Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #734 The Truth Behind the Contraceptive Mentality: And How It Reshaped Marriage and the Culture

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#734 The Truth Behind the Contraceptive Mentality: And How It Reshaped Marriage and the Culture · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Claymore Become Who You Are podcast where we look at today's headlines through the lens of timeless truth.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: In july nineteen sixty eight, Pope Paul VI released Humane Vite, an encyclical that was immediately dismissed by many as outdated.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Today, more than fifty years later, though, we're living in a very world that Pope Paul VI warned us about record divorce rates, fatherlessness, plummeting birth rates, hookup culture, growing government involvement, and reproductive rights.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: How did he know all this stuff?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: My guest today is Linda Piper, who spent years helping young people and all of us navigate spiritual warfare, the cultural confusion.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: She's the author of the powerful chapter, The Truth Behind the Contraceptive Mentality, Act 15 of the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: She's also a co-founder of the John Paul Tour Renewal Center, so we go a long way together.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, Linda, welcome to the show.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Jack.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's really an honor to be here.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Very exciting to be back with you after a series we had done earlier.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we did a lot of work.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So those of you who are new, go back and listen to those earlier podcasts with Linda where we unpacked John Paul II's Theology of the Body.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: So those of you who are looking for some resources, go back and look at that.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Linda, you opened Act number 15 and the article to be published soon in the Catholic Exchange.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: You noted that you graduated from high school in May of 1968, just weeks before Humane Vite was released.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: So why don't you walk us through this document and why it matters, why it mattered then and why it still matters today, 50 years later.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And just for our audience that is wondering what is Humanae Vitae, you might want to touch on that too.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Humane Vite is the encyclical from Pope Paul VI, and he was addressing the issue that had come to the forefront because of basically science and technology moving along.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it was the advent of the pill.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: And uh for those who don't know what we mean by the pill, the contraception, oral contraception, which was designed to prevent contraception, to prevent the birth of little ones.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: And um, it was the time, you know, I recall uh listening to my grandchildren, we talk historically, and their image of the hippies, you know, 1968, Woodstock, the summer of love, free love.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we talked about that seems to be an idea that everyone says, okay, this is what was going on.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Woodstock was that great gathering in New York, right?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Woodstock, New York, of all the what we called hippies, you know, all the folks who were promoting free love, meaning let's take our great gift of conjugal love, sexual intimacy in marriage, and let's appropriate it, take it out of those parameters of marriage, and just go for it, right?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: That was the idea kind of of free love.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, as an 18-year-old, I was one of five daughters and my little brother.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: My mother and father were never one to really talk openly about any sexual matters with us, you know.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So here I am trying to figure out life, graduating high school, and all of this is going on.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it was shocking.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: I can honestly say that when Pope Paul VI wrote Humane Vitae and it it came out there, without the internet and all the tools we have now, I don't honestly remember when it was that I first knew it even existed.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm sure that our church told us about it at some point, but honestly, it wasn't a big factor now uh back then in my life.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And yet I knew, I knew, because of something written in my heart, that this is not right.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: Something has gone really off the rails here.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And now looking back, you know, I told my grandkids, I said, guys, not everyone kind of jumped on board with that.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Some of us just realized that something isn't right here.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: And what I can say now, thanks to theology of the body and all the understanding that the church has given us since then, is that basically it was another way of going against God's plan, and in particular, his plan for how we propagate the human race.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it was this idea that I'd mentioned of we're saying, you know, forget it, God, you know, that's kind of boring or whatever.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna do things our way.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it kind of exploded.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the event of the pill because, Jack, face it, you know, sexual intimacy is designed for procreation.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so people did worry about becoming pregnant if they were engaging in sexual intimacy.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a big motivation to be careful, right?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: To not think about what I'm doing, what my behavior is here.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, that really is part of God's plan because having a baby, when you're not ready to raise that baby, which is a big part of it, is not his plan for us, and it's not our ultimate good.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: And everything God has designed for us is to help us flourish as we're made in his image, and that we carry that image of life and love into the world.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that would that was a long introduction, sorry.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but I think you know, if somebody's listening to this for the first time, they'd say, well, animals, you know, have sex and and they have babies.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, now human beings can decide.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we can have sex without babies.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: What's what's wrong with that, you know, and and and so free love became this just lust was released, is what happened on on it, right?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: We became like animals just yeah.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: But this time uh we didn't have to have babies, or so we thought.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: So everybody thought, well, this is gonna be awesome because we won't need abortion anymore because there won't be any babies unless we want them.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Marriage is gonna be great because we can have sex all the time without worrying about that.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the church said, No, there's something else to this.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: You're not just animals, you know, you're you're created in the image and likeness of God.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Our bodies make visible Trinitarian love, and you just go, that's what are you talking about, right?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: We we dis we we we dislocated our ourselves from God's plan, and then we found out that that there were consequences, like you said, to this.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And and I'll just say this, that abortion rates went up, right?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And and divorce rates went up.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: We saw a number of different things.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: There were there are four that you mentioned in here, Linda, uh, consequences that Pope uh Paul VI brought out very clearly.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you want to run through those?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he said that these would be grave consequences if contraception became widely accepted throughout our society.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: The first he mentioned is that, quote, it's an easy road towards marital infidelity and the brokenness that follows.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: My interpretation of the easy road, meaning that it's just going to make it so much easier to not work very hard at that fidelity that is supposed to be in marriage.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: In a broader sense, he brought out that there would be a general lowering of sexual morality in the culture.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Hello?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that that just amazes me.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: One that really strikes to my heart is his point of a loss of respect for women, kind of reducing them to a mere instrument for selfish enjoyment.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, he looked again at not only broader culture, but even worldwide, that governments in the world and institutions could use this to control populations.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we can say that we are dealing with all of this.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was very prophetic from that standpoint.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: When you say in the article Fast Forward to 2026, over 50 years later, you wrote, We're living the fallout, divorce, pornography, fatherlessness, children out of wedlock, huh?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Abortion, hookup culture, same-sex confusion, gender confusion, depression, suicide, all part of the same collapse.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's amazing, really, what happened.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Pope Paul VI saw that.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is this is seeing through the lens of of God's plan.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I remember, you know, the sexual revolution was alive and well by the time I came of age sexually, and I remember, and I tell this story in in the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook, being meeting this young uh girl, woman, when I was a junior in high school, finding a room at a party, and we we we got very passionate, you know, and in this time, you know, the the culture was telling us that that you know sexual activity is just something that we all do.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And like you said, it was free love.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I just remember getting to a certain point there, laying across his bed, and I realized, no, there's something very powerful going on.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: I remember seeing Linda a an actual glow coming from this woman.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: I it was a grace when I look back at it, coming from her face, but also kind of emanating from her her body.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Something very special was going on, and I just stopped.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: I just totally stopped.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: I I just like I came to all my passions, everything just went shoop and just deflated, and I just came like snapped back to reality, and I realized that no, I've been I've been lied to.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't understand why.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: I just knew there was a line I was not going to to cross that that this that this woman, her body was not just a body, and neither was mine.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we get back to this, this isn't the church just saying, no, you can't have sex before a marriage.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: They're saying that, hey, that this sexual intimacy is something very powerful, very beautiful.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Something is going on there.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: So what what what is going on, uh Linda, and and what are we missing?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think what we're missing is thinking only of the intimacy as bodily only.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: And we are body and soul.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: And in that intimate act, I'm not just involving my body, I'm involving all of me.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Body and soul equals the person.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what you saw with that glow is you saw that whole person and that dignity that goes along with it made in the image of God, Jack.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: You you got you had a little glimpse of God as our author of life, you know, the good, the true, and the beautiful, it was all kind of like right there.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it touched your heart at that deep level that God wrote in our hearts that this is special, this is my plan for you.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you knew that I had to back off because this wasn't the plan.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think when we talk about the dignity of woman, too, that you know, many people just think, and it was a big thing back, you know, when I was coming of age, of being equal to men, you know, the feminism and all of that stuff came on board.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: And my goodness, in retrospect, as I look back at how God had planned for the complementarity of male and female, part of the dignity of womanhood is that piece of our ability to have life within us and have that baby.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Men can't do that.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: Men cannot do that.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Until now.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now Men cannot do that.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and see another point of how far off the rails we have gone.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's part of that special dignity of womanhood that we know our blessed mother is the supreme model of for us.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: So you take that all together and say, you know, in that intimate act, it's body and soul, it's my will, it's my intellect, it's all of me.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: And when we contracept that act, we're withholding a huge part of me, which is my potential for motherhood, potential for fatherhood.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: And we inherently know there's something not right with that.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: We live in a time where you can really lose touch of the other person.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: You start to see, and we have, we've come to that point where we start to see the other person as someone to use instead of someone to love.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Free love was then reduced down to an emotion, a feeling, and then further reduced down to sex, and and and we see this all over.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've talked to so many couples, men and women, separately and as couples over the last almost twenty years now, as we've been involved in this work of theology of the body and John Paul's work.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so many of the the the people, especially the men that I've talked to privately that were divorced or or separated, and they they they understood that it was when they started to contracept that something went w wrong in their marriage.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's very difficult in these times of technology and noise.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: We live on the surface of things.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: But it was amazing to me how many men, especially when we started to talk about this, would say, you know what?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly within a six months or a year after contracepting that something happened in our marriage.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And what we what we have come to understand through this Catholic lens, again, when we get back to the truth of things, what is the truth of things, that something very sacred takes place between a man and a woman when they're not contracepting, you know, when when this flow of love is moving back and forth.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we didn't understand it until we saw all of this uh dysfunction going on.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, this really is a sacrament.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: This really is something sacred.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And when you take the the chance for life to come into this, you know, in in into this union, something went wrong, didn't it?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh we see the dysfunction, and like you said, that dysfunction it just continues to accelerate down and gets worse until until finally young people themselves, I don't know how they're doing this, Linda.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them have not gone to church, some of these young men that especially that we're meeting haven't been brought up sometimes even in Christian homes, or if they have, they never their family didn't take it seriously, they didn't pray together, they didn't go to mass uh very often, and yet they're waking up and saying, Something is wrong.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's amazing to me that the it's the young people that are open to hearing about this.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: The idea, of course, is that the sacramentality of the marriage provides that grace that is the bonding.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: So the purpose of sexual intimacy is both unitive and procreative.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: The church has taught us that forever.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we can't separate them, they're inseparable.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why when someone notices that my marriage started to fall apart when we started to contracept, it's because not only are we uh in our minds, you know, saying, okay, we're not going to get pregnant, but there is injury to that bonding that is there, was there, hopefully, and is now starting to break apart as well.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the piece of it that engages more than just our physical bodies.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's all of it.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's our soul, our our intellect, our will, all those things are being engaged, and we're finding that there's something that tells us that that intimacy is designed both for us to get closer and for potentially procreate with God.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: And when we harm that in any way, it all is harmed.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, once I had an image, I think I might have told you this a long time ago.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: I pictured, as I was trying to teach this in an RCIA class, if you take two glasses a salt and pepper shaker that are made of glass, and you bond them together with super glue.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, my analogy, as bad as it is, thinks of that super glue as that sacramental grace in our marriage.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And if you try to do anything to pull apart, you're not gonna get it pulled apart.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: What you're gonna do is break either the salt or the pepper shaker or both.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna break, and that's what's happening.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Our marriages are held together by that grace, and when we start to mess with that, we're going to get broken.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: And the divorce rate just shows us that's how it works in our culture.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not only uh the people that are actually divorced, it's so many uh people that I speak to on a regular basis that are still married, but there's there's no friendship there, there's no closeness there.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: They're there are two separate people passing, you know, kind of you know, passing back and forth.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh that intimacy that you're talking about, that friendship, that closeness somehow has been really lost.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's really been fragmented.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's really hard to to understand that when you're in it.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: You just feel here's what they'll think.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: They'll think, okay, well, I must have chosen the the wrong person.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there must be another person out there for me.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're trying to do is fill that infinite union and communion that God gifted us with in a in a finite world like you just uh your analogy, without the grace, and it doesn't work.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't work.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's just the reality of this, and this is what we're finding out.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: You also mentioned in there and about the government, and the article mentions legislation that went through declaring a right to contraception.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: How does this fit into Pope Paul's warning about governments using contraception as a tool of population growth?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, I think part of it goes back to in general our culture looking upon uh babies as an interference with what I want to do in my life.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: We have to understand that they are the supreme gift of marriage.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And again, at our stage, even in marriages, as you just mentioned, um, I've been married 54, almost 55 years now, and we've kind of gone through some of those spells of, you know, really here we are, you know, and what I found is that those were the times when we were losing the perspective of really what is life all about?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: What is our destiny?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: And when we pulled it back together in a spiritual way, we found again what had been missing at those particular points in time.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it goes to um our family as well, our children and our grandchildren.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you can kind of sit back now as the grandchildren aren't so little anymore, and you can see this plan that God had for the joy that comes from being open to life.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: We were only blessed with two, but we have eight grandchildren.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was a great blessing, you know, a multiplication of the blessing for us to see these beautiful grandchildren.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so in our culture, instead of having that view, I mentioned the contraceptive mentality is just kind of turning that around, that children are a burden, children get in the way of what I want to do.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: And our governments have taken that to the extreme to say not only are they a burden, we're going to find a way to assure that you have a right to eliminate this burden.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what this House bill is all about.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and then and then, of course, then Roe v.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Wade came through where the government said you have a right to to to kill your your your child.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is how far that has gone, because the Supreme Court justice at that time said in in his statement that if you have contraception and contraception is a right, you have to allow abortion because contraception in essence will fail.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we made that leap from contraception as a right to abortion as a right to murder your child.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is how fast we got away from all of this.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then it continued to the point right now where we we don't even know if we're male or female or what that even means.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: When you think about the irrationality of this, I think this is why young people are waking up because when we start to talk about these things, they don't realize well, they just grew up in this with this proverbial frog in this pot, you know, and they they they've been stewing in this.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: I am really surprised uh and uh that they're waiting.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and this shows the the power of our creation.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: The power of the human heart was made for something more.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And there and and again, how do they wake up in this crazy culture?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think it is because of the craziness.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you if you have a heart made for the truth, which we do, and if you just take the time to sit back and don't get caught up in all of this noise and being on those those phones all day long and just bombard it where you don't just live on the surface of things, but you go deeper, you don't get caught up in this ideology, you start to wonder, what is this really all about?
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and is there a truth out there?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: These crazy guys are talking about contraception as being something that broke apart families and the dysfunction, and they go, Yes, I live in that dysfunction, I know about that dysfunction.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: And they're starting to say, Well, yeah, tell me more.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and because I I think our human heart is always, whether we admit it or not, is seeking the truth.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: We have gotten so far away from it, it's like, you know, you're you're just in this fog that you say, enough is enough.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: I have to find some way out here.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: And you do once again reinvigorate that search for the truth.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think the transgender, and even now the transhumanism is pushing us all to understand this is so far beyond reasonable that we need to take another look.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, God bless the young people, because they're really seeing that.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: Truth is your reason, your intellect, your reason.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is really always fascinating to me, and you we have free will.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Your reason, your intellect is made for the truth.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: What is the truth of things?
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and so we start to think, what is the truth of our creation as male and female?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: How come our bodies are not the same?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, they're made to come together and to bring forth life?
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: What is that all about?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And when we start to go back, this is all the way back in Genesis in the very first book of the Bible that God says, let's create man in our image, in our likeness, he's already a communion.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And and then he flips that selfie, you know, he's taken like a selfie of himself, he of what Trinitarian love is, and he flips it, and he creates us.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: And our and our when we really sit down, Linda, and think our bodies, as John Paul would say, make visible the invisible, the spiritual, and the divine.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we're we're created to be filled with grace and transfer that Trinitarian love in the world.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what does that mean?
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is that love between a man and a woman that's open to life, just like the Father and the Son come together and they're open to the Holy Spirit.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: We really are a sacramental sign in the world.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: Love really only gets in the world through human beings.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Take human beings out, and and you have beautiful nature, you have the mountains, you have streams, you have oceans, you have animals.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: But authentic love, God's love, right, which is freely chosen, you have to have a you have to have a reason and you have to have an intellect to be able to give yourself freely away.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, you're just natural animalistic instincts.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: When you see the awe and wonder of how we're really created, and then I look at my wife, or I look at women, or I'm looking at you, and you see the awe and wonder of of a woman and and what it does to your heart, like that that girl I was talking about on that bed, was the I I look back at this today, and I think the awe and wonder which you just described too when I when I when I brought that up to you, we saw the awe and wonder of a human being, a body and a soul, actually filled with grace.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: It it it's it's amazing, isn't it?
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: And all that beautiful creation was created for us.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: We are the pinnacle of God's creation.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so we are the only ones who can express that beauty, that that love, that truth, and that goodness comes through us.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: That is what really got me when I first started studying theology of the body, and is it's very dense, and there's so much there, and and I'm not the intellectual that can comprehend it all, but it touched my heart as we got into marriage and the sacramentality of marriage and so on.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: That was really helping me.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: That was one of the low points of my own marriage at that point, and I think God just kind of had the timing hit where I was studying theology of the body, and I was realizing that as this interchange, this coming together, becoming one flesh, yes, beyond the flesh, we become one in mind, body, soul, and spirit as we are on this journey together and become more aware of is this it?
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: Or is there something else beyond this?
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: And when you become really aware that the eternal plan, you know, there's eternity planned for us, that third triptych, there's something more, then you can take where you are right now and put that in a much different perspective.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And as far as marriage goes, the procreation is the heart of the marriage.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: You're sharing everything.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it all kind of comes together to this understanding that this is what our young people really need to grasp intellectually but in their heart too.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then they will know what they need to do, and they'll be the ones who turn this culture around.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's so important to discuss this stuff, and we can only go so far on one episode.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: We'll do it, we'll we'll do a a couple more, right, as a follow-up.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because the series, the the what we're discussing today, this contraceptive mentality that you wrote, is just the beginning of a series of, I think we have five acts in there, five short chapters or acts we call them in the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the opening one, and then we get uh deeper into their so we'll have to continue to bring that out.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I would like to leave this image because when I talk to young people, they are seeking love, authentic love.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so what is that?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: And they're pressured to have sex, right, when they're going out on a date.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's so important for them to hear it's okay not to have sex, that it's okay to to to because they don't even know how to date today, do they?
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: And and and they feel this pressure.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: We felt this pressure.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: I remember very distinctly as a young man in my late teens, going to my early 20s, this pressure of everyone around me, be, you know, because I hadn't had you know uh sex with a woman yet.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: I felt a real pressure just to get this out of the way.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like I needed to get this out of the way so I can go on with the rest of my life.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and what a tremendous thing it was when you're able to say, no, I don't, it's not something I have to get over.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is a gift of of uh from my myself to another person.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's called marriage when you make that free, total, faithful, fruitful, those are your wedding vows, you know.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: But I just would like to bring this one uh thing up that's you know, when you look back at Genesis, and this is what John Paul brought up so well, you know, God creates in five days, he's creating, and he's getting this whole thing set up, and it's that sixth day where he does that flips the selfie, right?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: And creates man and woman after five days, and you realize that he set up a wedding banquet.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned this was all for us.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: This whole layout before sin entered the world was set up for a wedding feast.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: You've got all this beauty around, he's got all this lushness around, you've got everything you need, and boom, now you come into the world.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: And when I speak to young people, they're looking for that, Linda.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: They they they they're looking for a marriage, they're looking for love.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: And when you think that everything that's around them is setting this up, you know, if if it's not twisted and distorted in their own hearts and their own culture, that's why the Battle Plan Handbook doesn't just talk about getting your heart back and understanding this contraceptive mentality that we're discussing here, but that we have to go out and live this out because we have to change the culture so that when when our friends and our neighbors and our relatives are are living in this cesspool that that they come together and and fortify each other, to help each other to say, no, something went wrong here.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and we can do our little part to to to fix that, to remedy that, and to be able to say, yeah, we have kids and grandkids in the future, but I want them to have a culture and a nation, right?
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: And and so all this beauty continues to flow through us, and then it actually restores the culture.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: It pushes back against these things like abortion and dysfunction in families and all these crazy gender ideologies and the hate and all of the stuff comes out of these dysfunction, doesn't it?
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's so important for the young people to understand, too, that this is so multifaceted.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many ways to go in discussing, you know, God's plan for us and how it plays out in our lives.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: One point we didn't mention that I hope we can talk about in future podcasts is the health aspect of the Aaron.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, let's do that.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do that right now because I think that is important.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we can at least spend a few minutes on that because what we're finding out is when you step away from God's plan that it's not just our sexuality, it's actually our health, right?
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: That that's so yeah, let's talk about that a little.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: So we know that the hormonal-based contraceptives, you know, affect our whole body.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: It isn't just the factor of the hormones needed for pregnancy.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: We are one, you know, complete system.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Our bodies are just amazing.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: They are amazing.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: Adding those hormones in for the woman is really affecting her in many ways.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: We have increased risk of heart attack and stroke, breast cancer, and then because the brain uses hormones as well, we see depression, perhaps suicidal tendency.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: So all of these health findings really are showing that introducing this into our bodies is a negative for us.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: And as a woman, Jack, I don't think I've mentioned this to you, but you know, I think about this and I think, you know, young women are becoming, many of them are becoming more health conscious in terms of our food and you know what they consume.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: And yet it seems like we haven't made the connection to our health in terms of the contraceptive.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great point, yeah.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, all these others.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: So we need to help them see that that's another aspect that we have to pay a lot of attention to.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: But the young men often don't even think of that at all.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: And for a young man who has that desire to meet the woman he wants to marry and so forth, his role as protector begins even before that marriage, where he has to have in his own mind an understanding that that is harmful to his potential wife, not something that he should be doing, he should be protecting her from it.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so even then, when we look at this complementarity of male and female, we have to consider all these other consequences from both perspectives.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I hope the young men will understand there's grave health risks for women and that they wouldn't be the ones who would be, you know, trying to promote the contraception for their wife or girlfriend if that's the situation they're in.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so I bring that up as another thing to consider for this really multifaceted topic.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and uh and and again when we're talking about the the the pill and and in contraceptive mentality in general, uh we're talking about every contraception here, right?
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh any any contraception is going to have some effect on us physically, psychologically, certainly this this being used as an object.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: I you know, I've I gave a talk to women one time about these these kind of things, and there was a lot of tears there because even in their marriages they felt like they were being used, that there was this intimate time where they would come together, that in a normal situation there's this bonding going on, this sacramental bonding where grace would flow into your into your lives through this sacrament of marriage and this marital union, the sexual union coming together, but instead it was distorted and was the opposite.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: They, you know, lust enters into that and and the selfishness enters into that.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: And as a woman's giving her body to a to a to a man to be used, you know, then she feels that use, like he's not giving anything to me, he's just taking from my body.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of being a grace and and uniting them, it's actually separating them.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this has a tremendous toll on your emotional and psychological and physical health.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when you get depressed and and you start to look at another person, and then you start to feel like they're they're they're they're looking for something from you without this idea of looking at you as someone to be loved and not used.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, very few people have actually made love like I call it love with the lights on, where we're just giving to you know, this can you imagine the beautiful flow of our sexuality when we're totally given to one another?
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: And God gave us those inc incredible feelings of sexuality that's almost transcendent.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: But yet we take that and distort it and it turns into use and this feeling like I've just been used.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: And w what what a travesty, isn't it?
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: And a woman does know intuitively if she's being used.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you can try to deny it and say, No, that isn't true, but you know.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: And as you pointed out, then that begins to divide, and that's what we talked about earlier, where the bonding just starts to break down.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: And in a marriage, you know, it's it's very serious.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: People might be thinking, Jack, well, you know, does that mean you just have as many kids as you can have?
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: The flip side here.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: And of course not.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: That the church has never taught that.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that is why we need to learn about a woman's natural cycle, the natural order, and God has provided time within her cycle where you're not going to be able to conceive, and that's a whole nother topic for us to talk about.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't want to.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if people know fertility is a very short window, actually, every month.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: God gave us a you know, this very short, is it five or six days really?
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean, we, you know, because we're not it's not always perfect, sometimes natural family planning, we would call this, extends out a day or two on both sides beyond this.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe you're at an eight, eight, nine-day window here.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the rest of the time, you know, you can you can come together and and you're not going to have a child.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if if do people even know that today, Linda?
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know if they're understanding their cycles that that you're not always fertile all the time.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, most of the time you're not.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I don't know if they know it or not.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: I I certainly hope that they should be.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: And see, Jed, Jack, what that does for me is it brings me right back to an understanding of what was God's plan and his design.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: His design is perfect, you know?
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: And if I'm using natural family planning and deciding that we will not have sexual intimacy at a time when I could potentially get pregnant and I do get pregnant, if my mindset is saying, I'm trying to work with God's plan, the natural order of things, he wanted this child to be cons and I need to accept that.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the beauty of that, because I I know I've talked to people who have been in this situation, and it all falls back to are we trying to live within our design and God's plan for that design, or are we trying to do our own thing?
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: And with every element, every consequence, we can always bring it back to that and say, you know, we're trying to overrule, and and it's not ever going to work because God's plan is perfect.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I as we wind down here, thank you so much, Linda.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: As we wind down here, I'm gonna encourage everybody to get that Claymore uh battle plan handbook.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: But if you order it, you know, you can order it through Amazon and it's gonna explain all these things and and much, much more.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: But uh but if you order it through our website, you're gonna get a Claymore uh wristband, you're gonna get a miraculous medal, you're gonna get that battle plan outline that we talk about.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: You can get that online, and I'll put the uh website in.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody should check out that website.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: Man, woman, and you know, this is the handbook says spiritual battle for young men, but it the the language in there is such that you know young women tend to like young men, Linda.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so we we're working with with w women right now, and and how many women are reaching out to us and asking us to journey with a man in their life, uh, because they they're starting to understand this too, which which mo in the beginning it was mostly the men that we're talking to that are getting this.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I but as men start to talk about this, women are saying, wait, wait, let me let me hear about that a little bit more.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then the the uh the ones that have been around that have a Catholic lens already are looking at their sons and and and the and and just the people God put in their life, and and just somebody reached out to me yesterday via email, said, uh, now this woman's probably I don't know, maybe late 50s or so, and she has a niece that's in college and they were visiting, and she met uh the uh the her niece's friend, girlfriend's brother, and he was 19 years old, and she started to talk uh the this woman that I know started to talk to him.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh uh he was searching for something.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: They got into a discussion, and boom, she just emailed me last night and said, Hey, you know, do you have someone on the team that he could reach out to and start to talk about this?
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: I got him the book.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's beautiful, you know, that we have this way we can journey together.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I would again encourage everybody to look at that website, it'll be in the show notes there.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: And there's two asks here, and and this gets really into our uh story today.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: The first ask is before you look at that phone in the morning to go down to your knees in prayer, whether you've ever prayed or not, you got to go vertical because God will give you the grace to understand what we're talking about here if you open yourself up.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then you read one of those acts once a week or once every night.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it only takes you five, six, seven minutes.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're very short, and you'll fill in the context.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: You'll get the content and the context of what we're talking about, but you you but you get the grace by going vertical.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: You can't you can't not pray and start to understand this thing at a deep level because you know, God has to be involved in your life, and then then things will open up.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're gonna you're gonna have a you're gonna see very quickly that your heart was made for more, and God wants to fill that up.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's something powerful that really happens, Linda.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's so true.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: We feel that our heart is made for more, and all that restlessness that we feel.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: St.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: Augustine said it best our hearts will only rest until they rest in him.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: That we're restless without it.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you and the Claymore team are a great grace to our young men and to the young women who are also searching.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I can't say it enough that uh my my own grandson, who's 17, has a copy of the book.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: He who loves the writing style.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um you wrote most of it, of course.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he says it's really great.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: And um I only see beautiful fruit coming from this.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I would challenge everyone who's just saying, What is this all about?
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like, give it a try.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: You'll be happy that you're yes, yes.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for that.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and for all everybody that's that has this in their heart already that wanted to have a way to share it and just didn't know how this is the way to do it.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: What I always tell people, Linda, is is do it yourself for a week or two.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you know, get on your knees, do that 10-minute claymore morning ritual, which is outlined.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then the second thing is read one of those acts every night for just 10 days or so.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then something's gonna move in your heart.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then when God puts someone in front of you, you just say, Hey, you know, I I you know, I do this Claymore battle plan routine in the morning, and I read one of these acts.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's been really fruitful in my life.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: I want to share this with you.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's really the way to do it.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: Share it with people that are searching, God will put them in front of you, and now this becomes a very doable, very simple, very simple way to share our faith.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, um, in the old days, uh, Linda, which was right before we started this Claymore uh Militus Christi, I I would all it's like a drudgery.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a guy wants to know what all this is, and then I gotta meet him, say, for coffee or a beer somewhere.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm I it's like I've got to hit him with the fire hose.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: I gotta try to tell him everything that we're talking about here.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: But now with this, it's all in the handbook.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't have to do that later.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: I can sit down with this young guy or with anybody and get to know them on a personal, relational level because I know that they can go home and read this, and then we can just get together in a week or two or or you know and and and uh grab a coffee or breakfast and just unpack what what's been moving in their heart.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's such a joy, it's so much better way to do these things.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a gift, you know, it's been a gift.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a great tool for sharing the truth, goodness, and beauty that we're all searching for.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you so much.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Linda.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks everybody for joining us.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: Talk to you again soon.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: Bye bye.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.