Denver, Colo., Jul 24, 2018 / 13:57 pm
Sex "untethered" from reproduction can mean "whatever individual men decide it means to them, even violence and power," says law professor Helen Alvaré, adding that the #MeToo movement can learn from the wisdom expressed by Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae.
"When even the very thought of children is far removed from sexual intimacy, sex struggles to serve the man and woman together. Why? Because the man and woman's possible future - i.e., a child, a family, a marriage, extended kin, even love - is cut off from their present," Alvaré wrote in the July issue of the Knights of Columbus' Columbia Magazine.
"What Catholics are so concerned about when it comes to contraception," Alvaré wrote, is "the breaking apart of what should be held together, with the result that sex loses its beautiful mutuality and becomes something else."
Bl. Paul VI wrote in Humanae vitae that "a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires."