2015
Without expressly coming out in support of birth control, Pope Francis suggested Catholic families think carefully about the number of children they produce. Discussing international aid, the Pope’s remarks centered around how Catholics might practice their faith responsibly. From The National Catholic Reporter:
Telling the story of a woman he met in a parish in Rome several months ago who had given birth to seven children via cesarean section and was pregnant with an eighth, Francis asked: ‘Does she want to leave the seven orphans?’
“This is to tempt God,’ he said, adding later: “That is an irresponsibility.” Catholics, the pope said, should speak of ‘responsible parenthood.”
‘‘How do we do this?’ Francis asked. “With dialogue. Each person with his pastor seeks how to do that responsible parenthood.”
“God gives you methods to be responsible,’ he continued. ‘Some think that—excuse the word—that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits. No.”
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While there’s considerable proof that citizens of the ancient world practiced birth control, it’s a tenet of early Christian doctrine that the purpose of marriage is to produce offspring. Saint Augustine of Hippo, largely credited with shaping the foundations of the Catholic church, wrote definitively in On Marriage and Concupiscence that even within marriage, couples should go to bed with reproduction on the brain:
For necessary sexual intercourse for begetting children is alone worthy of marriage. But that which goes beyond this necessity no longer follows reason but lust. And yet it pertains to the character of marriage to yield it to the partner lest by fornication the other sin damnably. For, whereas that natural use, when it pass beyond the compact of marriage, that is, beyond the necessity of begetting children, is pardonable in the case of a wife, damnable in the case of a harlot; that which is against nature is execrable when done in the case of a harlot, but more execrable in the case of a wife. Of so great power is the ordinance of the Creator, and the order of creation, that when the man shall wish to use a body part of the wife not allowed for this purpose, the wife is more shameful, if she suffer it to take place in her own case, than if in the case of another woman.