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The Early Church Fathers on Contraception.

 

  • Early Church Fathers
  • From the Scriptures

 

 

  1. St. Augustine of Hippo, (A.D. 354-428)
    St. Caesarius of Arles, (A.D. 468-542)
St. Clement of Alexandria, (A.D. 150-220), Greek; theologian, a scholar of Pantaenus, to whom he succeeded as head of the Catechetical School at Alexandria, Egypt. His writings display great acquaintance with the Gentile philosophy. He wrote with the express design of hiding the mysteries of the Christian religion from the Pagans, and the uninitiated, while at the same time, laboring to show the immense practical superiority of the Christian code of morals over that of every Pagan sect and system of philosophy.

This proves that you [Manicheans] approve of having a wife, not for the procreation of children, but for the gratification of passion. In marriage, as the marriage law declares, the man and woman come together for the procreation of children. Therefore, whoever makes the procreation of children a greater sin than copulation, forbids marriage and makes the woman not a wife but a mistress, who for some gifts presented to her, is joined to the man to gratify his passion.

The Morals of the Manichees 18:65 [A.D. 388]

You [Manicheans] make your auditors adulterers of their wives when they take care lest the women with whom they copulate conceive. They take wives according to the laws of matrimony by tablets announcing that the marriage is contracted to procreate children; and then, fearing because of your [religious] law [against childbearing] . . . they copulate in a shameful union only to satisfy lust for their wives. They are unwilling to have children, on whose account alone marriages are made. How is it, then, that you are not those prohibiting marriage, as the apostle predicted of you so long ago [I Tim. 4:1-4], when you try to take from marriage what marriage is? When this is taken away, husbands are shameful lovers, wives are harlots, bridal chambers are brothels, fathers-in-law are pimps.

Against Faustus 15:7 [A.D. 400]

For thus the eternal law, that is, the will of God creator of all creatures, taking counsel for the conservation of natural order, not to serve lust, but to see to the preservation of the race, permits the delight of mortal flesh to be released from the control of reason in copulation only to propagate progeny.

Against Faustus 22:30

St. Caesarius of Arles (A.D. 468-542), Bishop for forty years, was the foremost ecclesiastic of his generation in Gaul. In all the Christian West, only Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours overshadowed him.

Who is he who cannot warn that no woman may take a potion [an oral contraceptive or an abortifacient] so that she is unable to conceive or condemns in herself the nature which God willed to be fecund? As often as she could have conceived or given birth, of that many homicides she will be held guilty, and, unless she undergoes suitable penance, she will be damned by eternal death in Hell. If a women does not wish to have children, let her enter into a religious agreement with her husband; for chastity is the sole sterility of a Christian woman.

Sermons 1:12 [A.D. 522]

 

 

The Early Church Fathers were all against artificial birth control. In fact, all Christian churches were in agreement on this until 1930. Then, one by one, churches began bowing to societal pressures by abandoning this ancient teaching of the Church and the Early Church Fathers.

 

They understood what the Church understands: That to contracept (meaning to create an impediment to conception during the marital embrace) means not to give oneself totally within the bonding marital embrace of a husband with his wife.

 


The Church's Scriptures that implicitly prohibit Contraception:

 

God created man and woman as complimentary companions in his own image

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said to them,
"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth."

Genesis 1:27-28

Man recognizes that a woman, and only a woman, was created by God for him and was intended to complement his life.

23 Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." 24 Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.

 

Genesis 2:23-24

Our Lord catechizes on the permanence of marriage

4 He [Jesus] answered, "Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, `For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder."


Matthew 19:4-6

Jesus teaches that from the beginning a man was meant for a woman to become one flesh

5 But Jesus said to them: . . . 6 "But from the beginning of creation, "God made them male and female. 7 For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder."

 

Mark 10:5-9

Paul encourages husbands to keep their wives spotless and love them as they love themselves

25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church,

 

Ephesians 5:25-29

 

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