But all of this is addressed to couples who share a desire, or at least a sense of moral obligation, not to use artificial birth control. In other words, the ideal integration of NFP into the conjugal life requires a certain degree of unity between the spouses. What about a couple who do not have this unity? Both husband and wife want (for serious reasons) to avoid conception, but only one of them believes using contraception is wrong. The other sees no need, obligation, or benefit to limiting themselves to natural means.
I've met people in such a situation who respond cynically when they hear NFP praised as beneficial to a marriage. For them, their insistence on using NFP instead of contraception is a source of tension and resentment within their marriages. For such people, NFP requires a much greater sacrifice than just periodic abstinence from sexual relations: they find themselves in the position of being the “bedroom police,” of being made to feel they are selfishly denying the pleasure and joy of union to their spouses. Even if they are convinced that they are doing what they must do, they suffer greatly for it.
For what it's worth, this is first of all an acknowledgment of the suffering they bear. What solutions are there to offer? First, sin is never a solution to a quandary — it is never a moral option, and in this case it is clear that it isn't even a practical option, since giving in to sin will not resolve the tension in the marriage. Acting against one's conscience never brings peace — neither to the individual nor to the marriage. If one spouse resents a sacrifice that he sees as unnecessary (periodic abstinence), how much more will the other resent a sacrifice that he sees as endangering his soul? We are often called to sacrifice our desires, but no one is ever called to sacrifice his conscience.
Second, it is important to realize that a dispute over NFP is not the source of disunity within a marriage, but one of its manifestations. The only full solution is the grace which eradicates the disunity at its source. Wives and husbands who recognize this disunity must pray for this grace — may they persevere.
But the Church understands that Christians must live in imperfect circumstances. Holiness is not only for those with perfect marriages — the Church has words of guidance also for those who are seeking to live faithfully with an unbelieving spouse. Pope Pius XI addressed just this situation in 1930 in his encyclical Casti Connubii, “On Christian Marriage”:
Holy Church knows full well that not infrequently, one of the parties is sinned against rather than sinning, when for a grave cause he or she reluctantly allows the perversion of the right order. In such a case, there is no sin, provided that, mindful of the law of charity, he or she does not neglect to seek to dissuade and to deter the partner from sin.
In other words, it can be permissible to allow one’s spouse to use contraception, provided one has tried to dissuade him or her from it. This is not a compromise with sin; the faithful spouse is not sinning, but allowing a sin he or she cannot prevent without causing the further evil of marital discord. It is also not a solution to marital discord — Pope Pius describes the cooperating spouse as being “sinned against.” How sad to be sinned against during what God designed to be an act of love! The Pope is offering not a method of eradicating suffering, but directions for living purely in the midst of impurity.
More recently, in 1997, the Pontifical Council for the Family, in its Vademecum for Confessors Concerning some Aspects of the Morality of Conjugal Life, addressed the same problem, “…cases of cooperation in the sin of a spouse who voluntarily renders the unitive act infecund:”
This cooperation can be licit when the three following conditions are jointly met: 1) when the action of the cooperating spouse is not already illicit in itself; 2) when proportionately grave reasons exist for cooperating in the sin of the other spouse; 3) when one is seeking to help the other spouse to desist from such conduct (patiently, with prayer, charity, and dialogue; although not necessarily in that moment, nor on every single occasion).
(It is also noted that cases of abortifacient “contraception” require a different analysis.)
It is important to understand that the first condition forbids any direct use of contraception — a wife would not be justified, for example, in using a diaphragm or taking the Pill even at her husband's insistence, because this would not be merely to allow the sin of her husband; it would be to sin herself. The second and the third conditions emphasize charity. It is not an act of love to encourage another's sin. But neither is it loving to unnecessarily embitter one's spouse, or to accept more disunity than one must.
Spouses who carry this cross should know that the Church does not reject or abandon them, that she acknowledges the difficulty and delicacy of their task. To bear such suffering charitably and patiently, we must believe, is a redemptive kind of love — even if its power is revealed to them only in the next life.
(This article is reprinted with permission from Canticle Magazine.)
