Category: Controversies

OpinionJournal.com has a piece by Methodist minister Donald Sensing about the connection between artificial contraception and gay marriage. Though on the surface, the two phenomena have little in common, he makes the right connections:

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of “saving marriage” is pretty specious. There’s little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.
If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?
I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.

I don’t share his pessimistic view of how modern people view marriage — from my perspective, most secular married couples want to remain married until death, though many are woefully unprepared to make that happen — but he’s a pastor and deals with married people on a more intimate level than I do.
It is my fervent hope that Protestants join the Catholic Church in opposing artificial contraception, the exacerbating cause of bad marriages, illegitimacy, spousal abuse, and abortion. (It isn’t the sole cause, and eliminating it wouldn’t make those problems disappear, but it drives those problems.) Such a change would only be a return to the universal Protestant tradition until 70 years ago, when the Anglicans decided they would abandon Christianity for the siren-call of the world, and decide to place their faith in latex and chemicals instead of God’s providence.

Ken Shepherd has some comments related to the post about the St. Joseph novena.
I’m going to defer to my friends at Catholic Answers, who, when I was struggling with things like this, gave me the biblical, theological and rational grounds for what Catholics believe and do. If not for them and God’s grace, I might be an angry ex-Catholic today.
Some may grant that the previous objections to asking the saints for their intercession do not work and may even grant that the practice is permissible in theory, yet they may question it on other grounds, asking why one would want to ask the saints to pray for one. “Why not pray directly to Jesus?” they ask.
The answer is: “Of course one should pray directly to Jesus!” But that does not mean it is not also a good thing to ask others to pray for one as well. Ultimately, the “go-directly-to-Jesus” objection boomerangs back on the one who makes it: Why should we ask any Christian, in heaven or on earth, to pray for us when we can ask Jesus directly? If the mere fact that we can go straight to Jesus proved that we should ask no Christian in heaven to pray for us then it would also prove that we should ask no Christian on earth to pray for us.
Praying for each other is simply part of what Christians do. As we saw, in 1 Timothy 2:1–4, Paul strongly encouraged Christians to intercede for many different things, and that passage is by no means unique in his writings. Elsewhere Paul directly asks others to pray for him (Rom. 15:30–32, Eph. 6:18–20, Col. 4:3, 1 Thess. 5:25, 2 Thess. 3:1), and he assured them that he was praying for them as well (2 Thess. 1:11). Most fundamentally, Jesus himself required us to pray for others, and not only for those who asked us to do so (Matt. 5:44).
Since the practice of asking others to pray for us is so highly recommended in Scripture, it cannot be regarded as superfluous on the grounds that one can go directly to Jesus. The New Testament would not recommend it if there were not benefits coming from it. One such benefit is that the faith and devotion of the saints can support our own weaknesses and supply what is lacking in our own faith and devotion. Jesus regularly supplied for one person based on another person’s faith (e.g., Matt. 8:13, 15:28, 17:15–18, Mark 9:17–29, Luke 8:49–55). And it goes without saying that those in heaven, being free of the body and the distractions of this life, have even greater confidence and devotion to God than anyone on earth.
Also, God answers in particular the prayers of the righteous. James declares: “The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. Elijah was a man of like nature with ourselves and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth its fruit” (Jas. 5:16–18). Yet those Christians in heaven are more righteous, since they have been made perfect to stand in God’s presence (Heb. 12:22-23), than anyone on earth, meaning their prayers would be even more efficacious.
The full article is available at www.catholic.com.

Cardinal Ambrozic leads the way:

TORONTO, March 5, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a press release yesterday, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto reported that it has suspended the faculties of Father Tim Ryan. The Toronto Scarboro Foreign Mission Society priest who, in August 2003, filed an affidavit with the Supreme Court of Canada in support of homosexual marriage.

[via Relapsed Catholic.]

Can be viewed in full at this url from arlingtondiocese.org Here are the high points:

Is anyone else completely bored with the subject of homosexuality? I just don’t find it very interesting; never have, really. I can’t seem to avoid the subject, though. In college, I wrote an opinion column for the newspaper, and people were always accusing me of being “against” gays, when I never wrote a single word about them.
From a religious perspective, I believe what the Church teaches. From a civic perspective, I would just as soon leave homosexuals alone, as long as they aren’t out trying to indoctrinate our children or corrupt our institutions. I’m willing to bet a majority of Americans feel the same way: do what you want, and we won’t stop you, but we’d just as soon not think about the things you do in private.
This year, it’s astonishing that we’re going to spend a huge amount of time publicly arguing about whether marriage is between a man and a woman. Doubtless, next year we will have another battle about whether water is “wet,” not dry.