Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

Marriage To Anti-Catholic Redux

In regard to a previous post, a reader writes:

Ever since I got your response to my question, I was greatly troubled.  Can you clarify a point for me?  In the beginning of your answer, you said it would NOT be sinful to marry if the 4 conditions in canon law were met by the Catholic party.  However, later on in your post, you said it would besinful to marry if the non-Catholic party did not also meet those 4 conditions.  Could you clear this up for me?
(I’m determining if i have to break up with my one true love (my only chance of getting married, probably!), so please help me with this.)

Thanks for writing back. I know this is a difficult time for you as making the kind of decision you are facing is very hard emotionally.

The conditions affect your potential spouse in different ways. In particular, the three exclusionary reasons do.

1) The first exclusionary reason involves you making a firm commitment to removing all danger of your own defection from the faith *and* doing everything in your power to see that the children are raised Catholic.

The non-Catholic party is not required to make these commitments himself (he is not, as used to be the case, required to promise to raise the children Catholic, nor to become Catholic himself). But since the question was "Is it sinful to marry this gentleman?" it seems that his foreseen response to these commitments on your part is something that affects the moral character of your act.

If, for example, you reasonably foresee (or if you should reasonably foresee) that he will attempt to undermine your Catholic faith (either overtly or subtly) then are you really removing all dangers to your lapsing from the faith? It seems, instead, like you would be committing yourself to live in an environment in which your faith will be under attack (overtly or subtly) for decades and by the person with whom you are supposed to be most intimate. That sounds more like deliberately exposing oneself to the danger of defecting from the faith, which is sinful.

Similarly, there is the commitment on your part to do all that you can to see that all the children are raised Catholic. If you’re marrying an anti-Catholic, it is going to make this very hard to do. You’re asking for inter-spousal conflict by embarking on this course. If you really intend to do all in your power to raise all the kids Catholic and he has a reciprocal commitment to see that they’re raised in his faith, BLAMMO! Arguments galore.

The religious education of children is also, by natural law, a responsibility of their parents–including you–and for you to knowingly and voluntarily commit to raising your children in an anti-Catholic environment raises real questions about your handling of this responsibility. One can easily argue that sin is likely to be involved if one voluntarily commits to raising one’s children in an anti-Catholic environment.

2) The second condition is simply that the non-Catholic party has to be informed, before the marriage, of your commitments in such a way that he truly understands what you are committed to doing. This is customarily done by those involved in marriage preparation, though morally speaking you would be expected to play your part by impressing on your potential spouse the fact that you are firm in these commitments and will remain so.

3) Then there is the fact that the non-Catholic party is not to exclude the purposes or essential properties of marriage as the Church understands them.

This affects your proposed spouse directly. If he excludes the purposes or essential properties of marriage then it may be sinful to enter the union or the union itself may be invalid.

This question tends to impact Protestants on two fronts: the indissolubility of marriage and its openness to life.

Protestants typically do not hold that marriage is indissoluble. As a result, they typically believe that it is possible for one to divorce after a valid, consummated marriage between Christians and still be able to marry someone else while the first spouse lives. This is itself problematic, but does not automatically invalidate the marriage unless the property of indissolubility is excluded by an act which determines the will. (For example, if your proposed spouse were to say to himself, "I’m not getting married unless I have the right to divorce her and marry someone else if it doesn’t work out.")

When it comes to openness to life, Protestants (these days) typically do not recognize the immorality of using contraception, and the great majority use it. This is objectively sinful. While the Church acknowledges that it is possible for a Catholic spouse to have conjugal relations with a contracepting spouse under certain conditions, whether it is possible to without sin voluntarily enter a union in which one knows the other party will be contracepting is another question entirely.

Simiarly, the proposed spouse may pressure you to use contraception or may insist on using means of contraception that destroy the unitive aspect of the act (e.g., condoms). In the former case, it puts you in the proximate occasion of sin and in the latter case it causes the act itself to become sinful.

There are thus a host of different ways in which entering into marriage with an anti-Catholic Protestant could be sinful.

The reader also asks:

Would it still
be a sin to marry a Protestant, even though the Bishop allows it?

Bishops have to make the best decision they can based on the situation, and they often have less information about the situation than do the parties themselves. For this reason, and for other reasons, a bishop’s decision does not remove the responsibility of the parties themselves in determining whether they should get married.

It may well be that a bishop grants permission for a union in which one or both of the parties is sinning. Often this is done in hopes of avoiding a worse situation (e.g., the Catholic party leaving the faith immediately). A decision from the bishop thus does not mean that the parties are not sinning by marrying each other.

As hard as it is, you therefore have to make your own determination of whether it would be sinful to marry this gentleman, even if it were possible to obtain permission from the bishop. You have to look at what you know about the gentleman, what he would be likely to do or fail to do in marriage, compare it to the criteria that the Church has proposed, and make the best determination you can.

As you do this, it is certainly reasonable to consult those who may help you better discern your moral obligations. (Of course, you need to make sure that those whose counsel you seek are orthodox and not just telling you what you want to hear.)

For my part, I do not see how it would be possible to recommend that you marry an anti-Catholic. It would be one thing if he said, "I’m not Catholic, but I admire and respect the Catholic Church and think it does good in the world." It is another thing if he says (as you report he does), "I think that the Catholic Church is anti-Christ." As long as that is his view, I cannot recommend marriage to him.

I also think that you are likely underestimating your chances of finding a good Catholic man. I’ve already mentioned the possibility of using services like AveMariaSingles.Com to meet faithful Catholic men. As you mention in an e-mail I don’t quote, you’re in your twenties. You still have lots of time. And, as the saying goes, "There are lots of fish in the sea."

Often people underestimate their chances of finding someone. I’ve been guilty of this myself. Most people have at one time or another. I’d hate for you to make a life-affecting mistake just because you sold short your chances of finding a good Catholic guy.

20

Poison!

Napoleon1Stomach cancer may be what carried off H. P. Lovecraft. And it may be what Napoleon’s doctor put on his death certificate, but new findings strengthen the case that it wasn’t what carried off French emperor Napoleon.

Poison was.

Specifically, arsenic.

Some time ago, hair samples from Napoleon were found to contain abnormally high traces of arsenic, leading to speculation that he was poisoned.

SOME DISAGREED.

Some of the speculation centered on the idea that the abnormally high levels of arsenic might be due to environmental factors, such as the use of arsenic in certain kinds of wall paper at the time.

But new findings suggest that the arsenic in his hair was absorbed from his bloodstream, indicating frighteningly high serum concentrations of arsenic and thus a deliberate poisoning.

EXCERPTS:

The toxic form of arsenic, used for centuries as rat poison, was found in Napoleon’s hair samples at 37 to 42 times above the normal level in the new study.

"I can’t imagine Napoleon fed himself rat poison, even if he wasn’t a gourmet," joked Damamme of Montreal-based INS.

"The arsenic was in the ‘spinal cord’ of the hair, which implies that it came from the blood and food ingested," he said.

"Somebody in his circle gave him arsenic in small doses to poison him little by little to avoid another violent uprising by those who still supported the emperor in France," Damamme said.

GET THE STORY.

Now if they just had biological samples from the emperors Augustus and Claudius to verify the poisonings that reportedly did them in.

The Papers That Didn’t Burn

So on Friday B16 named JP2’s personal secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, to be the new archbishop of Krakow–the post Karol Wojtyla held before he became JP2.

Cool. A reward for a career of faithful service, no?

But on Saturday something emerged calling into question the precise degree of faithfulness that was involved: Archbishop Dziwisz announced that he had failed to burn all of JP2’s private papers, as called for in his will!

EXCERPTS:

Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, who worked with the pope from 1966 until his death earlier this year, told Polish state radio there are "quite a lot of manuscripts on various issues," but he offered no details.

"Nothing has been burned," Dziwisz said. "Nothing is fit for burning, everything should be preserved and kept for history, for the future generations – every single sentence."

"These are great riches that should gradually be made available to the public."

Dziwisz did not say when or how that might happen.

In Saturday’s radio interview, Dziwisz suggested that some of the notes could prove useful in the late pontiff’s beatification process.

Now, I don’t know if Archbishop Dziwisz was himself charged with burning the papers, nor do I know if he was ordered not to do so by someone with the authority to give this order (e.g., B16), so I don’t know how to appraise his role in this.

Still, my feelings about this revelation are profoundly . . . mixed.

As they were when it was announced that JP2’s will called for all his private papers to be burned. I recognized that this represented a huge loss to historians, but on the other hand it was JP2’s will–and in his will–and you don’t disobey what someone says in his will.

I also have some sympathy for JP2’s desire. There have been people who’ve been badly burned historically by folks rumaging through their papers and the misrepresenting them.

It happened to Friedrich Nietzsche, for example. After he was institutionalized, his anti-Semitic, German-nationalistic sister went through his papers and "edited" them for publication. She also promoted what she proclaimed as "his" philosophy, which was really her own and which served to make Nietzsche an inspirational figure for Hitler and the Nazi party (contrary to what Nietzsche himself would have wanted).

While one hopes that the proper scholarly controls will be employed in any evaluation of JP2’s private papers, the potential for mischief is significant.

For one, we have no idea what state those papers are in. It may be that it will be hard or impossible to determine what was authored by the late pontiff and what wasn’t. People may have sent him drafts of things that found their way into his private papers, and some of these might be assumed to have been authored by the pope himself. Others’ (potentially lame-brained) ideas thus might end up being ascribed to JP2.

Also there is a fact that someone’s private papers are things that–by definition–the person did not intend for publication. Private papers frequently represent efforts individuals make at "trying out" ideas or ways of approaching a subject, only to have the individual himself conclude that this was a bad start that was unworthy of publication.

There may even be things in a person’s private papers where he tries to write out the strongest case he can make for a position he disagrees with–so that he can use this brief as a foil for later knocking down the position.

And then there is the danger of sensationalism–of an individual gaining (or claiming to have gained) access to the "secret" JP2 private papers and publishing books erroneously purporting to give his "true, private views" on matters.

Try to imagine what "historians" have done to Pius XII being done to JP2 to get an idea of what this could involve.

So while I am, on the one hand, pleased that JP2’s private papers are not lost to historians, I am simultaneously apprehensive about the use and misuse that might be made of them and concerned about the apparent violation of a clause of his will.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)

The Papers That Didn't Burn

So on Friday B16 named JP2’s personal secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, to be the new archbishop of Krakow–the post Karol Wojtyla held before he became JP2.

Cool. A reward for a career of faithful service, no?

But on Saturday something emerged calling into question the precise degree of faithfulness that was involved: Archbishop Dziwisz announced that he had failed to burn all of JP2’s private papers, as called for in his will!

EXCERPTS:

Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, who worked with the pope from 1966 until his death earlier this year, told Polish state radio there are "quite a lot of manuscripts on various issues," but he offered no details.

"Nothing has been burned," Dziwisz said. "Nothing is fit for burning, everything should be preserved and kept for history, for the future generations – every single sentence."

"These are great riches that should gradually be made available to the public."

Dziwisz did not say when or how that might happen.

In Saturday’s radio interview, Dziwisz suggested that some of the notes could prove useful in the late pontiff’s beatification process.

Now, I don’t know if Archbishop Dziwisz was himself charged with burning the papers, nor do I know if he was ordered not to do so by someone with the authority to give this order (e.g., B16), so I don’t know how to appraise his role in this.

Still, my feelings about this revelation are profoundly . . . mixed.

As they were when it was announced that JP2’s will called for all his private papers to be burned. I recognized that this represented a huge loss to historians, but on the other hand it was JP2’s will–and in his will–and you don’t disobey what someone says in his will.

I also have some sympathy for JP2’s desire. There have been people who’ve been badly burned historically by folks rumaging through their papers and the misrepresenting them.

It happened to Friedrich Nietzsche, for example. After he was institutionalized, his anti-Semitic, German-nationalistic sister went through his papers and "edited" them for publication. She also promoted what she proclaimed as "his" philosophy, which was really her own and which served to make Nietzsche an inspirational figure for Hitler and the Nazi party (contrary to what Nietzsche himself would have wanted).

While one hopes that the proper scholarly controls will be employed in any evaluation of JP2’s private papers, the potential for mischief is significant.

For one, we have no idea what state those papers are in. It may be that it will be hard or impossible to determine what was authored by the late pontiff and what wasn’t. People may have sent him drafts of things that found their way into his private papers, and some of these might be assumed to have been authored by the pope himself. Others’ (potentially lame-brained) ideas thus might end up being ascribed to JP2.

Also there is a fact that someone’s private papers are things that–by definition–the person did not intend for publication. Private papers frequently represent efforts individuals make at "trying out" ideas or ways of approaching a subject, only to have the individual himself conclude that this was a bad start that was unworthy of publication.

There may even be things in a person’s private papers where he tries to write out the strongest case he can make for a position he disagrees with–so that he can use this brief as a foil for later knocking down the position.

And then there is the danger of sensationalism–of an individual gaining (or claiming to have gained) access to the "secret" JP2 private papers and publishing books erroneously purporting to give his "true, private views" on matters.

Try to imagine what "historians" have done to Pius XII being done to JP2 to get an idea of what this could involve.

So while I am, on the one hand, pleased that JP2’s private papers are not lost to historians, I am simultaneously apprehensive about the use and misuse that might be made of them and concerned about the apparent violation of a clause of his will.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)

Tag, I’m It!

Michelle did the blog book meme a piece back, and now Revolution of Love has tagged me for the book meme that’s going around the blogosphere, so here goes:

1) Total number of books I own –

A quick estimate of that based on shelf counting, etc., puts the number at about 4,000.


2) The last book I bought –

According to "My Account" at Amazon.Com, that would be

INTO THE TWILIGHT, ENDLESSLY GROUSING by humorist Patrick McManus

3) The last book I read was –

Read all the way through? Well, I just finished (listening to) one today so I s’ppose that would be

THE MAKING OF MODERN ECONOMICS: THE LIVES AND IDEAS OF THE GREAT THINKERS by Mark Skousen

4) Five books that mean a lot to me –

The five books (or sets) that mean the most to me would be the Bible, the Catechism, the Summa Theologiae, the collected decrees of the ecumenical councils, and the collected encyclicals of the popes, but those wouldn’t be very interesting for me to use to answer this question since they are all standard works directly related to my profession.

Therefore, let me offer five that are special to me for other reasons. Each one of the following affected my life in an important way:

  1. THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCUMENTS: ARE THEY RELIABLE? by F. F. Bruce. I read this book when I was a new follower of Christ who had imbibed an awful lot of secularism in high school and college. This book, by an important New Testament scholar, helped me start taking the historical value of the Gospels and the other New Testament documents seriously.
  2. MIRACLES by C. S. Lewis. This one further helped me get over the secular worldview by offering a powerful exploration of the concept of miracles and how they can fit with natural law and science.
  3. SCALING THE SECULAR CITY by J. P. Moreland. This one was a morale boost to me as a developing apologist because it provided an exemplar of Christian apologetics done with the kind of rigorously-argued approach that I craved. As an analytic philosophy student, I thrived on rigorous argumentation, but so few works out there tried to bring this level of work to the defense of the faith. This one did. It’s a modern classic and represents a kind of apologeics that still does not exist in Catholic circles. (Though I don’t like all of Moreland’s treatment of the kalaam argument for creation.)
  4. EARLY CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES by J. N. D. Kelly. Though Kelly is not a Catholic, reading his survey of doctrine in the early Church helped show me just how Catholic the early Church Fathers were.
  5. DR. ATKINS NEW DIET REVOLUTION by Dr. Robert Akins. This is the book that saved me from getting diabetes. I was insulin resistant with rising blood sugar levels when my doctor recommended this book to me. After going on the this diet, I dropped a hundred pounds without hunger. Even before the weight came off, I felt better and had more energy than I had in years. This book opened my eyes to how completely BACKWARDS normal dieting advice is (and thus why all previous diets I had tried had failed so dismally).

5) I tag – (5 bloggers)

Okay, here is a design flaw in this meme. There is no way, given how far it’s spread, that I’m going to go to who knows how many other blogs and search through their archives to see if they’ve already done the meme. Neither am I going to fire off tags to other bloggers irrespective of whether they may have done this meme.

Therefore, I hereby tag all the bloggers reading this who haven’t already been infected by the meme.

Tag, I'm It!

Michelle did the blog book meme a piece back, and now Revolution of Love has tagged me for the book meme that’s going around the blogosphere, so here goes:

1) Total number of books I own –

A quick estimate of that based on shelf counting, etc., puts the number at about 4,000.

2) The last book I bought –

According to "My Account" at Amazon.Com, that would be

INTO THE TWILIGHT, ENDLESSLY GROUSING by humorist Patrick McManus

3) The last book I read was –

Read all the way through? Well, I just finished (listening to) one today so I s’ppose that would be

THE MAKING OF MODERN ECONOMICS: THE LIVES AND IDEAS OF THE GREAT THINKERS by Mark Skousen

4) Five books that mean a lot to me –

The five books (or sets) that mean the most to me would be the Bible, the Catechism, the Summa Theologiae, the collected decrees of the ecumenical councils, and the collected encyclicals of the popes, but those wouldn’t be very interesting for me to use to answer this question since they are all standard works directly related to my profession.

Therefore, let me offer five that are special to me for other reasons. Each one of the following affected my life in an important way:

  1. THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCUMENTS: ARE THEY RELIABLE? by F. F. Bruce. I read this book when I was a new follower of Christ who had imbibed an awful lot of secularism in high school and college. This book, by an important New Testament scholar, helped me start taking the historical value of the Gospels and the other New Testament documents seriously.
  2. MIRACLES by C. S. Lewis. This one further helped me get over the secular worldview by offering a powerful exploration of the concept of miracles and how they can fit with natural law and science.
  3. SCALING THE SECULAR CITY by J. P. Moreland. This one was a morale boost to me as a developing apologist because it provided an exemplar of Christian apologetics done with the kind of rigorously-argued approach that I craved. As an analytic philosophy student, I thrived on rigorous argumentation, but so few works out there tried to bring this level of work to the defense of the faith. This one did. It’s a modern classic and represents a kind of apologeics that still does not exist in Catholic circles. (Though I don’t like all of Moreland’s treatment of the kalaam argument for creation.)
  4. EARLY CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES by J. N. D. Kelly. Though Kelly is not a Catholic, reading his survey of doctrine in the early Church helped show me just how Catholic the early Church Fathers were.
  5. DR. ATKINS NEW DIET REVOLUTION by Dr. Robert Akins. This is the book that saved me from getting diabetes. I was insulin resistant with rising blood sugar levels when my doctor recommended this book to me. After going on the this diet, I dropped a hundred pounds without hunger. Even before the weight came off, I felt better and had more energy than I had in years. This book opened my eyes to how completely BACKWARDS normal dieting advice is (and thus why all previous diets I had tried had failed so dismally).

5) I tag – (5 bloggers)

Okay, here is a design flaw in this meme. There is no way, given how far it’s spread, that I’m going to go to who knows how many other blogs and search through their archives to see if they’ve already done the meme. Neither am I going to fire off tags to other bloggers irrespective of whether they may have done this meme.

Therefore, I hereby tag all the bloggers reading this who haven’t already been infected by the meme.

Low-Carb Hash Browns!!!

Spaghettisquash1When I was a boy we raised a lot of our own vegetables, and squash was a regular part of our diet–when it was in season.

But not spaghetti squash (left).

I don’t know that I ever remember hearing of spaghetti squash before I joined the low-carb diet movement, lost a hundred pounds, and started hearing about the use of spaghetti squash as a substitute for . . . well, spaghetti.

I’d see it in the stores, but as a Helpless Bachelor, the thought of cooking anything that involves more than one step is intimidating to me. (Actually, I’m quite a good cook and used to work as a chef in a Chinese restaurant, but that’s cooking for others; cooking for myself is a different matter.)

In general, if I can’t microwave it or–at the most–boil it, I know that I won’t end up making it, so I don’t even bother buying it.

Judge of my delight when I was in the store Friday night and found spaghetti squash with a convenient how-to-microwave-spaghetti-squash label! I bought one and decided to make it my Adventuresome Food Project For The Weekend.

Spaghettisquash2I found the experience thoroughly delightful, though I did not find spaghetti squash a good substitute for spaghetti. It would work for that purpose in the absence of low-carb pasta, but there’s already plenty of low-carb pasta on the market that makes a better approximation of normal spaghetti.

What I found, though, was that spaghetti squash makes a wonderful low-carb substitute for something else that I’d been missing: hash-browns)!

I love hash browns (with ketchup and cheese and hot sauce–Mmmmmmmmm!) but, being made of potatoes, they are Strictly Verboten on my diet. No hash browns for me.

Until now.

The texture of spaghetti squash is remarkably like potato shreds (see up and right), and the taste and smell are as well. Topped with the pizza sauce I bought (I like pizza sauce on spaghetti better than spaghetti sauce), it really brought back memories of when I worked in a (non-Chinese) restaurant and would make those great beketchuped hash browns that I used to be able to eat. Good stuff!

I was so enthusiastic that I decided to do a blog entry on it, so here’s how y’all can make your own low-carb hash browns. It’s simple enough that even I, a Helpless Bachelor (when not cooking for others), can do it:

  1. Get a spaghetti squash.
  2. Stick it so that you pierce its outer rind (a Long Pointy Knife will do this job well, though I used a kitchen implement that looks like an Evil Tuning Fork that came with a long pointy knife set I bought a while back). This will let pressure escape from the squash so it doesn’t ‘splode when you nuke it.
  3. Nuke it. (On high. Five minutes per pound. Typically about 15 minutes.)
  4. Make sure that the outer rind has become soft. If not, nuke it some more.
  5. Let it cool down a bit so you don’t burn your fingers (this part is important!).
  6. Use a Long Pointy Knife to cut it in two (short or non-pointy knives are totally unsuited for this). The sticker on the spaghetti squash I got didn’t say which way to cut it, but I cut mine down its equator (not end-to-end), which turned out to be the right way to do it.
  7. In the middle is a hollow area that has orangey goop and seeds in it. Scoop that out and throw it away.
  8. Use a fork to scoop out the hash brown-like filaments that cling to the inside of the rind and put them on a plate (this is very easy to do since the filaments are practically falling out of there, at least after they’ve been softened up by nuking).
  9. Since they are already hot and soft and potatoey, top them with your favorite hash brown toppings, and you’re good to go. (Alternately, brown them in a pan so that they’re a little crisp, if that’s the way you like hash browns.)

Now that’s good eatin’!

About 5-6 grams of net carbs per cup. A three pound spaghetti squash probably has about six servings in it.

Now, I’m sure if you put olive oil or butter or garlic or similar spaghettifying things onto spaghetti squash it would make it taste more spaghetti-like, but there’s already good low-carb pasta and spaghetti-squash already tastes like a kind of potato, so it’s perfectly suited for hash browns.

Yee-Haw!

Pardon My Dutch?

I have no idea whatsoever how to cuss in Dutch, but apparently Dutch people do.

And it doesn’t sit well with some of them.

Yes, despite the extreme moral turpitude into which the Netherlands as a whole has descended, there are still folks over there who are swimming against the Eurotide.

Take, for example, the folks of the village Staphorst.

EXCERPTS:

The name of the Lord may no longer be taken in vain in the Dutch village of Staphorst.

Staphorst, in the so-called Dutch "bible belt" of eastern towns where religion holds sway, approved a ban on swearing by 13-4 council votes

Now, you may be wondering how such a village is even allowed to pass a law like that. Shouldn’t the central Dutch government–if not the central Eurogovernment–have made profaning the name of God a constitutional right?

Indeed it has, and so there are "enforcement issues" with the Staphorst law. Still, it’s nice to know that there are some over yonder who still rage against the dying of the light.

GET THE STORY.

The Morals Of Viagra

A reader writes:

Has the Church given a moral teaching on Viagra and other similar drugs? It seems to raise sex beyond it’s sacredness.

The Magisterium has not said anything specific about viagra or similar drugs to my knowledge, but its attitude toward such drugs would be positive provided certain conditions are met.

Overcoming physical evils is the purpose of all medicines, and the Church regards this as praiseworthy provided moral goods or comparable physical goods are not thwarted.

Viagra and similar drugs are meant to overcome the physical evil of impotence, and so the Church’s general regard for medicines–and its general cautions about them–will apply.

If the drugs perform their intended function of helping to alleviate male impotence (a humiliating reality that I’m given to understand the great majority of men suffer at one time or another), then all things being equal they would be praiseworthy.

They would not be praiseworthy if all things are not equal. F’rinstance:

  • If the drug causes the guy’s blood pressure to skyrocket, putting him at risk of a stroke.
  • If it causes his heart to beat wildly, putting him at risk of cardiac arrest or other heart-related ailment.
  • If it causes other alarming and/or embarrassing side effects that aren’t compensated for by what it does for his conjugal life (e.g., the rare, uncontrollable four-hour period of tumescence that you hear about in commercials for some drugs–though not Viagra specifically).
  • If it causes the guy to be so inflamed with passion that he can’t keep his mind on his wife and he is driven crazy by every woman he sees.
  • If it is used not to correct for impotence but for purposes of leading a wanton and irresponsible sex life (possibly extra-marital, possibly contraceptive).

(NOTE: This list is not exhaustive but illustrative.)

If the latter kinds of conditions apply then use of such drugs would not be praiseworthy, but then if any drug had comparable side effects its use would not be praiseworthy.

If such drugs are used, however, to correct for impotence and side-effects of the above-mentioned kind are not present for a particular individual then its use is morally non-problematic and the drug may play a useful role in building the union of the two spouses.

Now, just for the sake of completeness (and heading off questions folks might want to ask as follow-ups), let’s kick it down a notch.

What if we aren’t talking about pharmaceuticals but something weaker. What if we’re only talking about what in human society have commonly passed as aphrodisiacs?

I don’t know if there are any genuinely effective aphrodisiacs. My suspicion is that most of them that have been suggested in human history have simply be snake oil and have no effect beyond that of a placebo (not that the placebo effect is entirely to be discounted). I know that there are some nutritional supplements for which claims are made in this regard, though I don’t know if any are actually effective.

But suppose some are?

Again, it seems to me that the moral status of using such substances will depend on the way in which they are used:

  • If they are used to overcome impotence or frigidity then their moral status will be evaluated in the same way as the drugs dealt with above.
  • If they are used to enhance the experience of conjugal union then they would seem not in principle different than other things that enhance the experience (perfume, etc., etc.).
  • If they are used, though, so as to engage in marital (or non-marital!) relations more wantonly and irresponsibly then their use will be sinful.

So it seems to me that all of these things–from Viagra-like drugs to more traditional aphrodisiacs–may potentially play a role in reinforcing and assisting the conjugal relationship that exists between husband and wife, but they may also be abused and used in imprudent and even sinful ways.