Contraception and Catholic Teaching

(p. 107) In the first question of his Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas explains why we need more than mere philosophy in order to find our way in life and attain salvation. "The truth about God," he writes, "such as reason could discover, would be known only by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors."l

For the same reasons, we need to have at our disposal not only the truth about God as revealed by Holy Scripture, but also the truths about God and man that are taught by the Catholic Church as her received Magisterium. As Aquinas writes elsewhere, "If the only way open to us for the knowledge of God were solely that of reason, the human race would remain in the blackest of ignorance."2 …

Pressures to conform to the world's way of viewing contraception come from many sources and are very powerful. Pope Paul VI made note of this in Humanae Vitae, the Church's most definitive denunciation of contraception. "It is not surprising," he wrote, "the Church finds herself a sign of contradiction - just as her Founder. But this is no reason for the Church to abandon the duty entrusted to her of preaching the whole moral law and the law of God."