Just a week ago I was attending a conference at the Wilson Center dealing with population, climate change, and “health” when a journalist grossly misrepresented Catholic doctrine for cheap laughs. The lie I am referring to is the very statement Alan Weisman referenced when speaking about promoting contraception. Weisman recounted with glee the statement Planned Parenthood uses in Costa Rica try to “lure females away from the Catholic Church” was to ask, “What? Your church [the Catholic Church] thinks you’re a sinner for wanting to have the number of children you can care for? Our church loves you for being responsible. [laughs]” This is not an innocuous analysis Catholic beliefs; it is disrespectful, sectarian, bigoted, and false. It does not matter that these remarks did not originate with him; what matters is that he endorsed them insofar as they promoted an agenda he supports. I was shocked that this well-respected author would suddenly lose all sense of decorum by indulging in slander against the Church. This is not what the Church believes, and this is not what it preaches.
The Church is not against discerning how many children one can responsibly care for in within the paradigm of marriage. This does not mean that the Church supports any artificial contraception. It means that the Church recommends either abstinence or natural family planning. For those of you who do not know, Pope Paul VI explicitly addressed responsible parenthood in the Encyclical Humanae Vitae,
“With regard to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised by those who prudently and generously decide to have more children, and by those who, for serious reasons and with due respect to moral precepts, decide not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time”
This is a call for the faithful to exercise self-control. If what the author says about climate change, over-consumption, and overpopulation is true, then why does he ridicule a Church whose teachings may help in the effort to make the human race a more responsible steward of the Earth?
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