My failure invalidates precisely nothing

OK time to go all religious on you, folks.  Honestly, President Obama and Kathleen Sebelius didn't give me much choice.

I am a Catholic.  I will fight the encroachment of the Federal government upon the rights of my Church.  If you are not Catholic, I am fighting the encroachment of the Federal government upon the rights of your church too!  Your church allows contraception and sterilization, you say?  The particulars of the belief in question don't matter.  What matters is that, in direct violation of the First Amendment, the Federal government has informed our Church that we are not allowed to hold and practice this belief without penalty from them.  If we drop health coverage for employees to avoid the requirement to fund contraceptives and sterilization, then the Federal government will fine us.  And the fines are not small.  If we continue to write policies, the law requires we write them to violate our beliefs.  This time, it may be a belief or teaching you don't care about.  But what happens when the Feds again decide the Catholic Church, or any other church, teaches something they don't think it should?  And this time it's one you care about?  If you sat back and allowed them to destroy our First Amendment rights this time, how can you hold the line the next time?

Some people would call me a hypocrite.  Many people in my life don't know what I am about to admit, and I'll be honest, I am afraid their opinion of me will change.  But one cannot operate on fear.

I had a tubal ligation in December 2007, a couple months after my fifth child was born.

Yep, I disobeyed the Church.  I committed a mortal sin.  I thought all my reasons were good at the time, and that the Church was just being unreasonable, so therefore it was fine for me to disobey.  All the normal rationalizations that one tells themselves when they set out to purposely disobey God.

And you know what?  That means precisely.... NOTHING.  My failure to live up the the laws of the Catholic Church in no way invalidates those laws.  If surveys are to be believed, at least 90% of Catholics fail in obeying this particular teaching.  Even failing on that massive scale does not affect the validity of the Church's teaching.  All it means is that the human sin of pride is alive and well.  If the sins of its members invalidated the laws of the Catholic Church, then the Church wouldn't have survived one century, never mind twenty.  And if only the pure can defend the Church, then there is no one to defend Her.  As Jesus said about throwing stones....

I have nothing but the deepest respect for people who are able to live up to the Church's requirement of the use of only natural methods for regulating births.  They are stronger than me and I know it.  But they have their sins too, they are just different ones from mine.

I did go through a period of rebelliousness when I called myself a "birth control dissenter."  What we like to call "common sense" told me that it was impossible for people to actually live that way.  Those ideas were just outdated and the hangover from Medieval attempts to control the laity in every respect.  Basically, I bought into secular reasoning on this topic, which is hard not to do.  I must say, too, though, that some supporters of NFP methods do the Church no favors, in that their lack of charity can be breathtaking.  But in the end, after some growth and soul searching, and further reading of works that both supported and attacked the Church's position, I came to realize that there really isn't anything special about my position or my choice at all.  I am merely a sinner, who needs the hospital of the Church for her soul.  The fact that my sin has to do with a controversial topic, and would be regarded by most as no sin at all, again means nothing.

I submitted myself to the legitimate authority of the Church and made my Confession.  I expressed remorse and received absolution, so I know in my head that God has forgiven me my sin.  Sometimes my heart is another matter, though.  Even expiated sin leaves lingering temporal effects, which is why Purgatory exists.  (That is a whole other post and I am not getting into it here!)  Some days I am pretty sure that we do part of our time in Purgatory here on Earth.  Just before the doctor put me under for the surgery, I almost told him to stop, don't do it!  But I hesitated and the moment was lost.  I live with consequences from the choice I made often.  I wonder who the next baby would have been.  I wonder if God would have blessed us with a third son.  And I feel the absence in my life.  Victoria being four, by now I would have had another baby if our previous pattern and fertility continued.  Of course our lives would be different, and some sacrifices would have been necessary, had we chosen to have more children.  But different is not always bad.  In fact it's not even usually bad.  Whenever I have these feelings, though, my mind reminds me of the financial struggle, physical consequences, and unkind social pressure that led to the decision in the first place.  It reminds me of my two lost babies, the ones I loved but never got to hold, and how Craig and I were so afraid to face that again that we almost didn't have Victoria.  Sometimes I feel momentarily guilty about making love to my husband, even though my priest assured me that I should not.  I also feel guilty about depriving him of the opportunity to love more little people that look like him, because no matter how hard things got, he would always have been happy to greet another child into the world.  His well of love is deep and always ready to grow.  There are reasons he could not bring himself to do what I did, and I am sure I don't know the half of them.  In short, I live with spiritual warfare inside myself, as the price of my disobedience.

The worst temporal effect, by far, though, is that I have to explain this to my children as they grow up and I teach them about marriage and the Church.  Talk about Purgatory on Earth.  All I can do is emphasize that we are all sinners, and this is one of my more obvious sins.  I don't pretend that these issues are easy to decide for anyone, nor that they will likely cause my children and their spouses struggle and sleepless nights as they did me.  I suppose I will be in a unique position to understand and offer charity and sympathy.  You will never see me on a blog or message board screaming that contraceptors should be thrown out of the Church.  Yes, there are people who actually do say that.  I always ask them, for what other sins do we summarily throw people out of the Church?  There are sins bad enough that they incur automatic excommunication and can ordinarily only be absolved by the Bishop, but they are extremely few.  But, we don't throw people out of the Church for committing murder, rape, or abusing children.  We don't throw out people who cohabit in a sexual relationship without being married, straight or gay.  They may be in a state of mortal sin, but they can always come back and confess those sins and restore their communion with the Body of Christ.  Their membership in the Church is unaffected.  Yet some people think those who practice contraception should be just thrown out?  Reminds me of a dialogue about eyes, specks, and beams....

And so, this is how a woman with her tubes tied ends up defending the Catholic Church and its teaching on contraception.  I challenge anyone to read the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae by Paul VI, the one that confirmed the teaching of the Church against artficial birth control in 1968, and tell me that all of his predictions for society did not come to pass.

As I said in the beginning, though, the particular moral teaching that the Federal government's action impacts upon really, truly, is not the issue.  This is about the First Amendment, and the absolute prohibition on the government interfering in churches, and its utter disregard by this Administration.  Non-Catholics and Catholic birth control dissenters... join us in the fight.  Because if we lose and they win, the Constitution is dead and churches will be subject to government control or suppression, like they are in China and Pakistan now and in the Soviet Union in the last century.

I will end as I began.  I am a Catholic.  I am loyal to my Church and try my best to accept and obey all Her teachings, even when I don't fully understand them.  I recognize Her authority as legitimate and coming directly from Jesus Christ.  When She is under attack, I will do my best to defend Her.  But I am also an American, and I regard the Constitution as precious and one of the pinnacles of human achievement.  By standing up against the onerous intrusion of the Obama Administration upon the Church's rights, I am defending both my Church and my country.  And your church and your country, too.