Moscow Patriarchate Draws Nearer to the ROCOR

[Justin Kissel]

That's very possible (about the economy), I'll have to keep my ears open.

[Anthony]

Yes, it is disturbing that Bishop Kallistos Ware has been soft on birth control. What do the more traditional jurisdictions such as ROCOR teach about birth control? Thank you.

Herman

I believe Bishop Ware is from England and lately what he has been spouting concerns me.

Did you have anything in particular in mind? His changing position on birth control is a bit disheartening to me (especially since his books are normally seen as the authoritative introduction to Orthodoxy), but I hadn't noticed many other ... um... "concerns"

[Justin Kissel]

This subject always gets me in trouble (it's too personal for me), so I'll make it short, and please forgive if I don't post on the subject again?

Yes, it is disturbing that Bishop Kallistos Ware has been soft on birth control. What do the more traditional jurisdictions such as ROCOR teach about birth control? Thank you.

• Basically, ROCOR holds to the position that all of the Orthodox Churches had until the middle of the 20th century: that contraception is, normally speaking, definately not allowed, but that the Church isn't going to say a whole lot about it publically. So, the general rule was that it wasn't allowed and was a grave sin (a number of early fathers, including Chrysostom* equate it with murder, though they mean it in the same way that Jesus did when he equated hate with murder); if by chance there popped up a situation in which contraception had to be considered, it was thought of as a "lesser evil" as it was being considered, and as a private practical matter between a family, priest (and maybe bishop), and God. This seems, more or less, to be how it is today in ROCOR.

• Oddly enough, some anti-contraception Orthodox Priests--including a few ROCOR ones, view NFP as being mostly (if not totally) acceptable. How this is acceptable I'm still not sure I understand. It's just a fancy, scientific version of the rythym method, which was (in its archaic forms) condemned along with all the other contraceptive methods in the early Church. I can sympathise with the arguments about this being a more "natural" method, and therefore better than other, artificial, methods; maybe this is because I grew up in a culture that made such a sharp distinction between "natural" (which is good) and artificial (which is second best). Yet this distinction (natural vs. artificial) was never a part of the writings of the Church Fathers. The point was: if you are doing something to prevent conception, then you are using contraception; it doesn't matter whether this something is passive or active, or whether it is "natural" or "artificial".

• Noonan's book on Contraception is hopelessly flawed, both in conclusions and even in how the research is conducted (e.g., Noonan seems to have as an underlying premise--and he discusses this some in the book--that the early Church believed that a baby was "ensouled" weeks after it was conceived. He based this on very scant patristic evidence which seemed to me out of context, and seems to ignore the larger body of patristic evidence that explicitly says that a soul becomes intertwined with a body at the moment of conception). Having said this, Noonan's book does serve one valuable purpose: it provides many quotes and resources with which one can research. If you're really interested, I'd suggest getting this book from the local library (though there really isn't much point in reading more than the first quarter of the book, unless you care about how the Catholics looked at the subject in the late "middle ages" and modern years).

-And just so people won't think I'm trying to condemn those who use contraception or make them feel bad, I'll admit that I use contraception myself. As many on the board already knows, my wife has some major heart problems (a patched hole, 2 artificial valves, etc.). This condition means that if my wife were to become pregnant, she could very well die (because of the stress); in fact, both her and the baby could very well die. Beyond this, a medicine that she is on can and does cause birth defects, so even if we wanted to try getting pregnant, we couldn't do so anyway while still on this medication. If we were to "accidentally" get pregnant, we'd be in some major problems. Therefore, we decided, and were told by our (ROCOR) spiritual father, that we should use contraception. In our case, it was the lesser evil. The only other option was complete abstinence, which just isn't possible at this point, so something had to give, and what gave was an allowance for contraception.

Justin

• Chrysostom did indeed say that it was worse than murder and that he didn't know what to call it, but modern theologians don't want to hear this about Chrysostom since he's the only straw they can grasp at to keep some notion of patristic support for the pro-contraception position. Besides, how can they use Augustine as a scape-goat and say that "the east" never fell into such errors if Chrysostom himself does not totally agree with the modern theologians?