The latest issue of Faith Magazine is now online. You can download the whole issue as a pdf or you can look at individual articles.
This issue I have an article on The New (corrected) ICEL Translation which begins:
People have grown old and died waiting for an accurate English translation of the Missal of Pope Paul VI. Most Catholics under 40 years of age have never been able to participate at Mass said according to a faithful rendering of the official Latin text. This injustice to the People of God is now being rectified, and not before time.Our policy in Faith is to make all of the content of the magazine available online.
Here is the link to subscribe if you would like a shiny printed copy. Six issues per year: UK £25, overseas airmail £33 (there are other options.)
5 comments:
Sent to Kindle. Really looking forward to reading it. Thanks.
I would say thankyou for the link Father; but you've just taken up an afternoon in which I intended to lie on the sofa with a packet of Jaffa cakes and watch Downton Abbey - and inadvertently you - well rather Fr Dylan James has made my blood boil!
The teaching on NFP is simple:
Double-effect.
When those able to conceive refrain from sexual activity with a contraceptive by omission motive - there is moral disorder.
Only a primary mitigating motive which includes an holistic procreative end can ever justify the action.
Therefore recourse to NFP is NEVER a good in itself - or an imperfect good as Fr James intimates - it may only be designated as right action.
Fr James, along with Prof Janet Smith, don't realise what they are doing.
Sexual activity when it is unifying and directed towards its providential end is a good-in-itself. As St Paul said the physical and spiritual union is where we are most God-like.
It may be superseded by a supplementary glorious sacramental gift from God of new life where it transcends its already inherent goodness into the eschelons of Divine Love - a new universe comes into existence at conception.
Therefore from the earliest monastic period [ref John Noonan's 'Contraception'] Sex among the pregnant, the infertile and the menopausal was objectively classified as a good-in-itself because it was providence which precluded the sacramental supplementary [or it was already actuated] - God's will! Those making love were fulfilling the act to its optimal end.
Fr James makes an almighty gaffe by failing to consider this.
Therefore when he imposes an 'imperfect' good status upon those engaging in NFP - he inadvertently imposes an imperfection upon those engaging in the act who can never conceive!
By trying to mitigate and excuse the inexcusable [NFP is NOT good - get used to it folks - no matter how you try to run rings round moral theology with theology of the body platitudes - it is only ever RIGHT - for good reasons [and they'd better be bloody good!]]
When Fr James tries to ameliorate NFP he inadvertently scandalises the sexual activity of the infertile - imposing an imperfection upon it which does not exist - intimating it is a less-than-good because it does not achieve a procreative end.
NFP does not need Fr James' overprotection - it can defend itself in double effect.
But the per se destinatus is fulfilled in the good act of the infertile - it is not imperfect in its goodness - if one attempts to apply a non-existent benignity onto NFP under the same paradigm you scandalise the goodness of the act by the infertile by imposing a non-existent moral imperfection.
Elizabeth Anscombe would be having kittens!!! [to be continued]
...and I sincerely wish Prof Smith & Fr James would stop trying to scry the underlying motives for the words used in humanae vitae - and simply trust the teaching - we've 2000 years of the most acute overwhelmingly insightful minds in our moral theological armoury - there isn't one thing they can think of that a hundred other people of cosmic intellect haven't considered before them. The Church knows what it's doing!
The per se destinatus clause isn't merely about firing arrows so they don't hit a live target - it is also to do with the holistic entelechy of the act - the provisions made decades earlier in casti connubii and Pius XII's allocutios which permitted assisted fertilisation [and consequently actions like using the pill [while abstaining] to regulate ovulation to promote fertility - and ironically the use of a condom during lovemaking when the birth canal is hyper-ericaceous and spermicidal; or where there is low sperm motility - the sperm is merely extracted and pushed past the fertility disabling region] The mandated criteria remain - intromissio et ejaculatio in vagina [forgotten my tenses so excuse potential mis-spelling]
So next time you're at Wonersh Father could you please give Fr James a clip round the ear for inadvertently suggesting that all those infertile and menopausal couples are doing something other than exulting in God's glory and fulfilling their love for one another in an optimal moral good.
Definately had to buy this. Cant wait to get stuck in.
Ironically, there's a pic of you illustrating an article that takes a rather different view!
http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/
20111007_1.htm
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