Catholic Medical Quarterly Volume 65(3) August 2015

CHRISTIANS: BREAKING THE BONDS OF OUR CONTRACEPTIVE REVOLUTION

A speech given by Dr Tom Ward at the Moscow International Forum.
The Large Family and the Future of Humanity 10-11 September 2014 Interdenominational Round Table. Moderator Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin. Chairman of the Synodal Department of the Moscow Patriarchate on Interactions of Church and Society.

Jasna Gora

In November 2012 I had the privilege of organising the British stage of the Pilgrimage of the Black Madonna from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean in defence of life and the family. It was overwhelmingly the largest pro- family / pro- life event in the United Kingdom for many years. It enjoyed unprecedented cooperation of Orthodox and Catholics throughout the Kingdom.

I wish to thank the Charity Fund for the Protection of Family, Motherhood and Childhood (Russia), Human Life International and HLI Poland and the Orthodox Centre for Pro-life Activity (Russia) for this spiritual gift to Great Britain.

I believe that our Forum on the Large Family and the Future of Humanity is the fruit of From Ocean to Ocean.

Lambeth Palace - geograph.org.uk - 343862 In 1930 a moral volcano erupted in England. Its epicentre was just opposite Parliament at Lambeth Palace, the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual head of the Church of England.

The occasion was the World Conference of Anglican Bishops at which birth control advocate Helena Wrighton gave an address.

The Conference of Bishops concluded: "Where there is clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method must be decided on Christian principles....the Conference agrees that other methods (other than abstinence ) may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles."

For the first time in two thousand years of Christian history a Christian body had morally sanctioned the artificial separation of love from life by the use of contraceptives in marriage. Only ten years before the same body had condemned contraceptives as unnatural, morally and religiously dangerous, a danger to the nation and an incentive to vice, basically the position of Luther, Calvin and Wesley.

There had been a revolution.

Within about 35 years almost all Protestant churches in Europe and America had accepted contraception and many had come to accept IVF and abortion as compatible with Christian ethics. But to me as a family doctor living in the real world things looked different. I had seen how contraception facilitates extra marital sex, promiscuity, the inability to commit to marriage, marital breakdown, family disintegration and of course abortion. A World Culture of Death was taking place.

  • 1.7 billion surgical abortions worldwide.
  • 350 to 750 million chemical abortions in US alone due to the abortifacient mode of action of the Pill.
  • 30 to 150 million unborn lives lost by IVF Yes all estimated figures but terrible.

Archbishop Rowen Williams the former spiritual head of the Church of England believes that since in contraception non pro-creative sex is morally acceptable it must logically follow that homosexual acts are morally justifiable and might reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage. He states:.

"In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures."
"An active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness."

But in the real world same-sex legislation outlaws the exercise of the parent's primary right to educate, the teacher's right to teach Christian sexual morality as objective truth and the vulnerable child's right to have an adoptive mother and father. And same-sex "marriage" is now legal in 16 countries.

So which is true? Is contraception in accordance with Christian principles (Lambeth Conference 1930) or is it a religiously dangerous incentive to vice (Lambeth Conference 1920)? Does an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex (perhaps Sodomy), reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage? To my mind the answer has been given by the Rev. Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“Our concern is to raise an alarm about the entire edifice of modern sexual morality and to acknowledge that millions of evangelicals have unwittingly aided and abetted that moral revolution by an unreflective and unfaithful embrace of the contraceptive revolution.”

But it is not only Anglicans and Evangelicals who have been seduced by the Contraceptive Revolution, the great majority of Catholics clerical and lay have embraced this revolution and many have quite logically moved on to become sympathetic to the homosexual agenda and pro-choice on abortion. Some senior clerics state for example:

  • "the Church is not against birth control at all. " Cardinal Walter Kasper
  • The eminent French bishop who has written that France's massive pro-marriage demonstrations Manif pour Tous perpetrated “violence against homosexuals.”
  • New York's Cardinal Dolan who welcomes homosexualist participation banners and all to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
  • Bishop Galantino, the new secretary-general of the powerful Italian Bishops' Conference who believes that: “In the past we have concentrated too much on abortion and euthanasia. It mustn’t be this way .."

Such reckless folly!

Contrast the words of these clerics with those of the realist, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago:

"I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilisation, as the church has done so often in human history."

In my speech at the Plenary Session I said that never before in the history of free men has our human right to the primary educators of our children been removed. This loss of freedom began with contraception.

 Ladies and gentlemen contraception has caused Evangelicals and Catholics to stray widely from our common Christian moral roots. Together we must return to them. Contraception is not compatible with Christian principles and we now must say it.

Dr.Thomas Ward
Vice-President and Founder of the
National Association of Catholic Families