1)       "It is not true that Christianity brought self-control and asceticism to a pagan world that delighted in pleasure and the body. Rather, hostility to pleasure and the body are a legacy of Antiquity that has been singularly preserved to this day in Christianity." page 9

2)       "But we need consider only the subject put before Jesus to know what he is talking about in his answer. He is not asked about celibacy, and hence is not discussing that. He is questioned by the Pharisees about divorce, whereupon he proposes a thesis that was unheard of at this time, when a man could divorce his wife simply for burning his dinner (thus Rabbi Hillel, in contrast to the stricter Rabbi Shammai). Jesus says:       "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery" (Mt.19:9). Even his disciples object to this teaching; and Jesus says, "Not all men can receive this saying" (Mt. 19:11), and he adds that there is a self-castration for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven (Mt. 19:12). This statement, which is naturally to be understood etaphorically, has an immediate grammatical connection (through the word "for") with the preceding debate over divorce. The issue here is voluntary renunciation of remarriage, which Jesus treats as adultery. "Unmarried" or "incapable or marriage" (thus the New English Bible) are common but erroneous translations of the Greek word ennuchoi. " pages 32-33

3)       Referring to Matthew 5:32 and Matthew 19:9: "Jesus, as we have seen, did not say anything at all about celibacy. He simply corrected, to his disciples' horror, the biases of a polygamous society contemptuous of women, and sketched an ideal image of martial unity. But his teaching was later reinterpreted by celibate theologians into a call to renounce marriage, while his words on becoming one flesh were transformed into praise of celibates as the eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven." page 38

4)       "Hostility to sexual pleasure is a Gnostic-Stoic legacy, which as far back as Clement was superimposed on the Christian Gospel ("Good News"), and which spoke of pleasure as if it were a source of pollution." page 50

5)       "Virginity was the Christian virtue." page 57, and may I note, among fundamentalist Christians today, Virginity still is the (only) Christian virtue.

6)       "No Church Father wrote more offensively about marriage or more contemptuously about sex than Jerome (d. 420). And at the same time no Church Father was so beloved by women, or lived as much with them (in physical proximity), or loved women, in his desexualized way, as much as Jerome." page 60

7)       "It was not until the year 374 that, under the influence of Christianity, infanticide was legally defined as murder. Seneca (d.65), for example, had looked upon it as an everyday event in Rome, as a reasonable way of acting, to drown misshapen or sickly infants . . . . Suentonius (d, second century) mentions the exposure of newborns as a matter left to the discretion of the parents . . . . Plutarch (d. ca. 120) writes in his life of Lycurgus (ninth century B.C.), the founder of the Spartan constitution, that among the Spartans infants were first examined by the elders, and the weak or deformed babies were flung over the precipice of Taygetos so they would not be a burden to the state." pages 63-64

8)       "Thus before Christians took up the cause, the Jews were concerned about the life of all newborn infants and likewise took a stand against abortion." page 66

9)       *** "In the first two centuries of the Christian era the notion that morality was essentially sexual morality could be found among the pagans, Jews, and Christians alike." page 67

10)       "On January 16, 318, Emperor Constantine issued an order forbidding fathers to kill their grown children for crimes, as the right of patria potesta had allowed them to do." page 68

11)       "The abortion law promulgated by Emperor Septimus Severus (d. 211) and Caracalla (d. 217) stipulated that a woman who tried to abort her pregnancy was to be sent into exile, "for it is dishonorable for a wife to deny her husband children with impunity." All this, obviously, was designed to protect the interests of the husband. Unmarried women seeking abortions were not punished. And this law too did not deal with the protection of the fetus as such.

      Protection of the unborn first began to be enforced on the grounds of the sharp criticism that Christians voiced on abortion. We know that abortion was common in the Roman Empire, from the fact, for example, that Seneca (d. 65) praised his mother because, unlike many others, "she did not destroy the hope of children conceived in her womb" . . . .

12)       "The oldest documents on contraceptive practices come from Egypt. These papyrus finds from the nineteenth to the eleventh century B.C." page 70

13)       "In keeping with this idea about successive animation, the term "murder" was incorrect not only for contraception but also for early abortion. Augustine follows Aristotelian biology in writing that no soul can live in an unformed body, and so there can be no talk of murder here . . . . Jerome too writes in a letter to Aglasia: "The seed gradually takes shape in the uterus, and it does not count as killing until the individual elements have acquired their external appearance and their limbs" . . . ." page 75

14)       "The respected Parisian professor of theology Johannes Beleth (d. ca. 1165) forbade dead pregnant women to be laid out in church since their unborn children had not been baptized. Before such women could be buried in a consecrated cemetery, the child had to be cut out of their body and buried outside the cemetery." page 77

15)       "Many people believe that the dogma of the Immaculate conception refers to the point in time when Mary conceived Jesus from the Holy Spirit. But it actually refers to the moment when Mary herself was conceived by her mother without original sin. So long as the Church clung, with Augustine, to the idea that original sin was transmitted through the act of generation, it was impossible to speak of Mary's immaculate conception. For Augustine only Jesus was free from original sin, because he came into the world without any sexual act. Conversely in order to be free of original sin he had to come into this world in a virginal birth." page 78

16)       "There follows the famous scene in the garden, which took place in Milan in 386, Augustine's immediate conversion to Christianity. This fits into the process of repressing the betrayal of his mistress in favor of a conversion to asceticism or, concretely, a depreciation of marriage vis-à-vis celibacy.

      While in the garden Augustine heard a child's voice singing, "Take up and read, take up and read." He took the Bible, which was lying open in the garden and read: "Let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires" (Rom. 13:13-14). The image of the enemy is clear: lust, evil pleasure, sexual desire, carnal craving. Augustine writes: "It was as though my heart was filled with a light of confidence and all the shadows of my doubt were swept away . . . For you converted me in such a way that I no longer sought a wife nor other worldly hope" . . . .

      Augustine's conversion to Christianity, from love of pleasure, to hatred of it, took place by classifying women as stimulants and ignoring them as partners." page 81

17)       Referring to the rhythm method of contraception:

      "The following is not meant to criticize that form of "rhythm," but curiously enough Augustine would have greeted this couple not as a papal model, but as "adulterers" and "whoremongers." That is the vein in which he addresses the Manichaeans: "Didn't you warn us before to watch as carefully as possible for the time after the monthly period, when a woman may be expected to conceive, and to abstain from intercourse at this time, lest a soul be enclosed in the flesh? It follows from this that, in your opinion, marriage was not intended to beget children but to satisfy desires" . . . .

      In Augustine's day the medical profession was convinced that the most fruitful phase in a woman's cycle came immediately after menstruation. In another passage Augustine tackles the same issue even more forcefully: "The birth of children is what you most abhor in marriage, and thus you turn your 'hearers' into adulterers of their own wives, when they are on the alert to see that their wives do not conceive. . . They wish to have no children, for whose sake alone marriages are contracted. Why then aren't you the sort of people who forbid marriage. . . if you are trying to take away what constitutes marriage in the first place? For if that is taken away, husbands are shameful lovers, wives are harlots, marriage beds are bordellos, and fathers-in-law are pimps" pages 82-83

18)       "In Familiaris Consortio the Pope [John Paul II] calls upon theologians "to elaborate the anthropological and at the same time moral difference between contraception and recourse to rhythm."

      The theologians must feel overtaxed by the Pope's demand- he'll have to elaborate that difference all by himself. Because, to quote Germany's best-known moral theologian, Franz Bockle, "We should not be surprised when troubled pastors and most of all pressured lay people can't understand the metaphysical difference between the 'natural' and the 'unnatural' methods." While for Augustine contraception is contraception, the Pope asks theologians to discover differences where there are none, theologically speaking, the only distinction being medical." pages 83-84

19)       "Since 1981 the Pope has once more taken a little turn on the issue of rhythm. On September 6, 1984, again during one of his weekly audiences, within the framework of the eighth in a series of twelve addresses on birth control, John Paul II warned the faithful not to "misuse" the church-approved method of birth control. This would happen if married couples were to try "for dishonest reasons" to keep [the number of children] below the birthrate that is morally right for their family." " page 84

20)       "Unlike the Pope, therefore, Augustine did not divide contraception into two categories, allowed and disallowed: It was all forbidden." page 84

21)       "Of course, Augustine does not intend to introduce polygamy, which he restricts to Old Testament times. In his view polygamy does not contradict the order of creation, but polyandry does. For, he believes, wives are their husband's servants. "Now a slave never has several masters, but a master does have several slaves. Thus we have never heard that the holy women served several living husband, but we do read that many holy women served one husband. . . That is not contrary to the nature of marriage" . . . . In the contract for civil marriage in the Roman law of Augustine's day there was no passage about the subordination of the wife to the husband . . . . By contrast Augustine points to the Christian marriage contract, undersigned by the bishop, which stresses the subordination of the wife to the husband." pages 96-97

22)       *** "The claim that Christianity meant liberation for women is as false as it is long-lived." page 97

23)       "For Augustine hatred of pleasure was still more important than his emphasis on the procreative purposes of every conjugal act. This can be seen in the fact that he pleads for so-called Josephite marriage, that is, total continence in marriage, as reflected in many lives of the saints." page 97

24)       "Reform movements in the Catholic church always mean, apart from a strengthening of papal power, the repression of women and the campaign for celibacy." page 107

25)       "But even after the Reformation there were still many Catholic priests who considered themselves married." page 115

26)       "The Enlightenment and the French Revolution did not look on celibacy with a friendly eye. "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens" proclaimed in 1791 that nobody should be prevented from marrying. Thousands of French priests got married, among them Bishop Talleyrand. Celibacy was revived in France thanks to Napoleon and his concordat with Pius VII in 1801." pages 116-117

27)       Referring to married priests and priests who want to be married at the present time: "That would be approximately 20 percent of the Catholic clergy in the world. "During the tenure of Pope Paul VI (d. 1978) around 32,000 priests from all over the world were laicized, that is, relieved of their office and hence from the obligation to celibacy. Since the accession of John Paul II the Vatican has issued no laicizations at all. In Rome they talk about a "laicization-jam". . . In the meantime unofficial figures show over 10,000 petitions on ice" (ibid., p.13).

      The number of those who wish to abandon celibacy and get married would surely be greater, if the priests in question did not to a great extent find themselves facing a vocational void once they leave their office, since they get neither unemployment insurance nor counseling nor help in retraining.

      It should be obvious that in comparison with married priests the number of unmarried priests who have sexual relations with women is substantially higher." pages 118-119

28)       "Jesus was a friend of women, the first and practically the last friend women had in the Church." page 119

29)       "In Jesus' day, the general practice was that if a woman so much as spoke with a man on the street, she could be repudiated by her husband without repayment of the marriage portion - roughly equivalent to our alimony." page 120

30)       'The Church's celibates never managed to deal freely and openly with women." page 121

31)       *** "The Bible is the Word of God, but sometimes the word of men squeezes its way in . . . " page 125

32)       ***"For many people the Bible is a kind of supermarket where you pick up whatever you need." page 126

33)       *** "The history of Christianity is likewise a history of how women were silenced and deprived of their rights. And if this process no longer goes on in the Christian West, that is not thanks to, but in spite of, the Church, and it certainly has not stopped in the Church itself." page 127

34)       "The Church condemned as birth control not only the potions people took, but also various kinds of intercourse in which conception was avoided: coitus interruptus as well as anal and oral sex. The penances for these three forms of intercourse were enormous. The sentences meted out by the individual penitentials vary widely, but one is struck by the fact that anal and oral intercourse (coitus interruptus is mentioned less frequently) were often punished more severely than abortion, indeed more severely than premeditated murder." pages 148-149, contrast this attitude with the opinions expressed by Jefferys in Anticlimax

35)       " . . . sets the penalty for oral intercourse at seven or fifteen years or even a lifetime of penance, for abortion three times forty days, and for premeditated murder seven years." page 149

36)       "Huguccio continually repeats the axiom from Pope Gregory's rescript, "Pleasure can never be without sin." Hence he rejects the idea of the holy husband who hates the pleasure he gets during intercourse with his wife and for that reason is supposedly free from sin. This husband sins too, because pleasure is always bound up with ejaculation of sperm. Only "he who feels nothing does not sin" (Muller, p. 111). Every sensation of venereal pleasure is a sin, regardless of the reasons for, or the occasion of, its appearance. It makes no difference whether it comes to a virgin being raped or a husband begetting a child, or a man having a nocturnal emission. Pleasure can never be without sin. Huguccio methodically carries this abstruse ugustinian-Gregorian idea to its logical limit." pages 159-160

37)       "To this day no Catholic theologian has failed to label coitus interruptus as a serious sin. . . " page 172

38)       "In sexual morality Thomas [Aquinas] has remained the authority, along with Augustine." page 184

39)       "Only someone who believes that there has been any essential change in the Catholic Church's defamation and contempt of women from Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries to Thomas in the thirteenth, or that there has been any change, given Thomas's towering influence, from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries - only such a naive observer would be "surprised" to note that basically everything remains stuck in the old groove." page 184

40)       "Anyone who tries nowadays to raise marriage to the same rank as virginity will be viewed, as he or she would have been back then, as dragging virginity down to the lowly level or marriage and as slandering the Virgin Mary herself." page 184

41)       "But the churchmen's fear of adopting, along with Aristotle, a misogynistic Greek admiration for homosexuality was weaker than their desire to find at last a convincing explanation of woman's subordination to man." page 186

42)       "Male theologians internalized Augustine: For male intellectual life woman had no meaning. . . . Thomas quotes Augustine "Nothing drags the mind of man down from its elevation so much as the caresses of woman and the bodily contacts without with a man cannot possess his wife" (Summa Theologiae II/II q. 151 a. 3 ad 2)." page 188

      More from Augustine's Summa Theologiae II/II q. 26 a. 10: "The father should be loved more than the mother, because he is the active principle of generation, while she is the passive one." " page 189

      "As a defective creature, still somehow on the level of the child, woman is capable of bearing children but not of education them. The intellectual training of the children can only come from the father, since he is the intellectual leader." page 189

      "Thomas has yet another reason for making marriage indissoluble: "For the woman needs the man not only for generating and education the children, but also as her personal master (gubernator)," for the man, Thomas repeats, is of "more perfect reason" and "stronger virtue." " pages 189-190

      "Fuchs notes that "Thomas gladly repeats what Paul says in 1 Cor. 7:1: 'It is good for a man not to touch a woman' ". . . .

      The fact that the Gnostic principle (which Paul cited in order to refute it) has been represented to this day as Paul's own principle has caused all sorts of mischief for two thousand years." pages 194-195

      "Back to Thomas. Deviation from the missionary position, he believes, is one of a series of unnatural vices that were classified in a system going back to Augustine, as worse than intercourse with one's own mother (more about this in the next chapter)." page 197

      *** "Thomas holds that the other most seriously sinful - because they are unnatural - vices, worse than incest, rape, and adultery, are masturbation, bestiality, homosexuality, anal and oral intercourse, and coitus interruptus . . . . Thomas appears to put deviation from the missionary position on the list of most serious sins because he thought that like the other acts on this list, which prevented contraception, this one, if nothing else, made conception more difficult." page 197

43)       "In connection with Ivo's quotations from Augustine, Gratian sets up a "scale of indecency," which goes like this: "The evil of adultery [adultreii malum] is greater than that of fornication, but still greater is that of incest; for it is worse to sleep with one's mother than with the wife of another. Worst of all, however, is everything that takes place against nature, for example, when a man wishes to use a part of his wife's body that is not permitted for such use." Included in this "unnatural intercourse" are coitus interruptus and any kind of contraception. This apex of unnatural behavior is raised even higher over one issue: "it is more shameful when a wife has done this to herself than when her husband does it to another woman" . . . . In the immediate context Augustine was speaking more about anal and oral intercourse, but in Gratian's Concordance that prohibition is tightened into an unheard of criminalization of birth control in marriage, which is now the absolute limit of vice, beyond even incest or "safe sex" with a prostitute." page 204

      Peter Lombard following Gratian: "Those who procure poisons of sterility are not spouses, but fornicators," he says: "She is her husband's harlot, and he an adulterer with his own wife" . . . . He also adopts Gratian's "scale of indecency" . . . in which "unnatural" intercourse (contraception), especially with one's own wife, constitutes the summit (or the abyss) of vice." page 205

      "What the medieval writers chiefly had in mind was coitus interruptus. This, as we have seen, was considered worse than intercourse with one's own mother." page 206

      Quoting Bernadine of Siena (d. 1444): "It is better for a woman to have relations in the natural manner with her own father than with her husband in an unnatural manner" and later, "Every time that you came together in such a way that you could not conceive and beget children, it was a sin" page 207, here unnatural intercourse means intercourse using birth control or withdrawal

      "The penitential of Bartholemy of Exeter (d. 1184) says that sins against nature by married couples should not be described too precisely, "for we have heard that men and women, because of the detailed mentioning of crimes they were previously unfamiliar with, have fallen into sins they had not known" " page 208

      *** "John Gerson preached that if one spouse desired something "unseemly" during marital relations, the other should resist, "even unto death" " page 210

      "All three, Alexander, Gerson, and Bernardine, explicitly included coitus interruptus in their definition of the sins against nature. . . . " page 210

44)       From the Code of Canon Law issued in 1241: " "Whoever [si aliquis] uses sorcery or administers sterilizing poisons is a murderer." When contraception was labeled as murder in a universally binding code produced on orders of the Pope, the summit of Mt. Everest had been reached in the campaign against contraception.

      The canon "si aliquis" was consonant with the violent rhetoric of both Jerome and Chrysostom, and made a serious contribution toward outlawing contraception in the Catholic church. But on the other and it was alien to canon law from the beginning, since the Church's code assumed the theory of the successive animation of the fetus and penalized as murder, not contraception, but only the abortion of an animated fetus. " page 211

45)       "Thomas, the master of hairsplitting, alludes to "si aliquis" when he says that the use of poisons for infertility is a grave sin "and against nature, since even animals do not prevent themselves from conceiving young, but not as grave as murder, since conception might possibly not have taken place for other reasons." We can speak of murder, he says, only when someone aborts an already formed embryo. . . . gnoring the inconsistency, the papal decretals characterize contraception as murder and place it at the top of the list of sins." page 211

46)       "Marriage despite such affinity was incest." page 216 - list of such affinities coming up

47)       "This whole structure was invented by the Church's celibates, and extended to a downright grotesque extreme (people within the seventh degree of kindred could not marry, although since the time of Innocent III [d. 1216] this has been limited to the fourth) in order to make it harder to marry and to promote the monasticization of the laity. The system also turned out to be an opportunity to shed one's spouse on account of

1. blood relationship,
2. affinity by marriage,
3. affinity by forbidden cohabitation,
4. public integrity (prior betrothal), and
5. spiritual relationship (with godparents, sponsors at confirmation, and their families)."

      "In the eighth and ninth centuries the Church demanded that couples who had married within the sixth degree of kindred separate and take other spouses." page 218

      "Proof that the couple were not related in the seventh degree was practically impossible to obtain, and if such a connection showed up afterward, the marriage was annulled." page 219

      "Emperor Henry III (. 1056) violated the laws of the Church by marrying Agnes, the daughter of William of Aquataine, for Agnes and he were great-grandchildren of two stepsisters, Albreda and Mathilde, and thus related in the fourth degree" page 219

      *** "In 1066/67 Pope Alexander II forbade a marriage because the woman was related in the fourth degree to a person with whom the man had earlier had an affair.

      It had become difficult to find any marriage partner at all. No married couple could be sure that someone motivated by envy and malice might not accuse the marriage of being incestuous before the Church's tribunal. If the children were suddenly declared illegitimate, that would have legal consequences for their inheritance, etc. The whole situation caused understandable unrest, so Pope Alexander III (d. 1181) decreed that it a marriage in the fourth degree had lasted from eighteen to twenty years it could not longer be challenged. And Pope Lucius III (d. 1185) allowed the archbishop of Spalato to leave a marriage in the fifth degree of kindred undisturbed." page 219

      "In 1983 the impediment arising from a spiritual relationship was dropped altogether." page 222

48)       Jesuit Friedrich von Spee in his Cautio criminalis about the witch trials: ". . . in Germany especially the smoke from the stake is everywhere." page 230

      "In Cologne from 1627 to 1630 nearly all the midwives were wiped out. One out of every three women executed was a midwife." page 231

49)       About the Church's reluctance to concede issues because of tradition: "But no matter how many centuries pass, an error does not turn into truth." page 245

50)       "After the Council of Trent a process of strict regulation of religious life began to gain ground." page 249

51)       "That rule was now suspended by the fanatical Pope Sixtus V, who in 1588 in the bull "Effraenatam" attempted to convert the "si aliquis" canon into penal practice. Up to that point "si aliquis" (and its equation of contraception with murder) had for the most part been limited to the realm of confession and penance. Sixtus V now threatened with excommunication and the death penalty those who gave others or themselves took contraceptive potions ("cursed medicines"), as well as those who carried out an abortion, from the moment of conception on. After the death of Sixtus V "Effraenatam" was revoked by his second successor, Pope Gregory XIV, in 1591, as soon as he took office. This meant that once again abortion was not punished with excommunication until after the eightieth day." page 249

52)       "In a contemporary account excusing the event we are told that procuring had become so widespread in Rome that girls were less protected with their mothers than with strangers" . . . . "In the same month Sixtus V had a priest and a boy burned at the stake for sodomy, although both had voluntarily confessed their guilt" . . . . "The death penalty was inflicted not only for incest and crimes against budding life, but also for spreading oral and written calumnies" . . . . "We have already seen in the chapter on incest how broadly the Church interpreted that crime. . . ." page 250

53)       " ". . . The bull was published on November 3, 1586, ordering adulterers and adulteresses, as well as parents who procured their daughters, to be put to death. Married couples who divorced on their own initiative were to be given similar punishment at the discretion of the judges. . . The number of accused was so great that the ordinance could not be rigorously enforced" . . . ." page 250

54)       "To date the Church's celibates have not given a single positive thought to intercourse prompted by love (which simply does not exist in the classical theological taxonomy of sex) and to the responsible contraception this may require." page 270

55)       "Even Pope John Paul II accepted a certain amount of desire for pleasure on the part of married couples when in Familiaris consortio (1981) he allowed periodic continence as a method of birth control. He thereby abandoned the Augustinian motive of procreation as the most important factor in every marital act, and by making this concession to pleasure the Pope is in open opposition to Augustine's condemnation of rhythm as a "pimp's method." Nevertheless John Paul II is still right on the old Augustinian course. Granted, the motive of procreation as a requirement for every conjugal act has been dropped, but the hatred of pleasure has not. And since at bottom Augustine loathed pleasure more than he liked procreation, Catholic tradition has been preserved. Procreation may be avoided, so long as pleasure is too: through continence. One has in any case the impression that the continual stress on children as the first purpose of marriage is really aimed at the favorite activity of the church's celibates: keeping married couples away from sex.

      Thus John Paul II, despite his disagreement with Augustine, has brought out the actual, though hidden driving force behind Augustine's sexual morality, namely, hatred of pleasure. He is not primarily concerned with children. As needed, children will be prevented by birth control, Catholic or otherwise. What he is concerned with is curtailing pleasure." page 280

56)       "Given the wondrous effects of periodic continence, John Paul II has charged the theologians of the future with the task of answering a question. He has addressed "an urgent appeal to the theologians to stand by the Church's magisterium with concerted strength. . . to elaborate and probe more deeply into the difference, at once anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm method." Since Augustine challenged such a moral-theological distinction, the task will not be an easy one. Strictly speaking, it is an insoluble problem, because where there is no moral difference, none can be discovered. The only difference in fact is not theological but papal: The rhythm method enables the Pope to force married couples under the yoke of continence for at least several days each month, while with other methods he fails to do so." page 281

57)       *** "Thus if in Cardinal Ratzinger's eyes the pill constitutes a burden placed on women, by way of evening things out we should cite a burden placed on men, as described by Christa Meves in an essay, "Does Christian (Catholic) Marriage Still Have a Future?" in the Pastoral Bulletin for the Dioceses of Aachen-Berlin-Essen-Cologne-Osnabruck (1976): "Owing to the increased life expectancy for women, who in the 19th century lived for an average of only 35 years, often dying after being weakened by childbirth, often dying in childbed itself, there was also an increase in the number of people who live together for thirty, fifty, even sixty years. This length of time means an additional trial, especially for the husband. For while earlier he could, after the death of his (often still young) wife, remarry a (usually younger) wife, today he is forced to put up a with a wife who often ages more quickly than he does." As we see, everybody has his own set of troubles. Women are limited in their freedom and made "utilizable" by the pill, and men lose their freedom through increasing age of their wives. Besides this, the pill may have done its share to burden men in that not so many women today are weakened by repeated childbirth, nor do they die in childbed and vacate a place in the marriage bed for a younger woman." pages 283-284

59)       "The Pope, with his gospel of continence, is the only one protecting wives from the freebooting mentality of their animalistic husbands. A wife's taking the pill would unleash her husband's sex drive in such a way that she would be helplessly surrendered to his clutches. The only protection she can find is with the Pope, who forbids her the pill in her own interest, in order to save her from an existence as fair game. Animalistic husbands justify the Pope's taking this step to block their instincts. The Pope is doing nothing more than standing in front of the wife as her protector and helping in the fact of her lustful husband. The Pope is the mighty fortress of women and the Vatican a kind of women's shelter. And the Holy See promptly works a miracle. While a woman's taking the pill, her husband behaves like a lecher, not taking the pill makes him act chastely and continently. As Christa Meves sees it, the Pope has a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde notion of the pill: Depending on whether his wife takes or doesn't take the pill, the husband is now a beast, now an angel." page 284

60)       *** According to Arthur Vermeersch (d. 1936): "If her husband proposes to use a condom during intercourse, the wife is obliged to resist until she is physically overpowered or until she sacrifices "a fair equivalent to life." The wife is obliged to defend herself against her husband as if he were a rapist. She must be prepared to put up with the consequences, namely, "no joy or happiness in the family, breakdown of the marriage, willful desertion, divorce." " page 288

61)       "Contraception is unilateral disarmament. Thus it is no accident that the rejection of contraception swelled to a crescendo in this century of world wars and the arms race." page 291

62)       "Why doesn't the Catholic church give living persons the same protection that it lavishes on potential, fictitious persons? Why doesn't it forbid war just as emphatically as it forbids birth control? Why does Catholic morality occasionally embellish war, but never contraception, with the adjective "just"? Doesn't the Church seem to have gotten its values mixed up? If one makes a decision for children, one must also decide against war." page 292

63)       Regarding the rhythm method: "Given such contradictory statements on one and the same method, which was held to impoverish conjugal love in 1937 and to enrich it in 1987, one can conclude only that the bishops and popes have proved each other's incompetence, and that the documented ignorance on either side ought to reduce both to silence, if they care about their credibility with married people." page 294

64)       "Papal infallibility serves as a brake on independent thinking." page 295

65)       "Thus the Pope means that nature's intention, procreation, may under no circumstances be thwarted, even when nature cannot bear this procreation, and the woman will die on account of the pregnancy. The Pope, then, is defending a morality that marches over corpses. When the biological laws of nature are made the supreme moral norm and guideline, displacing the spouses' consideration for one another, then one should not argue that nature wants something, even when it cannot perform it, and that its will must be observed by sacrificing human life." page 295

      *** "Even in Rome they don't listen unconditionally to such "nature," as can be seen by the fact that the princes of the Church do not run around in their birthday suits, and their attire, in any case, is still more unnatural than that of the rest of the population. The intelligence that seeks help in clothes when the organism cannot endure the cold and that prevents pregnancies, "Whose consequences the organism cannot endure," is probably part of nature as correctly understood. . . . In 1853 English theologians brought charges against Queen Victoria's personal physician, reproaching him for anesthetizing the Queen during childbirth. The theologians saw in this a violation of Gen 3:16: "In pain you shall bring forth children." " page 295-296

66)       "It is not the prestige of woman that the pill has jeopardized, as the Church teaches us, but rather its own authority, which is in the process of being lost if it continues to presume to control completely the autonomous territory of married people." page 297

67)       "The biggest bomb that Paul VI dropped on birth control in Humanae vitae was the claim that contraception "is to be condemned just as much [pariter damnandum est]" as abortion (nr. 14). This meant a huge dramatization of contraception. Some women concluded that it was better to be on the road to damnation at rare intervals because of abortion than constantly on it because of birth control. Thus a certain number of abortions must be credited to the popes, especially since equating contraception with abortion they helped to trivialize abortion. If, as Paul VI says, contraception counts as much as abortion, we can infer that abortion counts as little as contraception." page 298

68)       "According to John Paul II. . . a hemophiliac with AIDS may not have intercourse with his wife, ever, not even after her menopause, because God has forbidden condoms. And if the hemophiliac husband can't manage to abstain, it's better for him to infect his wife than to use a condom. Catholic sexual morality has turned into a morality of horror." page 298

69)       "Until recently women having babies in Catholic hospitals in Germany could find themselves in mortal danger because, under certain circumstances, they would be refused care." page 298

70)       *** "In other words, the doctor may save the mother by performing an abortion not when facing the quandary of mother or child dying, but only in the quandary of mother and child dying." page 299

      "Nowadays many people think that in cases of mortal danger to the mother the Church allows abortion, but this is false. Rather the Church has merely agreed to respect medical decisions when otherwise both mother and child will die." page 300

      "Plainly put, in 1976 the German bishops did not approve, they only respected, the decision of the doctors that one dead body was better than two." page 300

71)       "Every ejaculation that cannot lead to procreation is considered unnatural, thus onanism is a vice that according to Thomas Aquinas is worse than intercourse with one's mother . . . ." page 311

      "Pilgrim then describes the methods used to control onanism. "With boys wires or metal clasps were inserted through the foreskin, to prevent the withdrawal of the glans (so-called infibulation). At night metal rings with points were placed around the penis. . .

      " The century's best prescription for women was clitoridectomy." " pages 316-317

72)       *** "At any rate, on doubtful questions the Pope's word is always more important than Scripture, and so one need not be disturbed by the Bible's silence on masturbation." page 319

73)       "And so such clergymen agreed with the Nazis that the state had to do something against the danger to the nation's biological legacy." page 332

      *** "Pleasure-hating clerical celibates preferred concentration camps to sterilization. Cardinal Faulhaber reports a conversation he had with Hitler in 1936, where the Fuhrer argued in favor of sterilizing the so-called "hereditarily diseased" to prevent the birth of a sickly new generation. Said Hitler: "The operation is simple and doesn't incapacitate them for a trade or for marriage, and now the Church is holding us back." To which Faulhaber replied: "From the Church's standpoint, Herr Chancellor, the State is not forbidden to isolate these vermin from the community, out of self-defense, and within the framework of the moral law. But instead of physical mutilation other defensive measures must be tried, and there is such a measure: interning the people with hereditary disease" . . . . " page 332

      "Internment camps meant concentration camps, which were evidently within the "framework of the moral law," but sterilization, whether voluntary or involuntary, never was because it means a capacity for pleasure without a capacity for procreation. Pope Sixtus V's "lecherous eunuchs" of 1587 were not granted the right to marry until 1977." page 332

74)       *** "Recently Catholic moral theology has lost much of its prestige. With it's contrived elaborations it stands today, practically speaking, facing the ash-heap. It is folly that poses as religion and invokes the name of God, but has distorted the consciences of countless people. It has burdened them with hairsplitting nonsense and has tried to train them to be moral acrobats, instead of making them more human and kinder to their fellow men and women. . . . It has come to grief on its own stupidity.. . . It broke down because of its own hard-heartedness, when it tried to subject men and women to the shackles of its own laws, instead of letting them obey the commandments of God, which call them to freedom." page 334

75)       *** "By their reciprocal nonrecognition of the civil and religious marriage the Church and the State together relativize the value of a marriage license." page 338

Book of note

_Contraception_ by John T. Noonan, 1986

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