While researching the Catholic Church's forbiddance on the use of artificial contraception (birth control) from many perspectives, it has been determined the Catholic indoctrination is incapable of persuading reason in its favor pertaining to this subject. The Catholic Church's rationale is to emphasize obedience over influence. This discipline is profoundly "un-Catholic". Are Catholics expected to keep quiet and not ask questions as to Church doctrine? The Church has always firmly declared its position on "the importance of reason and the joint dominion of human conscience" (Humane Vitae 17). Clearly, the Catholic Church's successive insistence on the truth, their truth, of its instruction regarding artificial contraception is firmly established through authoritarianism rather than reason. The issue for the Catholic Church, as it stands on artificial contraception, is more about preserving the illusion of supreme knowledge than revealing the truth itself. This paper will !

provide background and documented history on artificial contraception as it relates to the Catholic Church, as well as question doctrine and philosophy. (Most form their

As the issue of artificial contraception continually resurfaces, the people of the Catholic Church find themselves questioning / ignoring Papal authority. Abroad in France, where there is an abundance of Catholics, attendance fell dramatically from the 1960s to 16 percent. In the United States, between the years 1963 and 1973, according to the Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley, Catholics attending weekly mass dropped from 71 percent to 50 percent. By the end of the 1960s in the United States, 70 percent of Catholic women were using artificial birth control. Further, the belief among Catholics that a family should have as many children as possible was declining from 41 percent in 1963 to 18 percent by the mid 1970s. Subsequently, in the United States around the 1960's, fifty-one priests stated that they in good conscience could not support Pope Paul's ruling on birth control. In Washington D.C., Cardinal Patrick O'Boyle warned them against false ideas and of becoming deserters of their faith. Some of these priests were forbidden to hear confessions, and others were forbidden to preach or teach. Eventually, most of the renegade priests retracted their nonconformity, but twenty-five of them left the Catholic Church permanently.

s as valid today as it was yesterday; it will be the same tomorrow and always, because it does not imply a precept of the human law but is the expression of a law which is natural and divine." Pope Pius XII was under the impression that the teaching of the Catholic Church on artificial contraception was always the same.

As established by Pope John XXIII, within his encyclical, Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), artificial birth control is "any action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act [sexual intercourse], or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible". This includes sterilization, condoms and other barrier methods, spermicides, coitus interruptus (withdrawal), the pill, and all other methods of artificial contraception" (14). Correspondingly, birth control is the conscious decision of when a couple will have children in a relationship. The most obvious way to control the number of pregnancies in a relationship is to control the number of times you have sexual intercourse, right? Wrong, in a loving relationship, there is bound to be strong sexual attraction between partners and any attempt to control when couples should and should not have sexual intercourse in a marriage wo!

Within the "Scholatic Period" (11th to 15th centuries), the scholastic writers affirmed the goodness of sexual pleasure, provided it was not independent of reason. The primary procreative end of marriage and human sexuality was also affirmed. Their understanding of sexuality was based on the philosophy of Aristotle, teaching that "a man's semen was the active principle in transmitting life, while the female was merely a passive receptacle who provided the medium for the fetus" (Dorr 125). Manuals for moral and pastoral guidance based on Scholastic theology encouraged leniency toward couples who struggled with sexual impulses.

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