TO THE EDITOR:
Thank you for your good work — it is such a blessing to have a Catholic newspaper in our diocese. I felt inspired to note a point about a recent editorial on marriage. In your editorial on December 15, you accurately stated that marriage “was redefined a long time ago,” then blamed divorce as a root cause without ever mentioning contraception. But by separating procreation from marriage, contraception – the insidious original sin of American sexuality – is more directly responsible here. If we preach against homosexual “marriage” but are silent about contraception in heterosexual marriage, we risk being at best unconvincing and at worst hypocritical. The full Gospel of Life both condemns any form of Adam’s and Eve’s choosing to act as God (contraception, divorce, redefinition of marriage, abortion, etc.) while celebrating the radical openness to God’s grace that echoes Mary’s “Fiat” and Christ’s “Thy will be done.” Catholics’ protestations about our society’s ever-more-radical distortions of sexuality, procreation, and marriage are inconsistent and, in a sense, dishonest, if we still don’t have the courage to preach and obey this “hard saying” ourselves.
Richard Beyer, Providence
