marriage bed, and consummation refers to His saving death, what kind of grotesque sacrilege would contraception signify? It would be Jesus ensuring in secret that His death on the cross was faked, that it did not really save us, i.e., the Bridegroom defrauding His Bride in a convincing, and satanic, lie.
This Is My Body, Which Is Kept from You?
Of course, any reference to the intention of the Bridegroom will also have a Eucharistic meaning. And here, too, birth control is tacitly rejected. Tw o key prophecies about Jesus—the suffering servant (Is. 53) and the gentle lamb ( Jer. 11:19)—are both realized in the Eucharist, the fulfillment of the ancient Jewish tradition of sacrificing an unblemished lamb for the Passover Seder meal (Ex. 12).
In the Eucharist, the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. When we consume the Lamb of God “who takes away the sins of the world” (Jn. 1:29), we enter into the closest possible encounter with Him this side of heaven. Jesus’ high priestly prayer for unity in John 14 comes literally true as He abides in us that we might abide in Him. The ecstatic sexual union of marriage is a foretaste, however gauzy and pale, of the eternal love-union God “has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9).
It is easy to forget that Our Lord could have saved us at the Last Supper by speaking a word or snapping a finger. Yet He willed that the Supper of Holy Thursday should be joined with the Sacrifice of Good Friday, and plunged Himself into a horrific experience of abandonment and torture, unto a messy death no crime writer ever dreamed of. Why? To demonstrate “to the end” (CCC, no. 1337) His total communion with us, even amidst unimaginable suffering and its terminus in death. Atheists and other scoffers can no longer say, “God doesn’t understand.”
Peter Kreeft explains the relationship between repast and redemption against this Trinitarian background:
It is a banquet because it is a sacrifice, just as any earthly food can be eaten only because it is first killed and “offered” to eat. Whether animal or vegetable, its natural life is ended, given up to nourish the life of the one who eats it. “My life for yours”– this is the law of nature and of grace. It is even the life of glory. Self-donation, the ecstatic coming out of the self and giving of the self in love, is the essence of our eternal life in heaven, because that is our sharing in the very life of the Trinity. 13
In the Eucharist, we receive the Body of God into our bodies. The Eucharistic Bridegroom impregnates us, as it were, with His divine life so that we can become other Christs for the world. “You are what you eat.”
But what if a man in the communion line inserted a latex sheath into his mouth (like the ones used by the dentist when filling a tooth) before going up to receive Holy Communion so that the Host wouldn’t be truly received? This is analogous of the condom writ Eucharistic. Or what if a woman swallowed something beforehand that would cause vomiting and ensure that the Host would be purged before truly entering her body? This parallels the Pill. Don’t these anti-Eucharistic actions bring to mind the word blasphemy ?
Chapter Six
The Truth Whisperer
Contraception and the Natural Law
What the law requires is written on their hearts.
—Romans 2:15
From the Trinitarian heights we return to terra firma to examine a very concrete idea that nourishes the mind of the Church in many moral disputes.
The arguments traditionally employed against contraception (while strongly attested to by Scripture) are not exclusively dependent upon Revelation, and in fact have nothing directly to do with a particular religion. This is partly why, compared with other papal encyclicals, Humanae Vitae cites relatively few Bible verses. The Church’s opposition to contraception is based mainly on what is
This Is My Body, Which Is Kept from You?
Of course, any reference to the intention of the Bridegroom will also have a Eucharistic meaning. And here, too, birth control is tacitly rejected. Tw o key prophecies about Jesus—the suffering servant (Is. 53) and the gentle lamb ( Jer. 11:19)—are both realized in the Eucharist, the fulfillment of the ancient Jewish tradition of sacrificing an unblemished lamb for the Passover Seder meal (Ex. 12).
In the Eucharist, the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. When we consume the Lamb of God “who takes away the sins of the world” (Jn. 1:29), we enter into the closest possible encounter with Him this side of heaven. Jesus’ high priestly prayer for unity in John 14 comes literally true as He abides in us that we might abide in Him. The ecstatic sexual union of marriage is a foretaste, however gauzy and pale, of the eternal love-union God “has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9).
It is easy to forget that Our Lord could have saved us at the Last Supper by speaking a word or snapping a finger. Yet He willed that the Supper of Holy Thursday should be joined with the Sacrifice of Good Friday, and plunged Himself into a horrific experience of abandonment and torture, unto a messy death no crime writer ever dreamed of. Why? To demonstrate “to the end” (CCC, no. 1337) His total communion with us, even amidst unimaginable suffering and its terminus in death. Atheists and other scoffers can no longer say, “God doesn’t understand.”
Peter Kreeft explains the relationship between repast and redemption against this Trinitarian background:
It is a banquet because it is a sacrifice, just as any earthly food can be eaten only because it is first killed and “offered” to eat. Whether animal or vegetable, its natural life is ended, given up to nourish the life of the one who eats it. “My life for yours”– this is the law of nature and of grace. It is even the life of glory. Self-donation, the ecstatic coming out of the self and giving of the self in love, is the essence of our eternal life in heaven, because that is our sharing in the very life of the Trinity. 13
In the Eucharist, we receive the Body of God into our bodies. The Eucharistic Bridegroom impregnates us, as it were, with His divine life so that we can become other Christs for the world. “You are what you eat.”
But what if a man in the communion line inserted a latex sheath into his mouth (like the ones used by the dentist when filling a tooth) before going up to receive Holy Communion so that the Host wouldn’t be truly received? This is analogous of the condom writ Eucharistic. Or what if a woman swallowed something beforehand that would cause vomiting and ensure that the Host would be purged before truly entering her body? This parallels the Pill. Don’t these anti-Eucharistic actions bring to mind the word blasphemy ?
Chapter Six
The Truth Whisperer
Contraception and the Natural Law
What the law requires is written on their hearts.
—Romans 2:15
From the Trinitarian heights we return to terra firma to examine a very concrete idea that nourishes the mind of the Church in many moral disputes.
The arguments traditionally employed against contraception (while strongly attested to by Scripture) are not exclusively dependent upon Revelation, and in fact have nothing directly to do with a particular religion. This is partly why, compared with other papal encyclicals, Humanae Vitae cites relatively few Bible verses. The Church’s opposition to contraception is based mainly on what is
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