Category: Moral Theology

A reader writes:

I have a question about marriage involvement.  I know that I cannot attend my cousin’s upcoming "wedding" because she is Catholic and divorced, "marrying" a divorced man, in a non-Catholic ceremony.  But what about attending the reception and/or giving a gift?  My wife (a non-Catholic Christian) wants to do both, but I feel uncomfortable about them.  However, I suffer from OCD, often in the form of scrupulosity, so I can’t really be sure of my judgment in this matter.  (Prudential judgment is very difficult with OCD!)

I understand your situation, and it’s good that you check this out. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder frequently does lead people to needless scrupulosity regarding matters. I have dealt with several individuals with OCD, and have some familiarity with it.

In this case, though, I don’t think that you are being scrupulous. If a wedding cannot be attended due to known or presumed invalidity, I could not recommend attending the reception or giving a wedding present. The last in particular, even more than attending, conveys an endorsement of the event. Gifts are given to celebrate things, and if a thing should not have happened, it should not be celebrated.

Even if you tell someone that you do not believe that they are really married and that you could not attend the wedding for that reason, if you turn around and give them a gift for their wedding, it undercuts the force of the message you are otherwise sending–a message that they very much need to hear and that is an act of charity toward them (as long as the message is communicated in a sincere and loving way).

A couple that received a gift from such a person would say to themselves, "Well, he may say that he doesn’t think we’re married, but the gift shows he isn’t really serious about that. The gift shows what he really thinks–where his heart is–and the other stuff is just talk."

Attending the reception isn’t as bad but also serves to undercut the basic message of honesty. It also would send mixed signals to a couple that need to understand the reality of their situation, and so I could not recommend it either.

As a non-Catholic Christian, your wife may not understand all this, but she should understand and respect that your religious conscience (now verified by a professional of your own faith) and recognize that you need to act in accord with that conscience.

Hope this helps!

20

A reader writes:

A while ago, my wife stopped taking the pill. I am ashamed to admit this, but we did not realize that the Church taught that contraception was intrinsically evil. We knew they did not "approve" of it, but we did not think it was a grave sin. We also did not know that the pill could sometimes function as an abortafacient. Anyway, when we found out, we immediately got off the pill.

Even though we had made the decision to get off the pill and to stop contracepting, I still wanted to meet with my pastor to discuss the issue of contraception in general, since I really did not understand what was "intrinsically evil" about it.

Anyway, my pastor had some interesting things to say. He pulled out a piece of paper with a [PHONY-SOUNDING TOOL FOR EVALUATING YOUR CONSCIENCE] on it. He told me that my wife and I should use this [TOOL] to make a "mature decision" whether contraception was right for us.

He stated that the most important axiom governing [THE TOOL] was this: Morality is based on reality. He said that the Church’s moral teachings were a "best case scenario" or simply IDEALS to be reached for, and that pastoral practice may not measure up to the optimum.

He basically told me that we needed to do what was right for us, in our situation.

Needless to say, I was very shocked at what the priest said. So I just came right out and asked him: "Father, are you saying that if my wife and I, after reflection, make a mature decision to continue to contracept, that it would be an acceptable decision"? He replied, "Yes."

So, can a decision by a husband and wife to contracept ever be licit?

Here is the teaching of the Church:

Every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible [Humanae Vitae 14].

Thus it is never licit to use the Pill or anything else in order to achieve a contraceptive effect.

It is extremely tempting to simply state that your priest lied to you, but I have to hold open the possibility that he is just grossly misinformed about the nature of the Church’s teachings. In any event, he grossly misrepresented them to you.

It is also difficult to resist the conclusion that he is likely to be morally culpable for this gross misrepresentation as well, since a few years ago the Pope issued an encyclical (Veritatis Splendor), one of whose key and widely-reported points was the repudiation of exactly the kind of moral theology your priest pushed on you (i.e., that the Church proposes only goals to strive and that nothing is intrinsically evil so that particular circumstances can allow one to morally do things that the Church proposes as intrinsically evil).

Whether he is culpable for his action or not, I could not recommend that you seek this man’s counsel on any matter of Catholic moral theology. He is at a minimum grossly ignorant of its basic principles and (with a significant degree of probability) knowingly subversive of it.

A reader writes:

Please help me understand the Church’s teaching on this issue.  Is it ok for a catholic single person to use contraceptives, if they do not want to end a sexual relationship with their partner, to avoid bringing a child into the situation?  A priest said that God is not in this sexual act, so they cannot be coming between God and the child is not part of God’s will.  (which I know God didn’t will the child to come into the world this way, but he permits the child to be born).

Here is what Pope Paul VI wrote in Humanae Vitae:

We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary.

Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means [Section 14].

There are no qualifiers in this about this situation only pertaining to the case of married couples. What your friend is doing is disrupting the way God designed human sexuality to work.

Specifically, your friend is doing two things:

1. Separating the procreative aspect of the sexual act from the act itself (i.e., contracepting), and
2. Separating the sexual act from the marital context in which it is meant to occur (i.e., fornicating).

Your friend’s behavior thus is "coming between [them and] God"–and in two ways. They are compounding the sin of fornication by adding to it the sin of contraception.

Indeed, their use of contraception is facilitating their fornication. You note that the use of contraceptives is because your friend does not want "to end a sexual relationship with their partner, to avoid bringing a child into the situation." The contraception is thus facilitating your friend’s rejection of God’s will by letting her avoid making the choice between (a) ending the sexual relationship or (b) having a baby by a man she isn’t married to. The contraception is thus a sin in itself and it compounds the sin of fornication by lengthening its duration.

What your friend needs to do is to resolve to do what is right: End the sexual relationship and not have sex until marriage and, even then, not to use contraception.

The above-described sins are grave matter, meaning that if they are mortal if done with adequate knowledge and consent.

What the priest said was wrong and was a disservice to your friend.

God will hold him accountable for it.

A reader writes:

About 5 or 6 years ago my friend started coming back to Church.

[One of her Catholic daughters pursued] a relationship with a divorced father of two and is now getting married. Mom disapproves of the marriage because he is divorced and it is not a Catholic wedding but she has accepted their plans because she know there is nothing she can do about it and does not want to ostrasize her daughter from her.

The question is, can she at all participate in any plans with the wedding or will this come accross as a approval? They asked her to find a blessing to be read at the begining of the ceremony. I thought that seemed a little unusal since the daughter knows how her mother feels. The mother has been praying alot and attending mass alot in order to bring about a change of heart in her daughter.

I could not recommend her involvement in this wedding. There are two problems with it:

1. The gentleman is divorced and, since you don’t mention him having received an annulment, I presume he doesn’t have one. That being the case, he must be assumed to be actually married to his first wife and thus not free to marry your friend’s daughter.
2. Since the daughter is a Catholic who, so far as you say, has not defected from the Church by a formal act, she is bound to observe the Catholic form of marriage or obtain a dispensation from it. Since you don’t mention a dispensation, I assume that she doesn’t have one. If that is the case then the marriage will be invalid due to lack of form.

The marriage thus looks to be invalid on two grounds, and I cannot recommend the participation of individuals in any marriage presumed to be invalid as their involvement constitutes a kind of false witness.

On the other hand, if the gentleman has received an annulment from the Catholic Church and if the daughter has obtained a dispensation from form then the marriage will be presumably valid. In that case, her participation would be perfectly legitimate.

Hope this helps!

A reader writes:

You may have heard of the recent surgery to remove a second head from a ten month old girl. 

I found this very troubling for a couple of reasons.

1. The kept on refering to the "second head".  Looking at the photograph and the fact that "it" could smile and blink, I would be inclined to refer to "it" as a conjoined twin.

2.  By refering to the conjoined twin as a second head, it seemed as if they were trying to remove or ignore the personhood of the conjoined twin.

With all of that in mind, was it morally licit for them to have the twins seperated knowing that the not fully formed twin would surely die.

If the unintended consequence of the seperation is the guaranteed death of one of the children is it still permissable to have the seperation surgery.

First, I agree that the situation here is not merely a case of a "second head" but of a conjoined twin who happens to (a) be joined at the top of the head and (b) lacks a body below the neck.

VIEW THE CHILDREN (PRE-OPERATION) HERE.

(I won’t reproduce the photo here since it’s a little disturbing.)

The fact that the body-less child is able to blink and smile makes her personhood easier to demonstrate, but the fact that she is a head with a brain shows it as well. A head is not just an extra organ. If a child were born with an extra leg, you could remove the extra leg without it leading to the death of a person, but removing a head with a brain and not sustaining its life somehow results in the death of that person.

Consequently, it could be done only under those conditions in which it would be morally licit to disconnect on person from another knowing that this would lead to the death of the disconnected person.

Are there such conditions?

The closest well-thought-through situation is that of a mother with a tubal pregnancy. In such cases the child will definitely die when it grows too large for the fallopian tube to contain it and it will cause a hemmorage that threatens the mother’s life as well.

Catholic moralists have been debating about whether the law of double-effect may apply to the case of removing an ectopic child in the case of a tubal pregnancy. For a survey of the debate SEE HERE (scroll down). A consensus seems to have emerged that at least one type of surgical procedure (known as a salpingectomy) might be morally licit to deal with the situation.

One group of conservative moral theologians, including William May and William Smith, hold that the thing that makes a salpingectomy possible is that it is a procedure done on the mother rather than on the child. Specifically, the segment of the mother’s fallopian tube is cut out that happens to contain the child. The child will die as a result of this procedure (until such time as we can transplant the child to the womb or to an artificial womb), but the procedure does not directly kill the child (in contrast to other procedures, such as injecting methotrexate to stop the child’s placenta from developing and functioning. Since a salpingecotomy does not directly kill the child, it is argued to be potentially justifiable under the law of double effect (i.e., for a porportionate reason an action can be taken that is licit in itself though it will have a foreseen but unintended evil side effect).

If it were the case that the bodiless-twin was certain to die or posed a grave threat to the life of the bodied-twin (which would also result in the death of the bodiless-twin) then it might be possible to perform a procedure on the bodied-twin that would disconnect it from the bodiless-twin in such a way that the death of the bodiless-twin is an unintended but foreseen side effect, analogous to the case of a salpingectomy.

Unfortunately, the story give me no reason to think that the bodiless-twin poses any threat to the life of the bodied-twin. As far as I know, they could live a normal life while remaining conjoined. The bodied-twin’s heart might have to develop a little more to cover the extra blood pumping to the bodiless-twin, but no evidence is presented that this would be problematic.

Consequently, I have no reason to regard the severing of the bodiless-twin as anything other than murder.

READ THE (DISGUSTING) STORY. [WARNING: Also has picture.]

A reader writes:

My place of employment is doing a drive to raise money for the United Way. I went to their Website, where they state a position of neutrality on abortion, yet have collaborated with Planned Parenthood on projects. Hence, I view this as an indirect support of abortion, despite their statement on their Website.

You are perceptive.

The United Way is deceptive.

MORE INFO HERE.

Therefore, I’ve decided not to contribute to the drive. However, I was asked to help with the collection of money.

Would this still make me compliant, or am I being scrupulous about this matter.

Well, if you comply with the request then you would, by definition, be compliant. That’s not what you’re concerned about though. I assume that you are wondering whether you would be morally culpable.

In this case the money is not being given directly to abortionists to do abortions but to a charitable agency that then, one way or another, gives some portion of it to abortionists. That’s poor stewardship, but then any time you give money to any fund there is a risk or even the known fact that some of it will not be used as it should be. If you were to maintain the position that you can’t have anything to do with such a fund then you’re going to end up not giving to anybody, and the good that you could otherwise do will not be done, including all the other charities that the fund would have supported, the abortionists only being a small percentage of the fund’s outlay.

I say that, not to encourage you to give to the United Way (I, myself, will not give to them until they change their policy on abortion; I’ll give my money elsewhere) but to point out the remoteness of your act from the evil that you may foresee the fund will do.

Remoteness is important in moral theology. Since there is a human will (the fund manager) intervening between the donor and the recipient, the donor’s cooperation is not as direct as if he were himself giving money to an evil cause.

In Catholic moral theology, remote cooperation with evil is sometimes permissible. It has to be because, since humans are sinners, remote cooperation with evil is unavoidable. That guy you paid ten dollars for the pizza may use the money to buy a porn magazine. You can’t control that. You have to make an up or down decision on whether you’re going to do business with someone, and you are not responsible for micromanaging every aspect of what they do with the money you give them.

A key is whether you are, with your will, endorsing the evil that someone else will (inevitably) do with the money you give them (either as a payment or a donation). If you endorse the evil then your cooperation with it is formal, and this is never permitted. If, on the other hand, you do not endorse the evil then your cooperation is only material, and remote material cooperation with evil is permitted . . .

. . . for a proportionate reason.

If you have a proportionate reason (e.g., you’ll suffer in some way at work if you don’t honor the request to collect the money) then, since the act of collecting money is morally licit in itself and since only a tiny portion of it will be used for evil and since you are not directly supporting evil (it’s only remote cooperation, remember) and since someone else will collect the money if you don’t, it seems to me that in that case it would be morally licit for you to collect the money.

So I wouldn’t say that you are being scrupulous. It’s good that you’re trying to think these things through.

Hope this helps!