Seeking Peace in Marriage

by Msgr. Paul E. Campbell, M.A., Litt.D., Ed.D.

"No life of self-indulgence, of mere vapid pleasure, can possibly, even in the one point of pleasure itself, yield so ample a reward as comes to the mother at the cost of self-denial, of effort, of suffering in childbirth, of the long, slow patience-trying work of bringing up the children aright. No scheme of education, no social attitude can be right unless it is based fundamentally upon the recognition of the necessity of seeing that the girl is trained to understand the supreme dignity, the supreme usefulness of motherhood. Unless the average woman is a good wife and good mother, unless she bears a sufficient number of children, so that the race shall increase, and not decrease, unless she brings up these children sound in soul and mind and body — unless this is true of the average woman, no brilliancy of genius, no material prosperity, no triumphs of science and industry, will avail to save the race from ruin and death. The mother is the one supreme asset of national life; she is more important by far than the successful statesman or business man or artist or scientist."

These words are part of an address delivered by Theodore Roosevelt, speaking to the delegates of the First International Congress in America on "The Welfare of the Child," at the White House, March 10, 1908. He goes on to say that no matter what other tasks a man or a woman may have to perform, the tasks connected with the home are the fundamental tasks of humanity. We can tolerate an inferior quality of success in politics, or business, or other areas of human life; failings in these areas can be made good in the next generation, but if the mother does not do her duty, "there will either be no next generation, or a next generation that is worse than none at, all." The nation, itself, cannot get along if we do not have the right kind of home life. The reward of children, the reward of a happy family life is the best and most satisfying reward offered to man anywhere.

The Sin of Willful Sterility

Father Charles Hugo Doyle, in his chapter on the transgressions through which parents sometimes offend against the Christian ideal of marriage,¹ quotes this address of Roosevelt at great length, and calls it one of the most remarkable speeches on motherhood ever delivered by a secular leader. Father Doyle draws from other writings of Roosevelt this straightforward enunciation on the man and the woman who attempt to escape their God-given duty in Christian marriage:

"The severest of all condemnations should be visited on willful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and the woman shall be the father and mother of children so that the race shall increase and not decrease."

The primary purpose of marriage is clearly stated in the teaching of the Church: There is but one chief end in marriage: the procreation and education of children. Human beings who ignore this clear teaching drawn alike from reason and revelation bring down upon themselves the judgment of their Creator, and there is no exaggeration in saying that their irresponsibility and selfishness may permanently affect their children. The biological urges of a human being do not form the sole reason for the institution of matrimony. When God instituted matrimony, He had one main purpose in mind, and that end was the procreation and education of children. All other ends are secondary and incidental to the main object.

Father Doyle draws a picture of a smug couple coming to a rectory, where they give answers under oath to the effect that they know and understand that the end of marriage is the procreation of children, but they have formed a purpose of practicing the vicious habit of sinful birth prevention. Sunk in sin, they cannot achieve happiness in the marriage state. When the divorce court threatens, they attribute their failure to a variety of causes, but they ignore that which is often the sole contributing cause, namely, their attempt to circumvent the primary purpose of marriage.

Alliance Against Nature

The very word "matrimony" in its derivation has the meaning of matris munus, "the office of mother." Here is a clear implication that the woman is to have, if possible, the privilege of lawful motherhood. When she or her husband, or both, set this at naught, they do so at their own peril. To speak in plain terms, they prostitute the marriage act just as truly as those debauched persons who prostitute it for commercial purposes.

Tradition, both religious and pagan, establishes that the chief end of marriage is the procreation and education of children. The testimony from both sources is convincing. Demosthenes notes that the people of his time had wives for the production of legitimate children and as trusty caretakers of their homes. God gave command to our first parents to increase and multiply and to fill the earth — a command which has never been modified or changed. Many other commands of the Old Testament were modified, changed, or even abrogated with the coming of Christ. The ancient sacrifices of the Old Law are a case in point. It was evident that these sacrifices were to terminate when God's Son offered His sacrifice on the cross. The prophet Malachias speaks of the passing of the old sacrificial rite in favor of the new:

"The table of the Lord is contemptible . . . I have no pleasure in you, saith the Lord of hosts: and I will not receive the gift of your hand . . . For from the rising of sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles; and in every place there is sacrifice and there is offered to my name a clean oblation."

Saint Paul confirms the fact of the change from the old to the new. In the tenth chapter of his Epistle to the Hebrews, he declares:

"He (God) taketh away the first, that He may establish that which followeth . . . We are sanctified by the oblation of the body of Jesus Christ once."

The fifth chapter of Saint Matthew records a striking example of a change enjoined by the Messias:

"You have heard that it hath been said: 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you not to resist evil: but if one strike thee on thy right cheek, turn to him also the other."

Thus, it was Christ's policy to make known any changes. Though He was questioned frequently concerning marriage, He nowhere rescinded or abrogated the primal command issued to Adam and Eve to increase and multiply and to fill the earth. He made no change in the primary end of marriage, first promulgated in the Garden of Eden.

Man is No Final Arbiter of Human Purposes

The classical prayer of Tobias is illuminating:

"And now, Lord, thou knowest that not for fleshy lust do I take my sister to wife, but only for the love of posterity, in which Thy name may be blessed for ever and ever."

Previously, the angel Raphael had said to Tobias:

"Thou shalt take the virgin with the fear of the Lord, moved, rather for love of children than for lust: that in the seed of Abraham thou mayest obtain a blessing in children."

Saint Paul makes it impossible to doubt that the law of increasing and multiplying remained in effect in the New Law. In his first epistle to Timothy he writes:

"I will therefore, that the younger should marry, bear children, be mistresses of families, give no occasion to the adversary to speak evil."

The commentary of Saint Augustine on this text makes the doctrine of Saint Paul doubly clear:

"The Apostle himself is therefore witness that marriage is for the sake of generation: 'I wish,' he says, 'young girls to marry.' And, as if someone said to him, 'Why?' he immediately adds: 'To beget children to be mothers of families.'"

Men cannot set themselves up as the final arbiters of the marriage contract, for this contract is not a merely human institution. It is subject to laws above those of man. Human society, both in its primitive and organized form, originated by marriage, not marriage by human society. Marriage was intended by the Creator for the propagation of the human race and for the mutual help of husband and wife. Writes Father Doyle:

"Those who are not willing to become parents, ought not to marry. To enter the holy state of matrimony with a purpose to defeat its primary end is to violate it. Those who pervert it inevitably degrade themselves. They descend from the plane of a spiritual and intellectual relation into a union beneath their nature as a whole. Such surrender themselves to a part which is the lesser and which, out of its proper adjustment to the noblest, not only becomes the lower, but ceases to be human at all and lapses into the purely bestial. When the true end of marriage is ever kept in view, the whole nature of the union is elevated."

Tragedy of Unwanted Children

Our author next calls attention to the fate of children born into the world against the will of their parents. The deliberate avoidance of children warps the mind of the offending parties, and their mental state modifies the condition of the accidental, unwanted child physically, mentally, and morally. His fate is worse than that of the orphan, for the orphan may find substitute parents to give him protection and security. The unwanted child is cheated of natural affection, and the environment in which he is forced to live is not conducive to normal development. Nor does his handicap end here, for the sins of parents who practice sinful birth prevention are visited on their children. Doctor James Foster Scott points out that almost all sexual perverts owe their anomalies of desire, inclination, and fancy to the neurasthenia brought on by either their own or their ancestors' onanism. Where the vice of conjugal onanism is practiced, the chance child will certainly show evidences of abnormality of desire or conformation at some stage of its history.

Birth prevention is the curse of our generation. So writes Father Doyle, and he adds:

"Unless and until men and women see in it the evil that God sees, it may wreak its own punishment on mankind. To prove that contraception is a grievous sin, one has only to consult the pages of God's Word and read Genesis, chapter 38, verses 8, 9, and 10."

Mrs. Sanger's Legacy

There we learn of the sin of Onan, who "spilled his seed upon the ground, lest children should be born in his brother's name. And therefore the Lord slew him, because he did a detestable thing." There is no change; contraception is a grievous sin today as it was in the days of Onan. History testifies that peoples practiced this sin and perished through it. Polybius records that Greece was guilty. Will Durant wrote about Rome under the Caesars:

"I know how Caesar almost scratched his head bald thinking how he could induce the Roman women to have children. He decreed that they should have no diamonds if they had no children — that they should have no jewels of one kind if they had none of the other. I know that Augustus passed law after law in the first decade of our Christian era almost two thousand years ago, trying to stop this current of family limitation. I know too that all that legislation failed. I know that Rome at last had to till her soil with barbarians and with slaves; and that finally, the rapidly breeding immigrant Germans overran Italy. It was the end of the Western Roman Empire."

Durant writes also about Mrs. Sanger who taught the human beings of this country to make parentage voluntary. Today she, herself, must wonder whether her movement achieved anything of good. He confesses that he worked for this birth control movement, "shouted it almost from the housetops shamelessly." Later, in 1940, he acknowledges that he sees America breeding from the bottom and dying from top because the birth control advocates won so thoroughly.

"I am not sure that it was good. We have solved one problem and we have created another that is immeasurably profounder . . . Civilization has to kill itself before it can be conquered."

The increasing birth rate of the past several years seems to indicate that America has learned the folly of artificial birth control.

The very name of Onan is witness to the fact that the sin of birth prevention is "a detestable thing." A choice modern fallacy argues that the sin of birth prevention is not condemned in Holy Scripture because the words "birth control" or "birth prevention" do not appear in the Bible. The very expressions were not current fifty or sixty years ago, but they are names for the sin which Onan committed, and he was slain because he practiced this sin, call it birth prevention or what you will; nor is it necessary that there be any reference to it in Holy Scripture in order to prove its malice. "The sacred traditions of God's infallible Church," writes our author, "would be as binding as the sacred word itself." Origen, great Christian scholar of the third century, writes of Christians:

"Christians marry as do others, and they have children; but they do not stifle their offspring."

The words of Saint Augustine in the fourth century are very much to the point:

"Intercourse even with one's legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked where the conception of the offspring is prevented. Onan, the son of Juda, did this and the Lord killed him for it."

Saint Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, declared:

"Next to murder, by which an actually existent human being is destroyed, we rank this sin by which the generation of a human being is prevented . . . A husband seeks from his wife harlot pleasures when he asks from her only what he might ask from a harlot."

The Times Must Keep Pace with the Truth

In the opening paragraphs of his encyclical letter on Christian marriage, Pius XI declares that he follows the footsteps of his predecessor, Leo XIII, of happy memory, whose encyclical, Arcanum, was published fifty years before. This encyclical he confirms and makes his own because, "far from being obsolete, it retains its full force at the present day." In his own encyclical, Pius XI wished merely to expound more fully certain points called for by the circumstances of our times. Smart columnists in 1930 predicted that the Holy Father in his new encyclical letter on marriage would make some concession to the changing ideas of marriage that had become prevalent in the enlightened twentieth century. The great white shepherd of Christendom did no such thing. His new encyclical reiterated the age-old doctrine of the Catholic Church and expounded "the wonderful law and will of God respecting it, the errors and impending dangers, and the remedies with which they can be counteracted, so that fruitfulness dedicated to God will flourish again vigorously in Christian wedlock."

The Holy Father was aware of the contention of worldlings that offspring, the disagreeable burden of matrimony, is to be carefully avoided by married people, not through virtuous continence, but by frustrating the marriage act. He wrote:

"No reason, however grave, may be put forward by which anything intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good. Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who, in exercising it, deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose, sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious."

In the following paragraph he declares that the Catholic Church raises her voice in token of her divine ambassadorship and "through Our mouth" proclaims anew:

"Any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin."

Even her enemies must confess that the Church has stood steadfast in preaching God's teachings to a rebellious world. Never was she known to vary her doctrines to suit the tastes of the age. Just as she forbids divorce because Christ forbade it, she condemns birth control because God Himself condemned it. Many are the passages that could be quoted from non-Catholic writers in commendation of the Church's stand on matrimony. We shall be content to take from Father Doyle the words of Professor Draper, historian and rationalist, often a severe critic of the Catholic Church, in regard to the Church's part in ennobling women through her defense of the sanctity of marriage:

"From little better than a slave she raised each man's wife to be his equal, and forbidding him to have more than one, met her recompense for those noble deeds in a friend at every fireside. Discountenancing all impure love, she put around that fireside the children of one mother and made that little less than sacred in their eyes."

Note

1. Sins of Parents. By Charles Hugo Doyle (Nugent Press, Tarrytown, New York, 1951).

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