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Question
Hello Father Angelo,
I read on a website your answers about the connection between the church and premarital sex… I attend a post-Confirmation group and, having started some meetings regarding our questions and our doubts about the church, I have a question to ask you… What does the church think about protected sex? Obviously, I think she is not entirely in favor of it since, when you decide to express with your body language words that you can’t say to your partner, you should do it with the intention of giving birth to a child and for nothing else…
I would like to know your opinion given that I’ll have to discuss it at the next meeting…
Thank you very much
Goodbye
Answer
Dear friend,
1. about the question you asked me, one wonders: protected from what?
The answer is: from the risk of procreating.
My reply: so why are procreative powers exercised if one does not want to be open to life?
Isn’t that a nonsense?
For this reason, procreative powers cannot be put into act outside of marriage.
Especially since the danger remains anyway.
2. Someone could reply: we do it to express mutual affection.
Yes, well, but when affection is expressed with those powers, it is expressed with the procreative powers.
This means that affection is true only when by giving your body to another person, you give him everything, including the ability to arouse life.
3. Only in this sense do we speak of true love.
Otherwise, as John Paul II said, a falsification is introduced into the sexual act: while it is said to give everything, in reality one does not want to give oneself totally, one does not want to put oneself on the line.
Here are his precise words:
“Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality” (Familiaris Consortio, 32).
4. It is, in other words, a lie.
Jean Guitton, a French thinker and an academic of France, said precisely in reference to our theme that even in telling lies in the end you get tired.
In our case this marks the end of the couple relationship.
5. E. Sgreccia, the father of Italian bioethics who died recently, wrote:
“When man and woman unite, if the act is human and full, it involves body, heart and spirit; if one of these dimensions is missing, it is then a humanly incomplete and objectively false union, because the body has no meaning except as an expression of the totality of the person” (E. Sgreccia, Handbook of Bioethics, I, p. 329).
6. Ultimately: protected sex alters God’s plan for human love and sexuality.
In fact, one no longer behaves as minister of a plan of communion with God and sanctification that transcends us.
In fact, even if we do not think about it, God ceases to be the starting and ending point of our actions and of our life, as he himself said at the end of the Apocalypse: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Ap 22,13).
Without thinking about it, one strays from the way of God.
I wish you well, I remind you to the Lord and I bless you.
Father Angelo
Translated by Chiara P.