The Chair of the Irish Bishops’ Committee for Bioethics has said there is a “direct connection between the ‘contraceptive mentality’ and the surprisingly high number of people who seem ready to redefine marriage today as a relationship between two people without distinction as to sex”.
At a conference in Dublin to mark 50 years since the promulgation of Humanae Vitae, Bishop Kevin Doran warned that if the act of love can be separated from its procreative purpose “then it is also pretty difficult to explain why marriage needs to be between a man and a woman”.
Addressing up to 150 people at the conference, which was hosted by the Nazareth Family Institute, the Bishop of Elphin said that in today’s “contraceptive culture” too many young people’s relationships are “all action and no talk”.
On the matter of infertility and assisted human reproduction, Bishop Doran said the “idea that intercourse is only incidentally related to the transmission of life has undoubtedly contributed to the concept of sex without responsibility – including sex with multiple partners”. He said this had “disastrous consequences for many young people including the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, which is a contributing factor in infertility”.
One of the challenges for the Church he identified is marriage preparation for couples who may already be engaged in sexual activity and using contraception.
He suggested that couples needed to “rediscover the procreative dimension of sex within marriage”. He added that young people who are preparing for marriage and don’t feel ready for children immediately should become familiar not only with their own fertility, but with the fertility of their proposed marriage partner. When they married they would then have sufficient understanding of one another to be able to use church-approved “natural procreative processes” rather than contraception, the bishop said.
Bishop Doran was one of four speakers at the conference, “Love and Life in Marriage”, who argued that couples should use Natural Family Planning because the Church teaches that every act of intercourse should be open to life.
The other speakers were Dr William Newton, professor of theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio; Dr Marie Meaney, a visiting professor
at the International Theological Institute in Vienna; and philosophy scholar Dr Maria Fedoryka (inset), of Ave Maria University, Florida.
Speaking to The Tablet, Bishop Doran said one of the “biggest myths” around Humanae Vitae was that it is about “having as many children as you possibly can”.
“Humanae Vitae is actually about responsible parenthood,” he said, “in the sense of recognising when it is appropriate for a couple to have children and when it is appropriate to space their family or decide that their family is complete – but always in the context of respecting the natural procreative process.”
He said consent was “a very central plank” in the teaching of Humanae Vitae. But teaching children in school about consent didn’t start with teaching them about consent in relation to sex, it started with teaching them to seek consent to the ordinary everyday things. “If people learn consent in the ordinary things – then it is easier to teach them consent when it comes to sexuality,” he said.
Bishop Doran’s comments at the conference drew fire from the Irish minister for health, Simon Harris, who tweeted on Sunday that “increasing access to and availability to contraception is and will remain public health policy”. The minister demanded that “religion cannot be allowed to determine health and social policy anymore. Please get that … Please just make it stop!”
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