ROF9 – Sexuality, Marriage, Contraception – Roots of the Faith with Mike Aquilina – Discerning Hearts Podcast

DescerningHearts.com, in cooperation with the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, presents

Ritz of the Faith, from the Church Fathers to you, with Mike Aqualina.

Mike Aqualina is the author or editor of more than 40 books on Catholic history, doctrine,

and devotion.

He has co-hosted with Dr. Scott Hahn, eight series that air on the Eternal Word Television

Network.

He has co-led pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Italy, Greece, and Turkey.

He's a widely sought after Catholic speaker.

Ritz of the Faith, from the Church Fathers to you, with Mike Aqualina.

I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Welcome back, Mike.

I'm glad to be back, Chris.

Thanks for having me.

The Church Fathers had so much wisdom to pass on to us about not only the sacramental

system in our Church, but also how to live out our everyday life.

Yes, they did.

The basic unit of society, the basic unit of our everyday life, for at least for most

of us, is life in a family.

And they had a great reverence for the family, they had a great reverence for marriage.

And that's a remarkable thing because they were living in a culture that didn't have

a lot of reverence for marriage.

A part of that coming together in marriage, male and female, is the beautiful life-giving

act, our sexuality, and then that engagement of that marriage act.

And they taught us the reverence, the importance of having a healthy appreciation of our sexuality.

You know, there's so much we take for granted today.

We take for granted the equality of the sexes, which is a Christian idea.

St. Paul said there's neither male nor female in Christ, and that was a radical notion in

his time.

Because if you were female, you were essentially property.

You were the property of your father first, your brothers, if your father happened to die

before you got married, and then you were the property of your father.

And really, females were looked upon by males largely as a burden, something that had to

be supported, kind of a necessary burden, but a burden nonetheless.

It was very common for Roman writers to speak of daughters as odious daughters, because

they were just someone you had to support.

They were never going to earn money to support you.

And then when it came time to marry them off, you were going to have to pay this exorbitant

dowry just to get them out of your house.

So there was this strange view and strange tension between the sexes.

Women were seen as property.

They were seen as something to be used and abused.

That's the way they were treated.

Marriage was not an equal partnership, and marriage was not largely seen in the culture

as something sacred either.

It was something that was disposable, and that was bad for women, because women could

not go out and earn a living afterwards.

So if you were divorced, you were largely condemned to be lonely and destitute.

Women is property.

That is an understanding that we need to appreciate of that period, because a lot of times when

we look back at Christian writing, we see that women were elevated in many ways.

Yes, and where is it coming from?

I mean, it's coming from this place where females were not valued.

It's quite likely that most female babies were killed.

The Romans practiced in phantoside, and if a child happened to have any birth defect,

the child was killed.

Left out on the Dung heap, the garbage heaps at the edge of town, to be picked apart

by vultures or by dogs.

If the child had a midwife who operated this way, the baby might be drowned first, and

then put out on the Dung heap.

Archaeologists have found these pits where babies were just buried, and it's usually a vast

majority of them are female babies.

There was just no value to them.

They were seen as an economic drain on the family and on society.

But that really plays havoc with demography, because suddenly there are no women around

to marry.

There are all these men who are supposed to be boosting the economy, but no women for

them to marry.

So, it really did play havoc with the Roman economy and with Roman morals and everything,

and so the Romans tried to legislate fertility and tried to legislate marriage and that sort

of thing, and it didn't work, because the emperors themselves were willing to live by

any kind of moral idea of marriage.

But the Christians came into this and the Christians started preaching monogamy, fidelity,

and love, life giving, self giving, love in marriage.

Husbands love your wife as Christ loved the church.

How did Christ love the church?

He gave everything for her.

He laid down his life for her.

Wow, that's what husbands were supposed to do.

I'll tell you what, Chris, that was not the pagan view of marriage.

But boy, that's an attractive thing to women, isn't it?

If you're this woman out there in the Roman Empire and you're not valued for who you

are, you're either a sexual object or you're just the necessary conduit of my offspring,

then suddenly you have this great value in the eyes of God, in the eyes of church, and

wow, I can have that value in the eyes of my husband until death do us part.

That's mind blowing.

That's a revolution, Chris.

It's a revolution in the way people viewed the family, the way husbands viewed their wives,

the way wives viewed their husbands, the way the husband and wife viewed their children.

Suddenly the child was someone loved by both of them together and not this kind of reason

for a tug of war between them, you know, as their own affection waned.

This is a revolution and we live with all the benefits of that revolution and we don't

realize it.

We think that this is something we've somehow earned, this idea of the equality of the

sexes, the idea of love and marriage, the idea that love can last.

All of these things, we think it's something we can earn by our own steam, but it's not.

It's a grace and it was only made possible through the Christian revelation that was

guarded and promulgated by the church fathers.

It's fascinating when we reflect on something you had mentioned in our previous segment about

the trajectory of salvation history, a arrow that was launched from Jerusalem and compelled

into Rome the most cosmopolitan of the cities of that world.

It is there that culture was in such a state where we reflect on it and we see these Christians

going into the heart of the epicenter of the cultural expression and trying to live

this message out and it would literally cost them their lives.

Yes, it's interesting that you put it that way.

Ancient Israel was really the only culture in the ancient world that did not practice so

many of these horrible things.

The Israelites did not condone abortion or infanticide.

They did not practice birth control.

They did not practice homosexuality.

They did not approve of pedophilia.

All of these things were really okay in Greek and Roman culture.

Pedophilia?

That was fine.

Even the Roman emperors were doing it.

We find deocacheus, one of the Roman historians, praising one of the emperors because he was

just a moderate pedophile and he did not beat up the boys.

He was abusing sexually.

He did not harm them.

Well, yes, he harmed them.

He harmed their psyches.

He harmed their sense of well-being.

He harmed them physically by the sexual acts he performed on them.

But when you compare him to Nero, well, Nero was a real pervert because he surgically

altered boys until they were the way he wanted them.

Nero was a real sick ticket.

But you know, he was in the line of the emperors and he was practicing a lot of things that

they practiced.

Nero was a pedophile like so many of the others.

The Christians came into this culture and they said, no.

One person does not use another person and the sexual faculty can be abused and it can

be used to abuse another person.

It belongs in marriage for the sake of procreation.

It should be open to life and it's there for the mutual support and the affection of the

couple.

This was the teaching of the fathers of the church and boy, did they praise marriage?

Oh, you know, you hear Tertullian, the wild North African Christian writing in the 1990s,

how shall we ever find words suitable to describe the happiness of a marriage that the

church arranges, the church blesses, the happiness of a marriage.

That's not the kind of language you hear when the pagans talk about marriage.

They speak of the, whoa, that is marriage.

They talk about the jealousy, the strife, the contention between husband and wife.

You know what was the only growth industry, I think, in third century Rome?

Give it investigators because husband and wife didn't trust one another.

So they had to hire these private eyes to go and chase each other.

Sounds like something that happens today.

It does.

You know, you see those sign boards out in front of these agencies.

Well, that's the way it was in each at Rome.

But Tertullian says, how shall we ever find words suitable to describe the happiness of

a marriage that the church arranges, the sacrifice of the Eucharist confirms and the blessing

seals, which angels witness, and to which God the Father gives his consent, wow, that's

dignity.

Wow, that's something.

I want a piece of that.

He says, for not even on earth do children marry rightly and lawfully without their fathers'

permission.

How beautiful then the marriage of two Christians, two who are one in hope, one in desire, one

in discipline, one in service, beautiful, beautiful words coming from the 1990s AD from

this place where marriage was in the pagan homes, a real hell on earth.

And what he's describing with the angels looking on with the Eucharistic sacrifice, he's

describing heaven on earth.

And we can experience this, we can have this.

He's holding up this hope.

He's holding it up for Christians.

He's holding it up for pagans as well.

You know, there's evidence in the early church that the majority of converts were women.

What can you blame them?

Study the contrast.

If you're a pagan woman, you're looking forward to a life where you will give birth to children

and see them killed before your eyes.

Maybe you'll have to endure repeated abortions because you got pregnant and your husband

didn't want those children taken away his money and his leisure time.

That's what a pagan woman had to look forward to and you know, you're looking forward

to the likelihood of divorce.

And here are these Christian prophets really.

Holding out a vision of marriage as something holy, of love as something beautiful.

Suddenly, the woman is not someone who's going to be abused and used through her life

and then discarded.

But someone who will be revered, who will be seen as a holy vessel, who will be seen

as a temple, wow, that's a vision.

And this developed through the time of the fathers and it really reaches a pinnacle in

the time of St. John Chrysostom, who had such a vision of marriage, a vision of marriage

that was mystical and beautiful.

And I look upon him in his writings as really a precursor to what we've known in our

own time as the theology of the body.

Because St. John had such a great reverence for marriage and when he thought about marriage,

he thought about the union of husband and wife, the sexual union that produced a child

as an image of the Trinity, an image of the Trinity.

I love this one very poetic image he brings up, he says, how do they become one flesh?

Paul told us that the husband and wife are one flesh, right?

One flesh union.

Well, how do they become one flesh, John asks, as if she were gold, receiving purest

gold, the woman receives the man's seed with rich pleasure.

And within her, it is nourished, cherished and refined.

It is mingled with her own substance and she returns it as a child.

Wow, again, what a contrast with the way pagans were looking at sex, with the way pagans

were looking at childbearing, with the way pagans were looking at that child, especially

if the child had a birth defect or horrors happen to be a female.

Wow, John Chrysostom is holding up an entirely different vision, a beautiful vision.

And he's saying, I'll bet you want a piece of this.

This is the way you want to be married.

You don't want to be married like pagans.

It's an amazing thing.

And it's something that still speaks to us today because around us, as Christianity and

the Christian doctrine of marriage recedes, what's taking its place, Chris?

What vision of sexuality?

What vision of the love between a man and a woman?

It's being replaced by all of the old stuff from the pagan cultures.

We see a new surge in homosexual practice.

We see the rising tide of terrible perversions like pedophilia.

These were things that were perfectly okay in Rome and in ancient Greece.

We are seeing them again and we're seeing that because this is a new paganism arising

and it sure looks like the old one.

It helps us if we go back to read the writings of the early Christians and find out what

they had to deal with, the kind of misery that they saw all around us, and the kind of

joy that they lived in the midst of that misery, the kind of homes they kept.

There's that beautiful letter that was written in the 100s, the epistle to Diagnatus,

and it holds up the vision of the Christian home as a joyful place.

And it says, think about the misery that you have in your homes.

This is what you want.

You want this kind of joy.

We still want it today.

Listen to St. John, Chris, there is nothing that so welds our life together as the love

of a man and his wife.

That love is the fundamental unit, the basic building block of society.

He says there is nothing in the world sweeter for a man than having children and a wife.

Wow!

And this is a celibate man saying this, and this is the same man we were quoting last

time we got together to talk about priesthood and celibacy.

He's the guy who had mystic visions of the dignity of the priesthood and of celibacy.

And yet he saw the sweetness of marriage.

He saw marriage as a grace given by God and a joy even in the natural order.

This is a great thing that we have.

We've been given by the Lord Himself, given to the apostles, and preserved by the fathers

and passed down to us.

We need to recover that sense that they had of marriage, and we need to witness to it

in the way that they did.

Because they prevailed over that culture, that culture of death.

They prevailed over that culture of misery and all those sad marriages.

They prevailed and established a place where women were equals with men.

They established a place where the home could be happy, and that's the kind of world

we want to live in.

We'll return to roots of the faith with Mike Aqualina in just a moment.

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Thanks and God Bless.

We now return to the Roots of the Faith with Mike Aqualina.

The Roots of our Faith go so deep on this and the witness of that church in that situation

in Rome all those years ago, what they faced, should help to strengthen us and to help us

to stand in the face of our culture.

We pray, don't we, Mike, that none of us, none of our brothers and sisters, would have

to suffer the martyrdom that many of those families had to walk into a Coliseum together

because of their Christian faith, because they love that unity and that love that bind

them that they would not renounce.

Can we not do that in the face of maybe a neighbor or a coworker or maybe even a family

member that might call us names or to say certain things about us just verbalizing because

of our witness to our Christian faith and that love of the family?

We have so much to offer.

If you just look at the statistics, you see that when a Catholic

couple is living according to the church's teaching, for example, by not practicing birth

control, by refusing to use contraception, it's a happier home.

Statistics bear this out, that couple is much less likely to get divorced.

You go from the 50% divorce rate that's the cultural norm right now to less than 5%.

That's a remarkable thing.

That's a great...

This is the faith we received from the fathers.

You have St. John Chrysostom again.

He's condemning contraception in his time.

He says that it's preemptive murder.

Why do you so where the field is eager to destroy the fruit?

Where there are medicines of sterility.

That's what he called contraceptives.

Why use these medicines of sterility where there is murder before birth?

He's talking about abortion there.

Indeed it is something worse than murder and I do not know what to call it.

For the woman does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation.

What then?

Do you despise the gift of God and fight with His law?

Do you despise the gift of God?

The practice of so many of these things, like contraception, really brings misery into

life.

It brings a kind of selfishness and it brings a hardening against God.

We might think, oh no, not that.

Now me, this is just a little thing that it's just a choice I'm making but you know it's

a big choice.

It's saying that I'm going to be the master of my own destiny and I am not going to allow

God to work through my marriage the way He intends marriage to work in society and in the

church.

There's so much unhappiness because of these things.

People don't know the joy of a large family, don't know the joy of having many children,

of having people to take care of them in their old age, of having many grandchildren, of

having many cousins, nephews, nieces.

This whole idea of a large extended family is something that we've lost and it was a

support system in the ancient world.

It was social security and what do we have today?

We have social insecurity as a result of our practice of contraception.

This is a terrible situation we're living in and we really do have the remedy for it.

We shouldn't be silent, you know, we should speak up and St. John Chrysostom would speak

very frankly about these matters to his congregations and what's funny is that his secretary wrote

down the words of his sermons while he was preaching them and there's this one where

he preaches and he must have looked out and people were fanning themselves because he

was speaking so frankly and explicitly about sexual morality.

But he says to his congregation, why are you blushing?

Leave that to the heretics and pagans with their impure and immodest customs.

For this reason, I want marriage to be thoroughly purified to bring it back again to its proper

nobility.

You should not be ashamed of these things.

He's telling them not to be ashamed of their sexual relationship.

If it's good, don't be ashamed of it.

If you are ashamed, then you condemn God who made marriage.

So I shall tell you how marriage is a mystery of the church and then he goes on to give

the Pauline teaching, the teaching of St. Paul about how this is a great mystery, the great

sacrament of the church, you know, that the union of husband and wife somehow mirrors

or images the union of Christ and the church.

Well there's a whole lot wrapped up in that image.

If marriage between a man and a woman is intended to mirror or image that union of Christ

and the church will then it's going to be forever, it's going to be lifelong and it's

going to be fruitful and it's going to be multiplied the way the church does, it's going

to be open to God's will and it's going to be open to new life all the time, right?

It's going to be open to new souls coming into this domestic church because the family

is not only the basic building block, the basic unit of society, it's the fundamental

unit of the church as well.

It's the domestic church.

So much is wrapped up in that Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality as St. John

and Christ's system points out it's an image of the Trinity.

It's an icon of the Trinity on earth.

We can't tinker with that icon.

We can't tinker with the image and make it what we want it to look like because then

it ceases to be a revelation of God's glory.

It ceases to be a revelation of God's relationship with the church.

It ceases to be what it is and it ceases to be a thing of joy and it becomes a thing of

shame.

It becomes a thing of misery the way it was for the pagan Romans and the pagan Greeks.

For many women in today's world, they would say that contraception was a remedy to oppression

and then it gave them freedom and the ability to be able, within a marriage, to control

the number of children because of the situation in the home and that they would not become

dominant.

I'm throwing a lot of things into that pot, but essentially that's a lot of the argumentation.

But unfortunately, for women, speaking as a woman, women have made choices in marriage

without the deliberation and guidance of the church before they ever enter into it and

that's something that you would point out at the very beginning that if we do it within

the formation of the church, but we don't even want to go through the marriage part.

We have a problem with taking six months out of our lives to plan for something that's

supposed to be a lifetime commitment.

contraception is nothing new.

You know, we think this is a new thing and a new idea, but you know, the Romans and the

Greeks had very effective methods of contraception and it was widely practiced among the Romans

and the Greeks and the Assyrians and the Persians and all of the ancient peoples.

Abortion is nothing new.

It was widely practiced in the ancient world.

We have the very instruments that were used to perform abortions in the ancient world.

None of these things are new.

They were there in the ancient world and they did not liberate the pagans.

They made them enslaved.

They enslaved them to misery.

They didn't set women free.

They enslaved women.

And you know what?

They enslaved women today.

Women are more the tools of men today, repagonized men than they ever were in any Christian

culture and they're used and discarded and abused more now than they were in past generations.

I don't think they're liberated and I don't think they've won happiness through the use

of contraception or anything else.

They've made themselves sexual objects, sexual toys.

They've made themselves something to be discarded, something that's utterly dependent for happiness

on physical beauty, on eternal youth and I'll tell you what, beauty doesn't stay that

physical beauty and youth certainly doesn't stay even after all the surgeries but you know

what?

The inner beauty does.

And when two Christians live out their marriage and they see that beauty in one another, they're

more in love.

The old Christian man in a nursing home is not more attracted to the waitress who's serving

his dinner, the young waitress than he is to the old wife who's sitting next to him and

using a walker.

That woman is sacred to him.

That woman is a temple for him.

That woman is a vessel, a holy vessel.

That woman represents God's will for him and she is something beautiful with a radiant

inner beauty that will not go away with age.

That's the kind of beauty that we should be striving for and not something that we get

through contraception or through plastic surgeries or anything else.

Pagan culture in the ancient world or today makes a lot of promises it just can't deliver

on.

It's promising endless sex and it doesn't deliver on it and it says that the more sex you

have the happier you're going to be and that's an empty promise.

It's saying let's eat drink and be merry because you know what?

Tomorrow we're going to die and it's all over.

That doesn't give us anything really to live for.

Christians had something to live for because they had something to die for and they were

willing to die for the sake of another to lay down their lives for a sake of another

and that manifested itself not only in martyrdom but in marriage in the beautiful love that

shared by a husband and wife.

It's still manifested that way today and thank God for the work of the fathers who evangelize

those pagan cultures, transform them, convert them and preserve the faith so that it could

be passed down to us and we could find it as a refuge in this repagonized culture we're

living in today.

Amen.

Mike Aqualina.

You've been listening to the roots of the faith from the Church Fathers to you with

Mike Aqualina.

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formation programs visit DescerningHearts.com.

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