Contraception and Natural Family Planning (Letter to the Irish Press, Dublin: March 6, 1995)
Your issue of March 1 has just reached me in Rome. Louise Ni Chríodáin, in her article on High Court Judge Rory O'Hanlon, quotes me as "condemning all acts of sexual intercourse that are not for procreation".
In protesting and totally rejecting this, may I say that one would expect a more exact reading of the sources before being accused of a position that no one in the Catholic Church holds.
In Covenanted Happiness, my book on marriage which Justice O'Hanlon quoted (accurately), I give my reasons for considering that contraception, inasmuch as it denies the essential meaning of sexuality in marriage, undermines love between husband and wife.
Following John Paul II's insistent teaching that "contraception contradicts the truth of conjugal love", I stated that it "contradicts the essential meaning which true conjugal intercourse should have as signifying total and unconditional self-donation" (p. 34). Contraceptive intercourse, I added, is not true marital intercourse at all: "In true marital intercourse each spouse renounces protective self-possession, so as to fully possess and be fully possessed by the other. This fullness of true sexual gift and possession is only achieved in marital intercourse open to life" (p. 36).
Contraceptive intercourse does not really unite spouses; its whole tendency is rather to split them. "True conjugal intercourse unites. Contraception separates, and the separation works right along the line. It not only separates sex from procreation, it also separates sex from love. It separates pleasure from meaning, and body from mind. Ultimately and surely, it separates wife from husband and husband from wife" (p. 38).
The chapter in question of Covenanted Happiness is entitled "Married love and contraception". In writing of the effects on marriage (which I have been able to verify over long pastoral experience) of contraception, I made it very clear (p. 34, note 6) that none of this applies to natural family planning which, when there are real reasons for it, in no way undermines the true love that keeps spouses together.