The problem is when the sacraments are seen as the end of responsibility rather than the beginning. For children born into Christian families (including Mennonites, who now fill this pastoral need by publicly dedicating their children), infant initiation is normative as a foundation for discipleship – a foundation which must then be built on.

I think we should admit that part of our rationale for baptizing infants was a fear that God would punish unbaptized children who died young. Most Catholics today no longer hold such a frightful view of our loving God, and if we want to encourage Catholics to take the faith seriously, perhaps we ought to make adult baptism the normal way people enter the Church.

What’s more, this is becoming a pattern. Your 13th century metaphysics comment was in turn a response to my comment about how your previous comment had apparently confused ‘natural law’, taken in the sense of principles of practical reason purportedly being a law natural to us, and ‘natural law’, taken in the sense of a theory so identifying these principles. It is quite easy to recognize that your 13th century metaphysics comment does not actually address this point, either.

When we clear away all the dust you’ve thrown up, there’s no argument. You’ve thrown up a lot of labels that turn not to be relevant, made a few statements about natural law theory itself that can easily be shown to be false, and more than once switched the subject when called on an error.

I’m not quite sure what to make of your conclusion that “So I don’t think that things reduce down quite so simply to this schematic.”

I think the key word here is “simply”, or reading into it some more, perhaps “simplistic”. However, what you and I wrote is factual, with almost no conjecture or extrapolation mixed in. I’m well aware that “blocks” exist throughout the continent of Europe, and that single family homes are beyond the reach of many Europeans (which is a shame, in my opinion).

I do know that there is, or rather was, a particular ideology behind this type of architecture, and that the blocks themselves carry a message that is squarely aimed at the dignity of the individual person. I do agree with you that a simplistic analysis of this may miss many nuances, yet on the other hand, unnecessary complexity may obscure that which is to be made explicit.

Perhaps you would care to explain your thinking some more.

I think it’s a simple refusal to think with the Church, which in turn is based on a lack of faith. Looking for practical reasons why a teaching should be followed, is like looking for logical reasons why a doctrine should be believed: You can do it, but if it’s the basis for your acceptance or rejection of the teaching, then you lack faith.

Why people, even Catholics, lack faith, is another question.

The interesting part of it to me is that I can’t think of any Catholic theologian or Catholic writer generally in history who argued that way. (Except for former National Catholic Register editor Tom Hoopes!! His poor wife!) ) Of course there us all the “Solomonic reasoning” that Marriage Tribunals get into, and I remember well reading binders full of that stuff. But not to that extreme. I think it may be the centrality of Marian devotion for Catholics that made the difference. Perhaps because of that Catholicism has certainly not been the most misogynistic religion. That terrible title goes to another world faith. And even within Christianity it seems the Marian devotion saves Catholicism from the clear misogyny of Jeffress’ extreme. For though he made it sound like it was binding on both sexes, I think realistically it is more often from one side than the other, and that means not from the distaff side.

(Why am I thinking of Wand Sykes “Ding-dong that dick is dead” comedy routine

I am not going to assert that there is not point to your logic here. But I believe it is reasonably a matter of emphasis, rather than the sort of definitional categories or moral bright line you are suggesting. The very proof of that is that the RC Church actually put a lot of the category in the other. The RC Church has a stellar history of having disapproved of many helpful medical innovations that would help cure disease, or palliate suffering. Those are mostly in the past now, because it would be just too ridiculous. Many of the categories people like you are so sure of, are, from a reasonable historical and moral vantage point, just another example. Again, perhaps not all, and one can debate on that and philosophize. But again it is a matter of emphasis.

The failure to recognize this in light of your own history, makes people paranoid about history itself. Poor Mitch Pacwa on EWTN, he is in a seemingly paranoid space not in terms of all these debates, and believes, by his own words, that he is living through a situation like Revolutionary Mexico where clerics will be murdered for beliefs on contraception, etc. History is a great equalizer for us all, and also a path of psychological health, which some TV Catholics need to attend to more. Thus, the significance of the discussion we are having.

Not that the Church’s account requires rejecting the idea of evolution in itself as a description of how we got to where we are biologically. But it also nevertheless believes in a metaphysical human nature that is not merely nominalist, but which is real and which is instantiated in each individual.

Of course “the Nature” isn’t a Person or a moral agent in itself! But it is inseparably an aspect of each individual. There is you the person qua person, but there is also you the person qua your essence, which is the essence shared with all humanity. In each individual, there are the desires ordered towards that individual’s survival, but there is also the desire ordered towards the further propagation of his universal, of the species.

The Church would posit that an attempt to reduce the species to a mere collection of ultimately autonomous individuals is AS bad as an attempt to make a unified organism out of the collective, as if the individual “cells” can be sacrificed for the good of the body. The individual who asserts his individual good or desires over those which belong to the species IN him, is as bad as a collective which will toss out individuals for the survival of the Hive (which is not the common good either, exactly because the community is not a person who can have a good apart from the good of its individual members).

This model is apparently very hard for moderns to understand, who are caught in a dichotomy of individualism versus collectivism, consequentialism versus deontology.

Discussions that get into theories in which true happiness is “fulfilling the ends of one’s nature” always end up begging the question as to what this nature actually is, and end up saying things like, “But that’s not really, reeeeally human naure,” or “You might think you’re happy and fulfilled, but you not, reeeeally.” I think this assumes way too much, and makes distinctions that are more or less arbitrary. Is it violating our nature to change our genome or upload our minds into computers? Yes. But is contraception in a league with that? I don’t think so.

Divorce rates tend to be higher in the South because marriage rates are also higher in the South. In the Northeast, first marriages tend to be delayed and the marriage rates are lower, meaning there are also fewer divorces.”

Contraception is a personal choice that has wider ramifications as all personal actions do.
In recognition of those ramifications personal choices become moral or not to the degree the ramifications are harmful. It is not the assertion of autonomy over nature as already in nature the autonomy exists and exercised even when refraining from an action recognized as harmful even if inherent in the evolution makeup of the human species,
In short desire is personal and individualistic even our shared inherited instincts are operable only in the particular.

Yes, the advocates of legalism will find a way to turn even grace into Law.

But that’s not what I’m promoting here at all. Prayer may be a better medicine than direct attempts at willpower, but anyone who promises deliverance on anything other than God’s time is selling snakeoil.

For many, the deliverance may well be menopause.