Victor R. Claveau, MJ
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus himself exhorts us to “be perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mt. 5:48) Jesus did not present us with an impossible goal –– but we can’t reach the goal alone.
Grace is a supernatural gift of God to an intelligent creature, bestowed to enable us to merit eternal life. There are two kinds of grace, actual and sanctifying (also called habitual). Actual grace is a supernatural help given to us by God to avoid evil and to do good, it affects the faculties of will and intellect. Actual grace operates in the soul by illuminating it, so that a person can differentiate between good and evil and choose to do good.
Sanctifying grace is that grace which sanctifies (makes holy) the soul and makes it pleasing to God. It also has an absolutely supernatural quality, essentially and permanently dwelling in the soul by which we are made sons and daughters of God. The moment we receive the precious gift of sanctifying grace we pass from the state of sin to the state of grace.
We can only become truly holy with the sanctifying grace of the sacraments. Christ cannot live within us if our souls are corrupted by mortal sin. Jesus wants us to live holy lives and established the sacraments in order to provide us the help we need.
When we artificially contracept, knowing the sinfulness of the act, the sacraments are effectively void of grace for us. As serious as that is, there is something even worse––we would be making a mockery of the Holy Eucharist by receiving Him while intentionally in mortal sin. St. Paul tells us that if we receive the Body and Blood of Christ unworthily, we bring a judgment down upon ourselves (1 Cor. 11:27-29). All forms of artificial birth control are intrinsically evil.
In 2003, the Bishop of St. Augustine, Florida, Victor Galeone, wrote a pastoral letter entitled, Marriage: A Communion of Life and Love, in which he specifically addressed this “silence”:
“In order to counter the silence surrounding the Church’s teaching in this area, as your bishop, I ask that the following guidelines be implemented in our diocese:
“All pastoral ministers should study the liberating message of John Paul II’s ‘Theology of the Body’ in order to share it with others.
“Confessors should become familiar with the ‘Vademecum for Confessors Concerning Some Aspects of the Morality of Conjugal Life.’
“When appropriate, priests and deacons should present in their homilies the Church’s teaching dealing with marriage, including why contraceptive behavior is wrong.
“Adequate instruction in NFP is to become a part of all marriage preparation programs. “Instruction in our high schools, the upper grades of Religious Education classes, and RCIA classes should clearly teach the immorality of those forms of sexual behavior condemned by the Church, including contraception” (16).