relationship.
        It really makes no difference whether those who eulogise husband headship do so by implying that the husband rules for the benefit of all the family,the fact that he considers himself free to rule his family unilaterally, in my opinion, places his wife (an adult) in a position of equality with her children but unequal in her relationship with her husband.

      2. Any view that compares the husband’s leadership to that of a boss over an employee is not Catholic.

        I advise you read some of John Paul II’s thoughts on the subject. Marriage is not a matter of husbandly headship and wifely submission, but one of mutual submission and self-giving love.

      3. waywardson,

        All submission is not identical. A wife’s submission to her husband is not the same as a husband’s to his wife. Such can be the case while still being described aptly as “mutual submission.”

        To read JPII’s thoughts is not necessarily the same as to understand him. You don’t convince me that you do the latter.

  5. You refuse to dignify…what? Behold all who pass by, the tyranny of the perpetually offended, by which you just never know what word you use might be trigger language.

    Whether you truly attribute bad faith to me, you are framing the discussion in this way. Clearly there is really no discussion to be had in such situations. Good day.

    1. Buckyinky: Well said in general. The bad faith attributions of jackie64 towards you and towards me make it questionable as to whether she is the least bit interested in dialoguing.

      Ours is alas an age in which equality is conflated with sameness and interchangeability.

  6. I have not admittedly read the entire article. But what I read and from my own experiences I wonder if what I have done in my own marriage after my personal reversion, knowing that most NOT all affection leads to the wrong actions. AM I doing the wrong thing by holding back and not initiating because I know where it will lead? I know I am speaking in generalities but I hope you know what I mean. Currently looking for a faithful priest for help and faithful men to help strengthen my metal.

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