Moral use of gift of sexuality

July 12, 2007

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

The feast of Saints Joachim and Anna, the parents of Mary the Mother of God, on July 26, is a good opportunity for us to reflect on the importance of family life in the modern world. This feast is chosen each year to anchor a time of reflection and recommitment to the full meaning of family for the whole Church, and especially for those of you who live faithfully the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. The week of July 22 to July 28, the sixteenth week of Ordinary Time, is also "Natural Family Planning Awareness Week." I invite all of you, married or not, to become more familiar with the new developments in Natural Family Planning.

According to pious legends, Joachim and Anna were childless for many years, until finally God heard their constant prayers and granted them a child, with the prophecy that the whole world would call the child blessed. This child, of course, was given the further grace of being conceived without original sin.

Sometimes we still have the idea that saints are people whose special holiness is completely out of the ordinary. Being married is ordinary; most of us expected to be married when we were younger, and many of us still hope to marry. So we don't always expect to find extraordinary holiness in ordinary married people. But Saints Joachim and Anna show that married couples can be saints.

Indeed, if married people are to become saints, it can only happen within the daily work of living out the holy vocation of marriage. The Catholic Church recognizes marriage as a sacrament, precisely because the giving of oneself to another completely follows the model of Christ's self-gift on the Cross. As a sacrament, marriage is a means of sanctification for these two people, each to the other. Wives are called to lead their husbands to becoming saints and husbands are called to do the same for their wives.

Marriage teaches the husband and wife to love each other totally, without reservation, just as Christ loves each of us so totally that He willingly dies for us. In the daily work of choosing to love the other person in spite of, even because of, their flaws and failings, we imitate Christ and grow in holiness. Christ's sacramental presence within the marriage bond unifies and sanctifies that continuous recommitment of the spouses to each other, and deepens the choice so that it always becomes the choice to love Christ in the other. In other words, marriage teaches us to love God in the particular other person to whom we are married. From this, we learn to love all people with selfless, Christ-like love.

But just as with Joachim and Anna, marriage is not only for the unity of the spouses. There is also a promise by God that this depth of love will be providentially fruitful. There are many kinds of fruitfulness in marriage, since the whole of society, both civil and Church, is ultimately built up of these "domestic Church" units; but the most dramatic fruitfulness in marriage is children.

The total gift of love, by any Christian sense of what a human person is, includes the desire to procreate, to share in God's omnipotent creativity in the creation of new human life. The holy and providential gift of sexuality cannot be morally separated from the whole human person. In that context, a grateful and humble use of that gift respects all its potential for unifying, for sanctifying, and for generating life.

The moral teachings of the Church on the right use of such a profound gift flow immediately from this. Saints Joachim and Anna understood this clearly; they did not merely passively allow God's providence to act through them, but prayed and strove actively to cooperate with and foster that providential outcome. They teach us again that contraception is morally wrong, because it denies the potency of the gift of human sexuality. It separates the act from the full human context of choosing to act. It withholds a great portion of the self from the self-gift of a sexual act, idolatrously defending the attachment to self. It is ultimately a denial of Christ.

Natural Family Planning is not merely a rejection of contraceptive tools; one might avoid contraceptives, and still be idolatrous in one's sexuality. NFP is, rather, the choice for Christ. It is a full and open commitment to living out, each day and by deliberate choice to use the gift of sexuality rightly in the context of Holy Matrimony, the sacrificial love of Christ to which we are all called in Baptism. It is the desire to be attached to God, rather than to self.

This commitment to a fully moral use of the gift of sexuality does not inevitably mean a large number of children. Saints Joachim and Anna had only one child. As it did for these saints, however, this commitment means an openness to and a desire for the fruitful building of God's kingdom in this most profound way. It means continuous discernment of the call to responsible parenthood. There are legitimate reasons, some temporary, some permanent, to use NFP methods to avoid pregnancy. With proper discernment, these reasons do not become an idolatrous attachment.

The teachings of the Church, well expounded in the Catechism, in documents like Humanae Vitae and Evangelium Vitae, and in the celebration of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, emphasize the moral commitment to which NFP is a means. Let us pray constantly that the married couples of our own Diocese, and throughout the world, may be faithful to the call of their holy vocation, and their example a beacon of light in the darkness of a sinful world.

Praying that all of you will seek always the powerful intercession of Saint Mary, Saints Joachim and Anna, and all the saints, I remain

Your brother in Christ,

Most Reverend R. Walker Nickless
Bishop of Sioux City