So to you, Lust = Sexual Desire. Seems to me you are being insufficiently broad minded and excessively "Broad" minded. My training and dictionary consider lust as possible for any number of things. An inordinate,unbounded desire for most anything is usually called "lust". So it isn't the sex, per se, but the inordinate, unbounded, over-the-top nature of the desire that's the real culprit.

Of course, sex is a more widely interesting subject than, say, model railroad trains or pancakes. But that's just lust for fame and fortune as a writer speaking.

I am somehow reminded of the old story of the woman who goes to the "shrink" and complains that her family think she is crazy because she likes pancakes. "Why," says the psych,"That's not crazy. I love pancakes myself." "You DO!" says the lady, "Then come home with me - I have trunk fulls of them!"

Nice.

In the modern West, most of us mature so slowly that marriage before the age of 30 seems almost suicidally rash. You can't support a family on one income, and children need decades and decades of expensive education before they can move briefly out of your home -- then return to live on your couch while they "figure things out."

You think too much John--that's your trouble. God's design for love and sexuality is not a dilemma. It just seems to be so because you are too afraid to make any life decisions--and you're tired of being "on ice" while you vacillate about a mate, a career, and Readiness for a family! Monogamy isn't going to fit you any more comfortably than Abstinence.

Really nice.............a bit condacending?

I'm afraid this article, while trying to be humurous, will encourage eveyone to give into there "excuses".

<em>Annulment Court</em>:
"As season six winds down, we have good news. A decision in the case from our series premiere is coming soon!"

I'm not sure which is more tragic, the tortured spiritual personification of the author, the underlying misfeasance and malfeasance of the clergy which has dreadfully permitted the power & beauty of our sexuality chastity and celibacy to descend into selfish acts of gratification or the fact that these kinds of writings have taken over at Crisis - once a glorious tool for salvation & refuge for edification in the absence of being fed at the parish level.

What happened?

Mr. Zmirak, in the face of folks seeming not to get the joke or the point, I feel obliged to let you know that the integrity and dryness of my keyboard were in serious danger over the exchange counter remark. Very nice work, both in risking damage to company property and in making us feel the dilemmas that do exist around sexuality both in contemporary personal life and in the culture at large. There's a lot of room to expand here. It will be fascinating to see how it plays out in your new book.

This was an entertaining read, John. And unlike Piddiddle, I don't think this is out of line for Crisis or IC. Honest discussions about sexuality need to take place and there has to be a starting point. We may not agree with your every point or conclusion, but if the Church's actual official teachings on sexuality were all we were allowed to discuss here, and writers were expected to keep their comments and observations within those limits, pretty soon everybody would stop reading.

A proper theology needs to be based upon a proper anthropology, and ignoring how many of us see the sexual instinct doesn't serve anybody, heterodox though these observations may seem.

John's given us a good start. I hope his article is just the beginning of good discussions about this and not the end because too many readers come here for dogma rather than theology.

I, for one, would challenge John: OK, so you think that our natural sexual instincts more closely match the lifestyle of centuries ago - nasty, brutish and short. We have risen above this standard of living and created longer and potentially much more fulfilling lives for ourselves. Do you think this societal evolution is somehow wrong because it no longer matches up with our sexuality? Conversely, to what degree can we channel our sexual instincts to serve this new lifestyle we all enjoy in the West. You make it sound like we should eschew the technology and medicine that has made leisure and longer life possible, because it has made it harder for many to accept children.

Articles like this make me miss G.K. Chesterton.

I seems that our wit has dulled with regard to commenting upon the ever present urge to merge. I like and appreciate most of your points, John, but the tone and approach is more like a discussion in a bar than an article for reading....

I'll post a few Chesterton observations about marriage to consider (courtesy of www.chesterton.org):


"Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men." - A Handful of Authors

"Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue." - Chesterton on Dickens

"Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline." - Manalive

"The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous." - ILN 1/9/09

Jason,

Were your above thesis to hold true to the preservation of Deposit of Faith handed down to us from the Apostles, we'd be reading parables in the Bible authored by Judas and the hecklers while Christ sat in the audience. The Catechism and the Pope would be stimulating conversations by suggesting sexual instincts are similar to blowing our noses & defecating anthropologically speaking -let he who is so tight as to be constipated forevermore set their inhibitions free.



You seem to be splitting hairs. Dogma is the soul of sound theology and of course we would have hoped & expected the mission at Crisis to proceed soundly. It has not and my observation is a valid and charitable one. Upholding dissent and leaving readers to comment and Upholding truth and leaving readers to comment are two different missions. IC is now giving out licenses, and, to the detriment and confusion of souls who think that agreeing to disagree is perfecting soul force on this planet.

A word to the wise: If you're teaching your sons and daughters Catholic theology using dissent to navigate their passions, hoping seeds of fidelity will be the fruit of the exercises down yonder, it's neither fruitful or a mesmerizing show that we feel compelled to tune into.

your understanding that a conversion will take place with a co-worker by articulating that his sleeping around is sound Catholic theology

The whole point, as I understand it, of John's series, is to take apart the notion that the Christian Faith is a prozac-induced choice to embrace a more blissful, happy existence.

John is therefore taking a wry look at exactly how challenging being a Christian is, contrary to the atheistic belief that God is merely our blissful delusion of choice.

On that theme, he hits the mark - every time. If you haven't struggled with at least some of what John Depicts here, I'm not sure you're a part of the human race. It's normal to be a bit cynical about the struggle, if the humor helps you through.

Living chastity is damn hard, especially in a society that's always bombarding us with sexual provocation. For the celibate, it often doesn't feel like a gift, but rather a curse, to have to go around denying those impulses that come on so strongly at such a young age while society continues to extend indefinitely the age where one seems to meet anything like the reasonable conditions for marriage.

And even once we do get married, the challenges don't stop. With toddlers running amok in our house and another baby on the way, my wife and I joke pretty regularly about "Why did we decide it was ok to be fruitful and multiply again?"

I feel like I'm talking to myself. John, I get the joke - and I feel your pain. ;)

My thanks to those who "get it," and regrets to those who don't. Far from challenging Church teaching, I'm asserting how faithfully it reports on the Created order. Which after the Fall is fairly grim--or at least out of joint with our desires (themselves mostly good, if sometimes inordinate) for ordinary pleasures, comforts, and consolations.

We do our best to improve our conditions, which is our right, but sometimes overreach--as we do in cases like contraception, and many other areas of biotech where the notion of a normative Creation has been utterly banished.

I won't banish it--but I'm not going to pretend that it's entirely our friend. Our wills fell, but so did nature. It isn't ALWAYS that our desires are absurd and Promethean, and the ways of fallen Creation wise and wondrous. A piece of wood used to beat off an attacking bear is a piece of technology that helps us cope with one side-effect of a fallen Creation. I don't think that it's considered intrinsically evil.

Should we "eschew the technology and medicine that has made leisure and longer life possible, because it has made it harder for many to accept children"? Absolutely not. I thought I made that clear in my conclusion; if there's some neo-Luddite future coming down the pike, I have no place in it. Please check out the link I provided, to which this piece is a response: http://tinyurl.com/4ecvg8. It welcomes the prospect of an economic collapse, so that we can return to the ways of our ancestors. To which I say: If New York City is sinking, I'm going back there to go down with the ship.

No, to give a more detailed answer: We need to make training in NFP conditional for sacramental marriage. And we need to help people see it as a viable way to have a family one can afford to support and educate without having to move cities, change social class--or do any of the other things which we are not required to do EVEN TO FEED THE STARVING. (If any of you DO believe that everyone living in an expensive city is morally obliged to relocate, so he can better afford to send money to Africa--at least you're being intellectually consistent. Albeit nuts.)

We need the neo-rigorists among us to stop peddling scruples about the "contraceptive mentality," and promoting Providentialism as if it were the default position. It isn't. Like the Evangelical Counsels, it's a special relationship with God which SOME people are called to adopt.

People who are ready to undertake the sacrifices and difficulties (about which I've heard from married friends) of NFP do NOT deserve to get it in the neck from Job's comforters--whose scrupulosity for export only makes Church teaching seem impossible and ludicrous, instead of just difficult.


To impose Providentialism (and the choice of marital celibacy or children spaced 9 months and 5 minutes apart) on everyone with threats of heresy and mortal sin is to act like the Spiritual Franciscans--who tried to impose Apostolic poverty on pain of mortal sin. There's a word for people like that: Heretics.

<i>when we hear chipper sermons that call sexuality "one of God's greatest gifts," we smile thinly and try not to snark back: "Where's the counter where I can go exchange it? Like, for a sweater?" </i>

Reminds me of a line from one of Dorothy Sayers' novels. When Lord Peter Wimsey is reminded of the line from the wedding service in the Book of Common Prayer that lists, as one of the purposes for which marriage was instituted, that it is "a remedy against fornication, for those who have not the gift of continence," he says, "I wouldn't have it as a gift."

Whatever, dude.



Well then you misunderstand not only Mr. Zmirak, but me, and, I guess, most of the other editors/commenters here. IC has always proceeded from a position of orthodoxy, albeit they take the proper view that "orthodoxy" is a broader spectrum than perhaps some would wish. I can't see anything in this article that earns the label of dissent. Why are you so afraid to discuss things?
[/quote]



I'm sorry, but this non-sentence has me flummoxed. What are you trying to say here?

Hello, John:

It's been some time. We worked on Faith and Culture and one of your screenplays while in Baton Rouge; I had just left Yale via Washington, D.C. and was teaching in South Lousiana. Since then, I've been studying and working in Europe -- right now, in the Czech Republic and just come in from my village to Prague for an overnight visit.

Enjoyed the article; refreshing to see life in the midst of so much madness, especially the disgraceful hour through which we are passing.

Would appreciate learning what you've been doing and if you should have some time to write, just send a message via
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Best regards,

Paul Ryan

As the lesser half of an NFP teaching couple, I must say that we don't have a problem with finding rooms big enough to hold the meetings.

Modern NFP is indeed the most intelligent and sensible way to integrate the urge to merge with the duty to be prudent.

Sadly, the concept has been framed by the culture as "Catholic Contraception", which has led me to have MANY conversations about what "serious reason" means, and what "being generous" means. These conversations are necessary for the cultural milieu of self-centered gratification for the sexual urge has overlaid even the best of Catholic catechesis with a utilitarianism that is stubborn and intransigent.

It is a hard sell to make "practical" and “prudent” what our culture sells as "fun", and our hearts hope is "romantic". But that is why marriage is the narrow way – a daily test of self versus the other.....”A duel to the death that no man of honor should decline.”....

NFP does build virtue, by its practice, and by its short-comings. And we all know how unpopular virtue is today....

“The act of defending any of the ecardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”
G.K. Chesterton

Thanks, Johnnyjoe. Let me push this point further: I would like to suggest that most people who DO contracept in order to have 2,3,4 kids in modern America are probably using an ILLICIT means to a licit end. Their concerns--education, savings, moderate prosperity--are NOT necessarily or even typically signs of an evil materialism and a Culture of Death, but rather a rational response to their environment, economic conditions, and the "signals" they are receiving from an economy and a natural environment that don't require fast population growth under current conditions. (Since every Westerner's environmental "footprint," or use of resources, is some 12-15 times that of people in poor countries, this is not an unreasonable conclusion.)

As economist Virginia Abernethy has shown in her population studies, Malthus was wrong: Even before reliable contraception existed, most cultural groups regulated their population (by means fair or foul) to remain in balance with their environment. Famines rarely resulted from birth explosions, but rather from sudden dropoffs in a food source (i.e., the potato famine). People regulated their families with an eye toward bearing children who would not have to drop into a lower social class than their own, and also so as to maintain their own (the parents') existing standing. Pope Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum that we are not required to leave our social station--to go from middle class to poor, or rich to middle class-- by the duty of charity to the poor. Can the duty to welcome new life, to be fruitful and multiply--surely of a lower order in Christian ethics--demand more than that?

In other words, middle class families are not obliged to embrace a comparative poverty; in seeing that having twice as many children as their neighbors, and half as much leisure, savings, etc., they MIGHT in some cases act with insufficient "generosity." But this is a judgment call, something for their reflection, discernment, and consultation with a decent priest.

I know it seems counter-intuitive to be warning against the impulse to insist that people have large families; in the wider culture, this is not a danger. However, within the growing subculture of orthodox Catholics, I have seen people tormented by this, and heard of marriages crushed beneath the weight of scruples. It is facile simply to say that we are called to be "counter-cultural," and hence to dismiss with contempt the decisions of our neighbors--especially those who are devout Christians but not Roman Catholics. There is more than one way to be counter-cultural. Having a large family COULD be an excellent way. There are many others.

NFP does suffer from a cultural hang-over in one respect - it still leads couples to believe, in some part, that they have mastered the act of getting pregnant. Some wipe it with the broad "contraception mentality" stroke, but it is a distinction too vauge to be useful.

In reality, the Holy Spirit is the Lord and Giver of Life, and we merely provide the open means for Him to Bless us with those little tape recorders of our worst traits.

We had some friends approach us once with a question about another couple - mutual friends - and asked why they hadn't had any more than the two children. They knew these mutual friends had taken NFP from us, and were very concerned that these friends were in sin. Our quick and absolute response was that it was NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS.

Interestingly enough, within about three weeks those mutual friends called us up to have dinner. These folks were former students, and were friends, but I guess I would describe them as in the outer circle of our contact. It was unusual to have them call us up to go out, so we were fairly certain they had something important to talk about. In fact, they were struggling with the decision to have another child. They were somewhat rusty in their practical use of NFP, and that had brought on perhap a bit too much "abstaining" (I don't like that word - priests & nuns abstain, we just "wait"), so they wanted to chat.

What was really the struggle at heart was the wife grew up the eldest in a large family, and had some unresolved resentments about having to care for her siblings when she was younger. We didn't really have much to share but empathy, our own struggles with making the decision to have more children, and some basic NFP advice. God graced her with a patient husband, and it appears just giving voice to that darkness and doubt about having more children gave her room to hope; for they have had two children since.

Virueous practice of NFP allows for this movement of conversion. Contraception tends to block these movements of conversion, so I really think the "contraceptive mentality" stuff is usually just so much gossip. Are there couples who are "less generous"? How do I know?! Only God sees the heart, and only God knows the disposition of the soul. I'll let God sort that out while I stay focused on my own relationship with the Lord, and try my best to preach the good news of NFP....

Yeah, I spit my coffee out of my mouth this morning when reading a thing or two I came across on the internet and it's acting up. Let me try it again:

Is it your understanding that a conversion will take place with a co-worker by articulating that his sleeping around is sound Catholic theology?

Point being, when making a representation that your teaching/preaching/advancing faithful Catholicism, there isn't a Saint Saul to quote from for a reason that's upheld us all for 2000 years.

Steve, John - thanks for the clarification. Maybe it's my gender-but I'm not getting it. The doctrine of not scratching the itch is causally related to the ultimate drive to either find the right girl to marry or offer the discipline at the foot of the Cross as a priest or lay person in exchange for something much more powerful. While I understand the temptations, falls and getting back on the horse, I'm missing the burden of the journey. I think too, though this is perhaps unintended (?), your writings John are coming off as an invitation to cease and desist in evangelizing as a rational and understanding response to non-believers.

"Divorce entailed disgrace, but men and women alike knew that a wife's chance of dying in childbirth was one in three -- so each had some reason for hope. "

I'm going to drown this comedy with fact-checking.

Was the danger of pre-modern childbirth as great as we think? The erratically accurate Wikipedia claims a natural maternal mortality rate of 1 death per 100 births, while 50 per 10,000 is one figure from 1850s England and Wales.

The centralization of health care combined with a lack of medical hygiene may have killed many women in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but perhaps we overstate how risky it was for our ancestral mothers who birthed at home.

This "really deadly childbirth" idea could be like the myth that people in the "old days" often married in their mid-teens.

The thing about saying 'yeah, yeah' to the sermons given by the church about sexuality being a gift from God and feeling that they can't feel your pain in being chaste is that, umm, most of the people giving those sermons have renounced their sexual lives for God. So they really might know a thing or two about how to deal with unassuaged sexual frustration for long periods of time. I think maybe thinking about it in that high-minded way, 'a gift from God' is really a way to deal with it. Think outside your own wants and desires and put things into a Godly perspective. I went to a retreat once and the priest was talking about sacrifice and he said, "What if I got up every morning and thought to myself: "another day I can't have sex. I'd drive myself crazy!" Everybody laughed, but the truth of the matter is sacrifice is about pain and giving to others (God, your future spouse) so it is very bad for your soul to sit around thinking how frickin' difficult it is.

I do sympathize though. It is heartbreaking when you long for someone and it takes so darn long for the right one to come along. It is a cross to bear. It is hard, very hard, to be a faithful Christian in this day and age.

Were you looking through my window???

Actually son Michael used cardboard to build his cathedral.
and the boys cross between playing Matt Mahar and Mettalica as opposed to Mozart.

humorous as usual, a little edgy for some, a funny end to a hectic day. Thanks

Mr. Zmirak, thanks for this article. I laughed so hard. It was just what I needed after putting my offspring to bed. Reading some of the comments, I was shocked that not everybody realized how funny this was. It brought to mind my favorite line from "It's a Wonderful Life": "This is supposed to be a happy family--what do we have to have all these kids for?"

I once picked up a large hardcover at Half-Priced Books that looked at the Virgin Mary in art over a large stretch of history. I wish I had the title or ISBN to cite, but the gist of one section indicated that families in the Middle Ages identified readily with the Holy Family because there was but one child. In those days, it was the wealthy who had eight, ten, twelve children, and it was wet-nursing that contributed greatly to this phenomenon. You see, a child placed with a wet-nurse was not nursing with his mother, and this in turn, meant that her fertility returned remarkably quickly. Thus, having children spaced nine months and five minutes apart was a possibility.

Poor women, on the either hand, nursed their own children -- or else those children died. Now, I'm not so naive as to think that wealthy women (and their children) weren't also in generally superior health. Even in the old days, wealth could buy sufficient food when hunger was a real concern for a lot of people. And well-fed children were generally in a better position to weather the storms of the sometimes nasty bacteria and viruses of the age.

But people back then weren't nearly so naive as we often think they were. Poor women knew that breastfeeding meant they couldn't have another child soon (especially in the days when, perhaps, breastfeeding for two to three years or more may have been a norm). Moreover, rich women would have known (at least the wiser among them) that failure to find a good wet nurse would likewise mean that another child soon (the norm of the wealthy back then, remember?) was highly unlikely.

Incidentally, the Church condemned wet-nursing because it interfered with the normal mother-child intimacy deemed a proper and necessary good start to educating one's own children (remember that second mandate from Genesis 1:27-28?). But the Church then, as now, was rather concerned with day-to-day financial matters, and so the condemnation of wet-nursing was widely suppressed -- and therefore widely ignored. It sounds not so unlike similarly thorny details widely ignored in the Church today.

Not to belabor too much this point, but someone beat you to your suggestion. Indeed, Paul VI wrote the following in Populorum Progressio (http://tinyurl.com/PopulorumProgressio):



Thus, there can be no doubt that restricting the size of one's family is a licit end in and of itself. Pursuing this end via licit means (such as NFP) is the right way to do it, and using illicit means is unacceptable. But this quote from Paul VI's encyclical letter (equal in weight to Humanae Vitae) indicates rather clearly that the rights of married couples to decide on family size when acting in conformity with the moral law (as they do when they practice NFP) is, in fact, inalienable. Arguments to the contrary are, at best, noise, even when they come from the perspective of encouraging providentialism (which is also in perfect conformity with the moral law, though not to the exclusion of the licit alternative of NFP).

I should have said, "but the gist of one section indicated that poor families in the Middle Ages identified readily with the Holy Family because there was but one child. Sorry.

It strikes me that one of the great illusions of modernity is the idea that we can deterministically control ends. We cannot. We can (and should) study past actions and the consequences thereof. But the future is always unknown, and in the final analysis, the only things we can ever control absolutely are means. Perhaps the biggest counter to our NFP arguments is simply this: it doesn't work. And folks point to our four kids (and one on the way) as evidence of this as if no further argument on the matter is required or even allowed.

But the larger point (which John's article makes abundantly clear, though not in the specific context of NFP) is so what if it didn't? Even if we assume that NFP (and a whole lot of other licit means) were unreliable, how then would such a determination change the fact that we can never know all ends? Unless you presume ends as deterministic, then the above "show-stopping" counter-argument to NFP makes no sense.

It all boils down to whom we choose to confide in as to means (since means are the only things we can control anyway). Do we confide primarily in Christ and in His Bride, the Church? Or do we confide primarily in arguments (logical or otherwise) proffered by this World?

I submit that the most common response is that we too often confide first (and sometimes only) in the world. We are far too ready to behave as salmon in the fisheries. Indeed we even confuse means (such as confinement to a fish farm) with ends (full bellies). In so doing, we might end up as slaves, but at least we're reasonably well-off, and after all, once we get used to the confines of the fish farm, how on earth are we ever to know any different? Or any better? I am no better than others in this regard. My weaknesses (and submissions thereto) are simply different from those most manifest in others, perhaps, even though my kids do know how to play Chopin and Bach (though not yet Mozart).

Still, I love the satire. It's the best way to get through thickened and numb skulls like my own.

Oh my heavens. I roared throughout this whole article. Towards the end I was glad there was no one else in the room to hear me howling and wiping the tears out of my eyes.



A. Men. Brother.

Thanks for this article. And I have to disagree with folks who think the tone is inappropriate -- there's a reason why St. Francis referred to the body as Brother Ass! Better to laugh at it and remember it's a funny, poor, lumpish thing. (Seamus -- LOVE that Lord Peter quote, and the look of Puritanical horror on Helen's face as he says it!)

I guess we all are just a bunch of sex crazed or starved perverts. Either that or Lust for anything but sex is not one of the deadly sins and can be practiced without limit anytime. Let me at that beer barrel... Or the wine cooler... Or ... QED

John, I enjoyed the article very much, but you know there is a solution to your dilemma. Grow up, find a woman and get married!

And if you'll follow my advice, practice the extreme NFP of none at all. As I reach the end of my childbearing years (I think) I have maybe one or two more children than my friends who have been anxious, frustrated and feeling deprived for the last twenty years or so. (Have you heard all the variant meanings of the acronym NFP?) My husband and I have never had a moment's worry about it, in financially good times and bad. For us, it has never been a question of means and ends, but about believing that each person is a special creation, and a gift. Yes, these miracles happen according to physical laws, and they are smelly, noisy, stubborn, occasionally insolent, disobedient, ignorant and arrogant (and that's just today), but it's a very good life, nonetheless, and just the one we feel God had in mind for us.

That being said, I am not at all judgmental about those who do use NFP. I'm tempted to say that the worst thing about having a big family is that everyone wants to confide in you their reason for not having one, and frankly, it's none of my business! I'd just like a few more voices raised in favor of radically natural family planning. All other things being equal (which of course they never are), it's a better life.

Your comments remind me of my mother when I was in my desperately-seeking mid-twenties - she seemed to think it was the easiest thing in the world for a bloke to "Grow up, find a woman and get married".

Pur-lease! Do you really think John Z. would be writing this if it was just a matter of going fishing for a nice Catholic girl? IT'S NOT! I had to move from Johannesburg to London to find one!!

You rock, John. When I was single, I often asked God to just delete that part of my programming. He didn't, because He wanted my little girls to be around to say their Hail Marys every night.

Thanks, Kevin. I was relying on something I'd heard in a lecture long ago. It seems that the numbers are more like 10 percent in medieval Europe, so far as we can tell, rather than 33 percent. They got higher in the late 18th and early 19th century, as more women had doctors--but the doctors hadn't yet learned to wash their hands. So they'd go straight from cutting up cadavers to delivering children. We can thank Joseph Lister (c.f. Listerine!) for bucking the trend and introducing proper hygiene. One more thing that saved lots of women's lives: The invention of the Franklin Stove. Yep, after child-bearing, the most common cause of adult female death, I've read, was catching on fire while cooking over an open hearth. Franklin's invention was a real life-saver--which more than makes up, in my mind, for his Freemasonry and his attempt to invade Quebec and suppress the Church....

It took me until very near 30 to find my spouse, and I had to move from LA to Boston to do so, so I don't discount the difficulty. And I really did mean it as a joke. But I think it true that it is easier for men than women, somehow. Most men who can't find a suitable woman are really just not ready to get married. John Z. sounds on more than one occasion as if he's more afraid of marriage and its consequences than he is discomfitted by celibacy. Until that changes, he'll probably continue to find the women of his acquaintance resistible. My simple point, if I have one, is that a marriage entirely open to children is really a pretty wonderful state from the inside, however messy and unlike my neighbors it might look from the outside.

One piece of advice I heard Dr. Laura Schlesinger give to men seeking a wife the other day -- find a sweet woman. I don't think that's all that hard. She told women to find a man who would swim through sharks to bring them lemonade. That's a lot harder to find, especially if you're sweet enough not to ask for such silly things.

One of our quiet prayers we have as we teach is that young couples will retain enough knowledge to stay healthy and open to life, and gain enough confidence to trust God and his Providence in receiving the Gift of new life.

Indeed, I would wish young couples would toss it all aside and enjoy it all without pen and pencil and concern.

Sadly, there are many women today who need the fertility monitoring just to improve the process. For many women, perhaps even most today, the process of de-programming from the culture, and to improving their fertility health, requires some more formal instruction. The best selling book for the Couple to Couple League (www.ccli.org) is Marylin Shannon's book "Fertility, Cycles and Nutrition". We have a sugar and caffeine ladden diet, and it takes some women more effort to get "normality" back to thier fertility.

I wish it were not so, but we have the consequences of 3 generations of BCP use in our water supply, and I think it is starting to catch up with us....

A fun and interesting article--it speaks to a lot of us out here. As a single guy who wants to be virtuous, I have to ask God daily for strength in temptation.

Two things:

First, we can ask God to use our temptations to strengthen us (if we have good practice saying "no" to ourselves in small things, it will benefit us if we have to say "no" in some larger ones). So objectively speaking, this is spiritual bootcamp, and we can regard it as that exhilarating challenge of chastity. Chesterton, I think, does a good job of communicating the Manly and Exciting Adventure that is the pursuit of Virtue.

and

Second, I think the distinction needs to be made between good and bad desires. Sexual desire, like hunger, thirst, or sleepiness, is a good desire for a good thing. The catch is that natural goods have a proper place and a proper end. Contrary to the opinions of many, sexual desire is a good and natural one; this can keep us from becoming disheartened if we remember it!

Keep up the good posting!

I like articles like this, because they let people who are struggling know that they're pretty normal, and not dismal failures for not living up to some rosy, unrealistic picture. But there seems to be this assumption that people who have large families are making huge sacrifices, either out of generosity, response to a special call, or obedience to misunderstood Church laws--either way, they're being heroically selfless, right?

Not necessarily. There are also families who choose to have a lot of kids simply because they really like having kids. They would rather have kids than leisure or money because their kids give them more pleasure than leisure or money, even after you subtract the suffering of dirty diapers and spilled milk and lost sleep, which after all, are passing troubles. I suspect there's a lot of this mixed into the thinking of even the heroic types.

I'm just trying to say that there are natural reasons for choosing a big family--simple calculations based on self-interest--even today, and not just in the past, when kids could work on your farm. Have you never met or heard of a parent who longed--even selfishly--for another child?

Think of it this way: people have dogs, right? Why? You have to walk them, feed them, pay their vet bills. Are people heroic to take in those dogs? Nope. They like their dogs, and the inconveniences are worth it to them. Is it so hard to imagine that someone might feel the same way--or even more so--about a human child?

Dear Abigail,
You make an excellent point. I cannot imagine NOT wishing, if the circumstances were right, that I could open my home to just one more dog. You might enjoy my theological reflections on beagle ownership here: http://tinyurl.com/4qd6yg

Thanks for pointing out that there are people who feel that way about children. I'm sure you are right! It's incumbent on me to attempt the act of imaginative sympathy that would permit me to understand them.

Wow. We have a cat named "Ratzinger," which is really more appropriate, when you think about it. He hasn't zung any rats lately, but he did present us with a lovely dead chipmunk this morning.

As for being able to imagine enjoying having a whole bunch of children--I don't think most unmarried men can. That's why, as you point out, God gave them other motives for reproducing.

John ...
Can you post a citation on this ... its fascinating and I would like to be able to correctly cite it IF I use it.

Without endorsing all Dr. Abernethy's many strong, well-informed opinions on a variety of subjects, I can recommend Ggoose look at this article: http://tinyurl.com/468eh4

Here's a page compiling her publications on related topics:
http://tinyurl.com/3hjzvt