Excommunication threat vs Aquino

CBCP President Bishop Nereo Odchimar over a radio interview said they are considering excommunicating Aquino after he blatantly supports the use of contraceptives in family planning, a position Church is opposing. But WHY?

The Church’s prerogative to be prescriptive of a person’s personal views ends where free will begins. This free will is applied when, among others, one participates in the democratic processes and exercises of our secular state. Therefore, the mandate of an official to represent the aspirations of his people is understood to originate from free will as interpreted by due processes made available by the state for its citizens to channel said will.

Noynoy’s stand on reproductive choice represents the Church’s failure to influence how its constituents choose to exercise their will through these state-sanctioned processes. As such the CBCP should focus more on reflecting on where their influence is losing traction with their constituency than on making medieval threats against a duly-elected Chief Executive of the Republic.

The Bible and contraception

Two parts of the Bible are often quoted to show God’s disapproval of birth control:

First, God commanded his people to “Be fruitful and multiply,” and contraception is seen as specifically flouting this instruction.

Second, Onan was killed by God for “spilling his seed,” which is often taken as divine condemnation of coitus interrupts.

The first of these examples is normally rebutted by demonstrating that contraception has not prevented human beings from being fruitful and multiplying.

There are at least two interpretations of the second example:

God may have been angry with Onan for having sex for a purpose other than having children

this interpretation supports the idea that contraception is morally wrong

it also supports the idea that there is only one kind of morally good sexual act: sex between a man and a woman who are married and who are having sex to produce children

God may not have been angry with Onan for preventing conception but for failing to honour a commandment to produce a child with his dead brother’s wife but this interpretation has no application to modern cultures or morality the act that Jewish law required Onan to perform would nowadays be regarded as rape, since the widow’s consent was not required – and this makes the story a very dubious foundation for moral argument

Scripture in favour of contraception

The Bible never explicitly approves of contraception.

However, there are a number of passages where the Bible appears to accept that sex should be enjoyed for other reasons than the production of children, and some people argue that this implies that no wrong is done if a couple have sex with the intention of not having children.