I have a tendency to begin posts on sex by stressing my own moral shortcomings. Odd that I should spontaneously feel this will enhance my credibility, isn’t it?
The progressive puritan believes one should not criticize a sin if one indulges in it oneself; that would be hypocrisy. We Catholics are nearly the opposite, feeling it is better to criticize only one’s own sins or the sins to which one is prone. We feel more comfortable affirming moral demands whose burden or censure we ourselves share.
“Everybody commits sexual sins” is the punchline of jokes in the West going back to the Middle Ages. Our unchastity is a spiritual calamity, to be sure, but it is also very humbling, very civilizing. Who can boast?
For that matter, even those who do remain chaste, even in the hardest case of celibacy, feel little temptation to brag. Really, sexual temptations are weak, much weaker than the compulsions of pain or fear of imminent death. We admire those who defy the latter because of the strength of what they resisted. We give in to illicit sexual urges not because they are so strong but because our will is so weak. We didn’t really want to resist. If I had believed death or mutilation would follow my indulgence, I would have had no trouble resisting.
Sodomy is sodomy. In the eyes of the Lord, getting a blow job from your wife is the same as going to a gay bathhouse and engaging in buggery with multiple disease-ridden strangers. If we use God’s categories rather than modern man’s, most of us will be found to be in the same state as the homosexuals. Which means…we are in a position to judge! Heterosexual sin is far worse, because far more widespread, and I suspect heterosexuals are more likely to murder their children in utero, a sin God abhors much more than the sexual sins it enables. But we heterosexual perverts have this going for us: we’re not trying to persecute the Church for telling the truth about our transgressions, not trying to bully her into telling us accommodating lies. This is our little virtue–“tolerance”, one might call it–and a proof to the homosexual perverts that it can be done with no great spiritual heroism.
Morality–why do we so automatically associate it with sexual issues? Most of my duties have to do with taking care of my family and with my job. However, I never have to be motivated solely, or even mostly, by a sense of moral duty when it comes to those. I could ask myself, as a thought experiment, “How badly could I neglect my children and get away with it?” or “How little work could I do without getting fired?”, but even the thoughts anger me. I don’t want to neglect my children. I want them to flourish. First because I love them. Strip away that, and I still have a selfish, proprietary desire to see them do well. Strip away even that, and I still have a selfish desire not to think of myself as a bad parent. Strip away even that, and we are (fortunately) integrated well enough in our community that the kids couldn’t do too badly before it would be noticed. So, really, I’ve never have to motivate myself to care for my kids by appealing to bare moral principle. Affection, vanity, social expectations, and morality all work together to make any alternative unthinkable.
What are the consequences of sexual sins? But what makes them sins is the very altering of the act so that it doesn’t have consequences. Here, the moral law must stand naked, and its frailty in our souls is revealed.
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Must? Not must, but does. It doesn’t have to be the case that sexual sins call down no social or legal opprobrium.
More generally, I think this essay leans in an unpleasantly Frank Meyer direction. The only way we can be *really* virtuous is to set society up so that only our virtue makes us behave virtuously.
Actually the church used to give different penances for different forms of homosexual acts. Lesbian acts got the lightest penance, then sensual touching between men. Buggery, being “the sin against nature”, got the strictest penances.
> It doesn’t have to be the case that sexual sins call down no social or legal opprobrium.
In principle, I agree with you, but practically speaking it’s going to be difficult to make there be consequences for me engaging in unnatural acts with my wife. At best, laws and mores can keep me from boasting about it or advocating for it. This is their main purpose, to own the public space.
Spreading disease is a sin. One scenario is disorder leading to death, disease, and no or seriously damaged future generations. The other scenario may not be ideal, but is still within a marriage, one where God, who likes to call Himself the God of the Living, has a chance of seeing more of the living born into the world.
Or to put it another way, if some random reader with different preferences from yours is reading this, I would encourage him not to become fatalistic, declare the two scenarios equal, and run off to the bathhouse.
Bonald,
Practically speaking, it would be difficult for laws to attach consequences to abuse (short of killing or maiming) of children under kindergarten age. Yet I still think that social disapproval has an effect, by making people feel bad if they engage in such an act.
Laws have a teaching effect, and in this way can regulate even truly private behavior.
August,
Sodomy is just as bad in itself regardless of whether or not the parties are married. Of course, engaging in sodomy in an organized setting, or publicly celebrating it takes on an added gravity of scandal, but the essential evil of it remains the same.
Of course, this is no reason for anyone to engage in any sort of it.
You write: “We give in to illicit sexual urges not because they are so strong but because our will is so weak.” I would say that our will is weakened in this case. Sexual desire is perhaps unique in its power to paralyze the moral will. Other temptations force one to consciously rationalize the transgression, but sexual temptation simply bypasses that whole mechanism. That’s why people try to excuse themselves by saying that they “lost control.” This may be part of the reason sexual immorality becomes the test of moral fiber. It is certainly why the injunction to avoid “occasions of sin” is most relevant to sexual morality.
Sodomy is sodomy. In the eyes of the Lord, getting a blow job from your wife is the same as going to a gay bathhouse and engaging in buggery with multiple disease-ridden strangers.
Only as sodomy. Willfully endangering the lives of others adds the sin of injustice to the strictly sexual component of the sin.
AR,
I am pointing out the additional sins a visit to the bathhouse would no doubt contain, which is precisely why this sort of argument does absolutely no good whatsoever- people can tell the totality of the two scenarios lead to different outcomes, while you are stuck basically trying to explain an Aristotelian essence abstracted from the different sex acts in the two different scenarios, which are the same, because we say so.
I grant that there are more and less reckless forms of sodomy.
There is a tendency of Christians to dodge the accusation of picking on homosexuals by pointing out that we condemn all sexual sins equally. More astute Christians like Lydia McGrew point out that, in fact, not all sexual sins are equally disordered, and it is not completely accurate to say that heterosexual fornication is no different than homosexual fornication. However, the average heterosexual is not just someone who “jumped the gun” and had knowledge of his or her spouse before the wedding. The average heterosexual is at some point in his or her life also a masturbator, a contracepter, and a sodomite. One can argue that they (okay, we) are just as much perverts as the homosexuals. Why does that matter? Because it redirects the conversation. We’re not talking about them; we’re talking about us.
So, really, I’ve never have to motivate myself to care for my kids by appealing to bare moral principle. Affection, vanity, social expectations, and morality all work together to make any alternative unthinkable.
Supernatural Caritas perfects natural philia. I don’t think that God expects us to live every moment of our day in high minded principle. Some things do come to us naturally, and with without effort, yet it appears that nature is deficient, by itself, in acheiving lasting happiness. It comes naturally, to most of us to, indulge our children, yet Caritas puts limits on indulgence so that we don’t spoil them.
Likewise with sexual acts, Caritas perfects Eros. Possessed with Caritas, a Christian would not want to act in a way which is contra it. It’s not about the consequences more about the nature of the act that flows from the Christian being.
This ‘scholastic’ style of reasoning (taking revelation and extending it by extrapolation and interpolation to create hard rules and judgments via the application to infinite reality of a finite abstract logic) was probably the most significant reason for the Great Schism of Eastern and Western Catholicism c AD 1000. When scholasticism is applied to sex, as above in defining sodomy, the result is a reductio ad absurdum; which ought to send you back to examine the assumptions and limitations of this approach – rather than accepting inferential consequences which our hearts tell us are ridiculous.
Typical of modernists, Bruce presents no arguments against the scholastic position, only ridicule and appeal to emotion.
AR,
YOu can take emotion too far but didn’t Jesus appeal to the heart? Didn’t the pharisees appeal to reason?
Jesus never said anything to the effect of “We feel this way, therefore X”.
Granted, neither did the Pharisees.
When scholasticism is applied to sex, as above in defining sodomy, the result is a reductio ad absurdum; which ought to send you back to examine the assumptions and limitations of this approach – rather than accepting inferential consequences which our hearts tell us are ridiculous.
But whose hearts are you talking about? I’ve never heard my heart telling me this was ridiculous.
We’re talking about Bruce C’s most wonderful heart of course.
In addition to being logically irrelevant, Appeals to Emotion also have the benefit of being completely unreflective, since it’s impossible that anyone might not share the feelings of the speaker.
This ‘scholastic’ style of reasoning (taking revelation and extending it by extrapolation and interpolation to create hard rules and judgments via the application to infinite reality of a finite abstract logic) was probably the most significant reason for the Great Schism of Eastern and Western Catholicism c AD 1000.
No, it wasn’t.
which ought to send you back to examine the assumptions and limitations of this approach
I might question my assimptions if the founder of my religion was a known huckster who bedded 14 year old girls.
I might question my assumptions if the founder of my religion was a known huckster who bedded 14 year old girls.
^
“Founder of my religion was a known huckster who bedded 14 year old girls.” Who is this?
Joseph Smith
I’m curious why you think this. These sentences are verging on the sociopathic. Psychologically normal humans most certainly do suffer for violating norms even when nobody sees them do so. You don’t? Really?
For example, getting myself to the point where I could think “blacks are stupid, impulsive, and violent” in the privacy of my own head without feeling any guilt was not easy or quick. Sexual sins, by contrast, cause me not the least twinge of visceral guilt, whether or not anybody knows about them. It really is only the intellectual knowledge that this is wrong which restrains me. What you are taking to be inherent is culturally conditioned and obviously so. Surely you knew some old people when you were a kid? People who told nigger jokes easily but blushed at the least mention of sexual sins? People are born hard-coded for morality. They are not born hard-coded for any particular morality.
The fact that sociopathy seems like a reasonable frame of analysis for social phenomena is, itself, a consequence of modernity.
Very refreshing to hear straight words
In a way, I like this statement. It’s nice in that it wards off the farce that is “analytic philosophy.” What point is there, really, in saying all those words and making all those deductions when, at the end, what’s really in charge are our emotions: our feelings about what is intuitive or plausible or absurd or whatever? And not even our emotions are really in charge. Which stimuli set off which emotions is determined by what Hollywood was selling when we were 12.
It’s a beautiful argument in favor of Thomism, really.
According to Maistre, Bloy and a few other Catholic reactionaries, the consequences of sexual sins are the same as every other sins: they tilt the balance toward more evil and despair in the world. If your prayers can help people you don’t even know, your sins are hurting people the same way. We are at war, and you’re feeding the armies of our Adversary.
“Sodomy is sodomy. In the eyes of the Lord, getting a blow job from your wife is the same as going to a gay bathhouse and engaging in buggery with multiple disease-ridden strangers.” – Dude, if you really buy this cr@p you suffer from severe (and I mean SEVERE) mental problems. When you have sex with your wife you simply stick your d*ck into her and that’s it? LMAO. I suppose you two have sex with your clothes on as well, as seeing each other naked would also be a mortal sin. LMAO.
See what I mean?
No matter how many times I claim to be a pervert and a sinner, people still won’t believe me.
Just about anything is allowed as foreplay (anything anyone here is likely to be thinking of), but the seed has to go in the right place to avoid sin. Which, again, is not a rule I’m claiming to have always lived by. Just that any violation should exclude me and my partner from the Eucharist until Confession and a firm intention to avoid doing it again.
Question: do the people objecting to my equation of heterosexual oral sex with homosexual anal sex agree that they are sins of the same type, just not that they are of equal weight? Or do you not agree that they are sins of the same type, and perhaps that one is not a sin at all. (I imagine anyone here who approves of homosexual acts would actually not object to the equation. It might be the first thing I’ve ever written that they agree with.)
“Just about anything is allowed as foreplay”
The Church has been teaching that for about 5 minutes now. Amazing how we keep discovering that, once you stop and think about it, the Masons were right about pretty much everything all along. Thank goodness those guys came along to set us straight.
DrBill,
Is there anything to the contrary in previous Church teaching?
One way to approach this would be to consider the relationship rather than the act. I’m not going to pretend that I can square this with Church teaching, but put it out as speculative. A heterosexual relationship can be well-ordered to procreation, and yet include sexual acts that do not directly aim at that end. The unitive function of those acts can, indeed, support the general procreative aim of the relationship, although they will of course entail a “spilling” of seed. Another heterosexual relationship might spill nary one seed, and yet be in every other respect lethal to any child that might be conceived. The question is the scale at which we define the heterosexual act.
Raising children has led me to think that some sexual acts continue for a lifetime, or even that a fertile marriage is one long, multifaceted and unfolding sexual act. There is a kind of fornicator’s logic behind the notion that a sexual act has a duration of minutes, or perhaps hours, and that it is crowned by the orgasm. The crown of the sexual act is really a child, and its duration is the life of that child.
If we consider the nature of the relationship (which is to say the relationship as an extended act), it may be that some relationships preclude the possibility of sodomy. An argument for this might be similar (but not identical) to the argument that there can be no rape within marriage. The proven and ungrudging fertility of the relationship might, for instance, imputed to each “act” in the relationship. Conversely, it may be that an act becomes sodomitic in the context of certain types of relationships, including but not limited to homosexual relationships.
Obviously this will disgust the rigorists out there, and my opinion will cut no ice on doomsday, but I’m personally inclined to look with an indulgent eye on couples who generally do the right thing. If they get married and stay married and have children and raise those children, I’m not too concerned with the particulars.
Charlton is telling you the truth. Take a break from this stuff and go read Palamas. Or google essence and energies. It is completely different from this particular point, but the underlying understanding of reality will help you come back around to this point and see how ridiculous it is- eventually.
I do wonder if the reason this continues is narcissism. If I ‘redirect the conversation’ to make myself the subject of it, what have I achieved?
Certainly, the narcissist’s goal occurs instantly, while the Christian goal seems much less likely.
it may be that some relationships preclude the possibility of sodomy
It may be that some lines of reasoning destroy all rational thought.
> Take a break from this stuff and go read Palamas. Or google essence and energies.
Any introduction in particular that you recommend?
A.R. @ I’d say the idea is similar to what medieval theologians called “implicit faith,” whereby a worldly but baptized resident of Christendom partook of the faith that was more manifest in his neighbors. Of course this sort of holistic thinking outraged the Protestants, but it isn’t unreasonable to ask what the unit of moral analysis actually is. If we take Bonald’s licit act that winds up in the right hole, and divide it into smaller parts, we will certainly get many segments that look like sheer lust and lewdness. If we aggregate his illicit act with a series of acts, some licit and some not, we get a whole that has some redeeming quality. That’s all I’m saying.
I’d say the idea is similar to what medieval theologians called “implicit faith,” whereby a worldly but baptized resident of Christendom partook of the faith that was more manifest in his neighbors.
The modern affirmation of the ordinary has changed this dynamic. Now everything has to be about family life whereas in the past contempus mundi was the standard. Modern living conditions are a double edged sword. My priest often talks about how for all of its harshness premodern life did at least discpline the passions (this is also why premodern asceticism was so extreme, life was already hard). Us fat and happy moderns are now constantly exposed to external stimuli in an unprecedented way. We are easily manipulated and often bored with the sheer drudgery of it all and so it is very difficult to build up self control because our entire economic order is predicated on enflaming the passions.
This is one of Catholicism’s greatest virtures (modern Eastern so-called “Orthodoxy” takes it cue more from Protestantism here) if anything we need to be more anti sex and more anti (modern) family.
One can see why medieval theologians were so concerned about the ability to find the correct way to discretize human acts. At one point, I read an essay about Thomist ethics that made the identification of a discrete human act the centerpiece of the whole system. It’s hard to declare any act intrinsically evil if the demarcation of an act is arbitrary. And Catholic theologians tend to be very keen on ruling classes of actions completely out of bounds. Whether this is or is not appropriate in a given case strongly affects how we are to think about it.
@DrBill,
“The Church has been teaching that for about 5 minutes now.”
More precisely, Christopher West has been teaching that the Church has been teaching that for about 5 minutes now!
I.S.E. @ You are right to say that the vocation of family life is overemphasized nowadays, but I wouldn’t blame this on families hogging the spotlight. The other vocations have simply withered away. Apart from a couple of elderly sisters in pantsuits, there are no nuns in my fairly large parish; and the men who have the contempus mundi to take a vow of celibacy could drive to mass in a Smart Car. To the extent these vocations exist, I am happy to hear them honored, but it should not surprise us that a church full of families is preoccupied with the problems of the vocation of family life.
I think you may be oversimplifying Christian asceticism. We are not called to be fakirs or Cathars. We are simply enjoined to eschew the idolatry that places the creation before the creator. I do, however, agree that our moral exhortations might place more emphasis on the sin of gluttony. And not just etherialized gluttony, but gluttony of the good old stuff-your-face-with-mashed-potatos sort.
Energetic Procession hasn’t been updated in years, but, if memory serves, I learned a bit there.
I bought a book too, called
Gregory Palamas: The Triads (Classics of Western Spirituality)
by Gregory Palamas and Nicholas Gendle.
It is introductory. I wanted it to be longer.
The Orthodox do have problems with scholasticism.
Lossky is good too.
> The Church has been teaching that for about 5 minutes now.
It seems like a logical consequence of the Church being more precise about what she objects to in birth control. Nulla poena sine lege. Now that the law is more precise, there is a broader set of things we know we can’t get in trouble for.
You mean like “Let he who says that blowjobs aren’t blowjobs be anathema?” Probably not.. Some things are just kinda hard to anticipate.
About what?
“Is there anything to the contrary in previous Church teaching?”
Yes there is. In Noonan’s Book, Contraception, which I read a while ago, there was some Twelfth Century Pope who explicitly thought that having sex without the intent to have children was wrong. Indeed, the “unitive” aspect of the sexual act was only taught as officially legitimate from the 1930’s onwards. So yes, some things change.
As for dissing Scholasticism, I think it’s important to differentiate the method of scholasticism from it’s content, i.e, what’s been handed down by it. The problem with scholasticism is that the conclusion is only as good as the premise upon which it stands. And a lot of the conclusions which we have accepted as “tradition” have their basis in the medieval’s understanding of the natural world. The Church’s teaching on Usury changed as did it’s understanding of the nature and role of money.
Also, from the perspective of the modern world, there are circumstances which were simply not dealt with in the Bible, and therefore a source of moral anxiety for those trying to act correctly. I mean how do you evaluate the moral nature of organ transplants? I think Scholasticism has its use here.
As for the moral equivalence between a blowjob and homosex, the traditional understanding of sexual morality would certainly agree that both are mortal, but it would not mistake that they are equivalent sins.
Bill,
Removing the essential pet of the act does change its nature.
Slumlord,
Someone somewhere said something isn’t valid for any argument. Your false assertions concerning usury and contraception have been refuted countless times by Zippy and others, so please put up or shut up, as the saying goes.
August,
The first two links you posted actually directly refute much of what the theoretical Mormon peddles here and other places-
https://energeticprocession.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/contra-mundum-athanasius-and-the-lds-on-deification/
The second link counsels Orthodox to not attack like the theorectical Mormon does above-
scholastic’ style of reasoning (taking revelation and extending it by extrapolation and interpolation to create hard rules and judgments via the application to infinite reality of a finite abstract logic)
Pitting reason and philosophy against tradition is not only not in accord with what the Eastern Fathers taught it is not a sound basis for engaging modernism as it allows modernists to claim reason and exile religion to the realm of the irrational.
The second link also attacks Thomism for arguing (among other things) that God’s essence bears a resemblence to creatures. For the theorectical Mormon though this is a feature not a bug! His whole schtick against Thomism is that medieval Catholicism supposedly obscured a prior Hebraic notion of an anthropomorphic God with a literal human body with the remote God of the philosophers. There are a lot of other frankly bizarre criticisms in that link (I don’t know where the quote about cosmic dualism comes from) it would have helped if the author could actually cite where he thinks those ideas come from.
Anyway all you have demonstrated is that the theoretical Mormon is hopelessly muddled on all this, equivocating on fundamentally different concepts from different traditions is bound to produce only confusion.
@AR
I said nothing about contraception, and Zippy is pushing against the historical record. The licitness of lending out money at commercial rates of interest is a matter of historical fact, as is the Church’s change in position on the matter.
This is Bonald’s blog so I’m keeping things civil.
As I said, put up or shut up.
That is a dog that will never bark.
The reason modernists never produce an actual magisterial statement to back up the claim that usury doctrine has changed (and therefore profit from mutuum loans is licit) is because there has never actually been a magisterial statement that the usury doctrine has changed. And the reason modernists avoid and attempt to obscure the distinction between mutuum loans and other kinds of contracts is because once those differences become clear, their whole progressive house of cards collapses.
AR:
Exactly right.
Suppose the act is ‘mowing the lawn’. Suppose I fill up the mower, get a drink, put on earmuffs, and then mow the lawn. Have I not mowed the lawn just because of the surrounding more superficial preparatory acts?
Suppose I say I am going to mow the lawn, but before I start the engine I remove the mower blade. I proceed to run the deliberately de-bladed mower over the grass and claim to have mowed the lawn; but have I actually mowed the lawn?
Some behaviors (like sexual intercourse) are more probabilistic in outcome, but this doesn’t really change anything.
Suppose I propose to play the lottery. I buy a ticket and throw it away because I like the thrill of buying the ticket but I am fearful of the responsibility associated with winning. Have I played the lottery?
As usual things are really a lot less ambiguous and difficult to understand in most cases than modern people, with their radical turn to subjectivism and physicalism, like to pretend.
If you want to cut through all the BS you just have to adopt some form of naive realism, which is a term that modern philosophers use to refer to ‘sanity’.
I fear there is something to the usury-sodomy analogy. (There’s a reason Dante put them together.) It’s not that the Church used to vaguely condemn something, but then her understanding became more precise and certain things thought to be immoral were seen to be licit. It’s more that the Church used to condemn something specific, and then she became vague. Now very few people really know what usury is (I sure don’t), and fewer and fewer know what sodomy is. Specific prohibitions are being replaced by vague requests not to take things too far or not to do things you can’t convince yourself are “loving”. I fear Catholic sexual morality will become as meaningless and platitudinal as Catholic economic morality.
Usury is simple and clear enough for a child to understand: when you lend and your borrower personally guarantees to repay the loan, don’t ever charge interest. Charging interest is usury.
Personally guaranteed loans may only be charity or friendship: never economic self interest.
Agreements where property is the only security, as opposed to contracts backed by personal guarantees, are not usury when they make a profit.
What took centuries of relentless work was making something simple and clear seem difficult and obscure.
Call me a simpleton but I always thought that sodomy was what it says in the dictionary: sexual intercourse involving anal or oral copulation.
What I understand Zippy, Bonald, and others to be saying is that sodomy is really the stripping of the sexual act of its procreative ends. Therefore, if in the course of sexual intercourse my wife and I engage in oral or anal copulation, but “finish in the right place” so to speak, this is not sodomy.
Perhaps I misunderstand. I thought sodomy was sinful because it is degrading in addition to being sterile. Thus, even if the sterility aspect of the act is removed, it would still be sinful.
Donnie:
I am not suggesting that “anything goes as long as consummation is done properly”. I don’t believe that to be true any more than “any contract is licit as long as it isn’t strictly usury”. I expect that similar casuistry would apply, to wit, usurious mentality or sodomitical mentality.
But it isn’t a subject I’ve thought about much.
Although it wasn’t who I was thinking of, Innocent XI condemned the notion that sex done for pleasure–even if done the lawful way–is not sinful.
By the way, he came from a family of bankers.
slumlord:
Nothing wrong with being a banker and making non recourse loans for profit.
Magisterial citations are best done as actual quotes, and should’t be taken seriously at all without at least a citation of what document is being paraphrased.
Heck, I just helped a guy negotiate a buyout of a small leasing company myself. The whole business is equipment loans – non recourse ones.
Slumlord’s claim prompted me to do some Googling.
According to this blog Pope Innocent XI condemned sixty-five propositiones laxorum moralistarum (“propositions of relaxed morality”) that were being pedaled by the Jesuits at the time on March 4, 1679. Condemned proposition #9 reads the following:
This also seems consistent with St. Thomas Aquinas’s take on the matter:
– Sum Suppl, Q 49, Art. 6, co.
So it would seem that whenever the marital act is done for pleasure alone it is a venial sin.
Also, Slumlord, you would do well to read over condemned propositions 41 and 42 of the same list:
That supports Slumlord’s point, surely. Zippy, what magisterial statements support your distinction between mutuum and non-recourse loans? So far as I know, from Gratian to Innocent XI the rigorist position on usury was that any profit on any loan was usury: If you loan five dollars you get five dollars back, if you loan a truck you can get a truck back, etc.
Roepke,
When I Google the word “mutuum” the first result I get is this:
The definition a mutuum has not changed at all.
Therefore, determining what, specifically, is being referred to in any Magisterial text regarding usury is as simple as looking up the Latin.
Roepke:
I document a number of the pertinent Magisterial texts in my usury FAQ:
https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/usury-faq-or-money-on-the-pill/
If Slumlord’s point is simply that a marital act done for pleasure alone is a venial sin, then yes. But he seems to be suggesting that the Church has changed her teaching on this, that the Church has judged a marital act done for pleasure alone to be not sinful at all. In that case then, as with usury, he must procure a Magisterial document showing when and where the Church has done this.
@Donnie
The best I could do is something from an obscure Vatican document
“If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained“
Slumlord,
I missed the part where the it says that the martial act exercised “for pleasure alone” falls under the heading of “well-grounded reasons for spacing births.”
@Donnie
thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained
Since I’m a helpful guy, I’ve highlighted it for you. I suppose you could do the act to waste the time, but here’s a medical opinion, most people do it for the pleasure of it.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/only
Slumlord,
I’m still waiting for you to point out the contradiction.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that there can only be two reasons to engage in marital intercourse: pleasure and progeny.
Fortunately for the rest of us we do not live in a two variable world.
@AR
The essential part of a blowjob is ejaculating in someone’s mouth? Did someone notice this more than five minutes ago?