The story below comes from the blog MomsRising. I've left in a fair amount of argumentation because it seems to be integral to the story/personal experience.
Having been a lay minister in the RCIA program and a catechism
teacher for years I am very well informed about the Catholic Church’s
teaching on birth control. I have read West, Everett and the Theology of
the Body.
My husband and I did use NFP for a number of years until I acquired
an ovarian tumor after our second child and had to have a radical
hysterectomy/oophorectomy. Since then I have been able to analyze church
teaching through both a pastoral lens and from the standpoint of no
longer being personally emotionally involved in the teaching because I
no longer have the equipment that the teaching applies to.
My first experience was that having relations with my husband became
stress free after my hysterectomy. This was very freeing for me
personally and for our marriage and it flew in the face of what I had
been taught about non-procreative sex. My husband and I have been
married for 18 years and our bond is stronger than ever since the
hysterectomy. It made me wonder why I got to enjoy stress free marital
relations when all of my friends of the same age were required by the
Church to stress over intimate relations with their spouse. It began to
seem very unfair to me. I would hear couples’ stories of struggle,
depression, and in some cases the destruction of their marriages from
this teaching. It was also an irony that I saw that the best marriages
in my parish, the ones that are still standing strong, are the marriages
in which artificial birth control was the couples’ decision without
question from the very beginning. My experiences have not panned out to
look like what West and Everett said they should.
What I have found is that despite the arguments of West, Everett, and
TTB the Church has failed to address the very real fact that most
Catholics’ consciences are actually very well informed about this
teaching despite what the Holy Father would like to believe. I have
worked with these couples and families and these people know why the
teaching about birth control is what it is, and they do not see that it
is transparent to reason, so they have rejected it.
It would be one thing to say that 10% of Catholics reject this
teaching and therefore need to have their consciences corrected, but it
is entirely something else to take basically the entire Church and say
the entire Church needs to be educated. From my experience this is
simply not the case.
That is not to say that the Church is a democracy, but rather that if
the Church is so poor at persuading people to follow this teaching then
something may be going on that the Holy Spirit may be involved in. The
Church leadership refuses to pay attention to this and it is suffering
the consequences. From my experience this is not because priests are not
preaching the teaching, because I have always lived in a parish were it
is taught every weekend and the more it is taught the more the parish
rejects it. Telling people not to do things because the Church says so
is not an effective argument and year after year it becomes less and
less effective.
The argument that the laity are not informed is often the lazy
argument that Church leaders like to propagate so that they don’t have
to fully look at why their teaching is not being accepted and do the
hard work behind this, such as humbly admit their error.
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