The People Speak Out

Local voices connecting globally

This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.  (Pope Francis)

Canon Law 212 calls upon the laity to speak up:

2 - The Christian faithful are free to make known to the pastors of the Church their needs, especially spiritual ones, and their desires.

§3. - According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.

The Church’s teaching on contraception is fairly complex and largely based on the mythical texts of the Sacrificial Temple Cult of a late primitive Bronze Age tribe. This is the cult that Jesus would have been familiar with since his time was before the destruction of the Second Temple 70 AD Judaism we might be slightly familiar with today, a completely different religion. Judaism, like many Christian Churches – Catholic, Anglicanism, Methodism for example – has many varied forms of practice, Reformed Judaism being totally different to Orthodox Judaism. The teaching on contraception is completely inappropriate I believe. This is because the Church sees itself as our mother caring for our souls, which does, it seems give the Church rights over our sexuality. This is a huge mistake since it is not recognised that children grow up and have their own right to dialogue and conversation with the Trinity and relation to their God. This relation is to be conducted with prayer and individual concerns and is not a spectator sport for Canon Law or others. The horror stories I could recount, for myself, and others make the Church’s misguided teaching very difficult and even dangerous, since unless you are a WIFE, then insight is not only absent, but harmful in its ignorance of the frailty and dangers, many women and families are subject to, if sensible contraceptive planning is not part of the loving, caring and couple communion, within marriage.

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