This past week while reading through responses to Bishop Thomas Tobin's Tweet condemning joining in pride parades, I could see the inklings of hell in the responses. Self-righteous haters condemning a prelate of the church, with a pride that sounded only demonic. The moral self-creators of out era sound exactly like hellish ghouls cursing God while making their own truth, wishing to the measure of things instead of being measured by things.
Many of the Tweets circled around the idea that prelates, who allow pederasty to continue under their not so watchful eyes, had no moral authority to condemn "love." Indeed, the Church has been infiltrated and is currently run by the modernist homoheretics. The comical part of the critique was - just a sign of the irrational emotivism of our day - that these self-righteous folks were parading homosexuality without realizing it is homo clerics that were abusing minors. All studies done on the phenomena show that 80% of the abuse was done to post-pubescent boys, quite obviously a homosexual crime. Church haters fail to realize that the homoheritics, at the behest of the communists and Masons, joined the priesthood to hide their "lack of wives" and live lavishly off of the orthodox faithful. This is obvious to anyone with eyes.
Beyond this lack of insight, one particular Tweet stood out to me, and it was someone condemning the Church idea that sexual intimacy should be procreative in nature. The Tweet said something along the lines of "Post menopausal women can't have sex according to the church because they can't have babies. That sex is illicit." First, the Church does not teach that, but secondly it is a misunderstanding of key philosophical understanding.
From the classical (read Thomistic) lexicon, we have the terms per se and per accidens. Now one cannot blame the moderns for being ignorant of the difference between these two terms, since philosophy sidelined itself with the abandonment formal and final causality. Formal causality being the essential act of a thing, and final causality being "that for the sake of which" a cause has. Basically, any given form has a range of effects that it aims at, and these aims are its final cause.
If we review, then, the female sexual organ, we realize quickly that it is for the sake of procreation that it exists. Indeed, the pleasure it attains is merely for the sake of the preservation of the human species. Now, our objector says that once this functionality is gone, then it means intercourse is illicit. However, the lack of procreative functionality is accidental to it's final cause. That is, if you remove the impediment of age, it's per se functionality is procreative.
Similar to blindness in the eye, the lack of procreative functionality is a privation to the properly functioning organ. Remove the impediment, and it's per se functionality returns. Thus, the accident of age does not make sexual intercourse illicit because non procreative function is an accidental circumstance outside the intentionality of the agent in question. This is why nonprocreative sex, with this particular accident, is not illicit.
For Aquinas, moral actions have three basic components, an object, circumstances, and intentions. The object is the action or happening "out there" in mind independent reality. Circumstances are accidents that surround the object and intentions are the aims or targets of the agents. Circumstances and intentions are able to change the essence of an act, or the object. Circumstances, however, can also NOT affect the essence of an act. For instance, if someone is driving along on their way home from work, and accidentally run over someone, the object of the act is a crime of invincible ignorance. If that same person stops at the bar, and then runs over someone, the circumstances have changed the object, and the crime now becomes one of moral fault. Similarly, if the same person had a bad day, and sees the person who caused that bad day riding a bike, and intends to run him over, again, the object has changed because of the intention of the driver.
So, if we take all of that into consideration, we can see how post menopausal intercourse is not illicit. The object of the act is marital unity and procreation. Because of a circumstance that is uncontrollable in terms of intention by the aged woman, the circumstance of age does not change the morality of the act. For, remove the impediment, and the essential characteristic of the sexual organs returns. Basically, to check the intentions a post menopausal woman need merely ask if she were to become pregnant as a result of the intercourse, would she be okay with that? If she has the correct intention, the accident of age makes the act licit.
So, the per se functionality of the sexual organs are procreation. It is per accidens that they do not have this functionality, a circumstantial accident that does not change the essence of the act. Therefore, sexual relations amongst married couples that are not procreative on account of a privation in the sexual organs are licit, but only if there is no purposeful destruction of the procreative functionality. If and when someone mutilates their body in this way, the intention of their act changes the essence or object of the act, and thus makes it illicit. It becomes illicit because it changes the nature of the act, as the end of sex is procreation. By changing the end, one alters the act and acts contrary to nature.
If the moderns hope to be moral again, they need first to return to philosophy that recognizes the four causes. Without final causality, we obliterate nature and in so doing, have no natural law to guide us. No wonder we are a miserable lot...
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