The Impossibility of Having Children?

WE HAVE seen clearly that it is a “serious matter” to prevent conception by any voluntary positive act and if full knowledge and complete consent of the will are present it constitutes a mortal sin. If the marital act is performed, then God may not in any way—by the opposition of the parents—be hindered from creating a soul.

But we cannot, considering our burdens, increase the number of our children!

That may be, responds the Moral Law; such a case is far from being imaginary. But you do not enter upon marriage only for enjoyment. In the plan of Divine Providence, pleasure is the accomplishment or the result of duty fulfilled. To separate the pleasure from the duty, to seek the first while evading the second is to go counter to the divine plan. Sexual pleasure presupposes the normal exercise of the generative function, the acceptance of the resultant burdens for which it is, as Cardinal Mercier expresses it, “the providential payment.”

But when you consider the intimacy of life together, how can we refrain for any length of time at all without giving ourselves to each other?

There is every reason to believe that, without prayer and recourse to the sacraments, you are right. But what is your supernatural program? What are you doing to rise above the senses, to moderate the flesh?

Can’t we choose those times when fertility is least probable? Yes, if you have a sufficient reason, as you seem to have.

And the necessity of having to practice prudent and courageous continence several days each month will in itself force you to a certain and meritorious generosity.

Even that is not possible for us; for then we would have to renounce marital intimacies.

Of course. But nowhere has it been said that marriage is a state where one can allow himself every liberty suggested by his caprice without exercising any judgment.

That is said nowhere; at least, not in any sane and honest books on morality. Married persons are too quick to think that, because they have not chosen “the state of perfection” in absolute virginity, the great virtues are not for them.

Even in granting themselves what they may legitimately permit themselves, the husband and wife have a large field for detachment. They ought to be willing to profit by the opportunity and not reject it on the plea of moral or physiological impossibility when it is really because of their lack of stamina, of Christian spirit, and the will to self- control.

How will such married persons (aenemic in their spiritual life and accustomed to denying themselves nothing, even when the cost is not too great) deny themselves when a serious law binds them?

One must learn to will in order to know how to will. And if one falls he must not excuse but accuse himself.

You are the Judge of my past, O my God. I offer You all its efforts and its weaknesses. Give me the grace to be generous in the future.