DOCERE
« Christian life meant a separation from the standards of that world: you couldn't be a Baal-worshipper, you couldn't sacrifice to idols, be a sodomite, practice infanticide compatibly with the Christian allegiance. That is not to say that Christians were good; we humans are a bad lot and our lives as Christians even if not blackly and grossly wicked are often very mediocre. But the Catholic Christian badge now again means separation, even for such poor mediocrities, from what the unchristian world in the West approves and professes. »
— Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Contraception and Chastity
« if sexual union can be deliberately and totally divorced from fertility, then we may wonder why sexual union has got to be married union. If the expression of love between the partners is the point, then it shouldn't be so narrowly confined. »
— Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Contraception and Chastity
« The reason why people are confused about intention, and why they sometimes think there is no difference between contraceptive intercourse and the use of infertile times to avoid conception, is this: They don't notice the difference between 'intention' when it means the intentionalness of the thing you're doing — that you're doing this on purpose — and when it means a further or accompanying intention with which you do the thing. Contraceptive intercourse and intercourse using infertile times may be alike in respect of further intention, and these further intentions may be good, justified, excellent. This the Pope has noted. He sketched such a situation and said: "it cannot be denied that in both cases the married couple, for acceptable reasons," (for that's the case he imagined) "are perfectly clear in their intention to avoid children and mean to secure that none will be born." This is a comment on the two things: contraceptive intercourse on the one hand and intercourse using infertile times on the other, for the sake of the limitation of the family. »
— Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Contraception and Chastity
« If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery, when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can't be the mere pattern of bodily behavior in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. I am not saying: if you think contraception all right you will do these other things; not at all. The habit of respectability persists and old prejudices die hard. But I am saying: you will have no solid reason against these things. You will have no answer to someone who proclaims as many do that they are good too. You cannot point to the known fact that Christianity drew people out of the pagan world, always saying no to these things. Because, if you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition. »
— Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Contraception and Chastity
« As often holds, there is here a Christian mean between two possible extremes. It is: never to change sexual actions so they are deprived of that character which makes sex so profoundly significant, so deepgoing in human fife. Hence we would not think of contraceptive intercourse as an exercise of responsibility in regard to sex! Responsibility involves keeping our sexual acts as that kind of act, and recognizing that they are that kind of act by engaging in them with good-hearted wisdom about the getting of children. This is the standard of chastity for a married Christian. But it should not be thought that it is against wisdom for poor people willingly to have many children. That is "the wisdom of the flesh, and it is death" (there's a lot of this death around at present). »
— Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Contraception and Chastity
« If Christian standards of chastity were widely observed the world would be enormously much happier. Our world, for example, is littered write deserted wives — partly through that fantastic con that went on for such a long time about how it was part of liberation for women to have dead easy divorce: amazing — these wives often struggling to bring up young children or abandoned to loneliness in middle age. And how many miseries and hangups are associated with loss of innocence in youth! What miserable messes people keep on making, to their own and others' grief, by dishonorable sexual relationships! The Devil has scored a great propaganda victory: everywhere it's suggested that the troubles connected with sex are all to do with frustration, with abstinence, with society's cruel and conventional disapproval. As if, if we could only do away with these things, it would be a happy and life-enhancing romp for everyone; and as if all who were chaste were unhappy, not only unhappy but hard-hearted and censorious and nasty. It fitted the temper of the times (this is a rather comic episode) when psychiatrists were asked to diagnose the unidentified Boston Strangler, they suggested he was a sex-starved individual. Ludicrous error! The idea lacks any foundation, that the people who are bent upon and who get a lot of sexual enjoyment are more gentle, merciful and kind than those who live in voluntary continence. »
— Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Contraception and Chastity