This view. I could add in passing, has had a strong influence in the development of a canonical jurisprudence that distinguishes between the “right to procreative intercourse” and the “right to communion of life”. Ultimately it is the same view as that which stresses the difference between the “biological” and the “personalist” aspects of marriage.
2.
We are obviously not speaking here of the gift of self which a person may make to God.
3.
In this way, in fact, the uniqueness of the decision to marry a particular person is reaffirmed in each marital act. By every single act of true intercourse, each spouse is confirmed in the unique status of being husband or wife to the other.
4.
The “language of the body” is, of course, a key expression in Pope John Paul II's writings on sexuality and marriage.
5.
“Contraception contradicts the truth of conjugal love”.Pope John Paul II, Address, Sept. 17, 1983.
6.
This still remains true even in cases where, for some reason or another, the spouses cannot have children. Their union in such cases, just as their union during the wife's pregnancy, draws its deepest meaning from the fact that both their conjugal act and the intention behind it are “open to life”, even though no life can actually result from the act. It is their basic openness to life which gives the act its meaning and dignity, just as the absence of this openness is what undermines the dignity and meaning of the act when the spouses, without serious reason, deliberately limit their marital intercourse to the infertile periods.
7.
Obviously we are not referring here to those occasions in which, out of justice to a third party, one of the spouses is under an obligation to observe some secret, e.g., of a professional nature. Fulfillment of such an obligation is in no way a violation of the rights of married intimacy.
8.
If it is not sexuality which each spouse in contraceptive intercourse gives to or takes from the other, what does each one, in fact, actually take or give? In what might be termed the better cases, it is a form of love, divorced from sexuality. In other cases, it is merely pleasure, also, be it noted, divorced from sexuality. In one case or the other, contraceptive spouses always deny themselves sexuality, Their marriage, deprived of a true sexual relationship, suffers in consequence.
9.
Cf. the author's essay, “Marriage in Crisis”, inOsservatore Romano (English edition), Sept. 24, 1976.
10.
“Donum Vitae” (“The Gift of Life”), Instruction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Feb. 22, 1987.
11.
In contraception, man and woman do not become one flesh, they do not know one another sexually or humanly, and there is no fruit of knowledge. In artificial fertilization, they do not know each other either; there is fruit, however, but it is the fruit of scientific or technological knowledge, not the fruit of spousal, sexual carnal knowledge. It is this less-than-human aspect to it which turns it into forbidden fruit.
12.
Even in relation to the very child whom they seek, their attitude shows a possessiveness which goes beyond the proper rights or expectations of parenthood.
