Catholic Teaching on IVF and Contraception Explained

The Fr. Mike Schmitz Catholic Podcast

Ascension

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture

4.9 • 7.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2019

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For many people, the Catholic Church’s teaching on in vitro fertilization and contraception is a hard one, but it is in concordance with the nature of things. The nature of a thing, as Fr. MIke puts it, is its “what-it’s-for-ness”. Sex is for procreation and the unity of the couple. Equally important is the fact that sex, not in vitro fertilization, is the natural way to bring forth a new life. Contraception and in vitro fertilization violate the nature of not only sex, but also the nature of the person and life itself.

If you feel that this teaching prohibits you from being truly happy, Fr. Mike offers encouragement. It may not seem fair to us at first, but the deep abiding peace we acquire from living by God’s plan is better than anything we could acquire by doing things our way.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	How are my names, Father Megchimitz, and this is a sense of presence.
0:07.9	So I've received a number of emails, messages, a lot of questions regarding, okay, so what
0:14.8	is up with a, the church is teaching on contraception and b, the church is teaching on in vitro
0:21.0	fertilization, because they're actually kind of two halves of the same coin.
0:24.8	So I thought, why not?
0:26.5	You know, I'm not doing anything.
0:27.5	I might as well tackle this relatively controversial and very difficult sometimes to understand
0:32.7	topic.
0:33.7	Now let me give you a little background on myself.
0:35.0	There was a time in my life when I just hated being Catholic and I was, I hated the church
0:38.8	and I'm embarrassed about being Catholic and it actually kind of all stems from this particular
0:44.0	teaching that church is teaching that sex must be open to life, that all sexual intercourse,
0:50.2	all sexual actions must be oriented towards the procreation of children.
0:55.5	And I was like, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
0:58.0	I remember asking a bunch of priests and doctors, like, meaning like, doctorate doctors,
1:02.6	like, teacher professors, nuns, like this kind of sense of like, why is that?
1:06.8	And no one was able to give me, well, they might have been able to give me a good answer.
1:10.2	I was not able to hear any answer at all.
1:13.2	Most people just told me like, well, don't worry about it.
1:15.2	The church is way behind the times and hopefully the church will catch up at some point.
1:18.9	Thankfully, thanks be to God.
1:20.2	The thing that brought me back to the church was someone speaking directly into this.
	...

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