That’s nice of you to say that. Thank you for the comment.
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I am grateful for this forum because it has served an important purpose for me: it has reminded me of why I left the catholic church.
The Church is pure. It cannot be apologised on behalf of; if it were anything less, one could not confess sins through it.
Therefore, your allegiance is to the Church and not to individuals - who come and go. Because individuals can sin, while Hell cannot prevail.
So, you leaving is down to you. You let others push you out.
Part of God’s kingdom is on Earth and therefore you have the dogmas and the writings of the saints and a treasury of prayers inclusive of intercessory ones to make sure you stay on course. Jumping ship is never okay, as an alternative.
And you have Scripture, itself. Everything you need to know is in there.
And the Sacraments, if in a state of grace.
No excuse to be leaving.
Can you expect an army to never have arguments within the ranks. What if they trounced off? How would that appear?
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I am still Praying for you : )
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I’m not Catholic, but I just wanted to reassure OP about the decision to have a vasectomy, if they haven’t done it yet. I had one a few years ago, and it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as most men would have you believe. Mild discomfort the first two days, but no real pain to speak of. I didn’t even need to ice it or anything.
Edit: One thing to look out for is whether insurance will cover it in whole or in part; I guess it’s a state-by-state thing, but mine was only partially covered by insurance. I think it depends on whether it is considered prophylaxis or not.
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Christian Men should not be getting broken. It isn’t that we are scared of the pain, but rather that it is immoral.
You say that you are not Catholic. Do you identify as any other Protestant denomination? If so, which one?
No; I don’t identify as religious at all.
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But God hasn’t left you.
On the contrary, God wants you more than ever!
God frequently will turn bad into good, he is very good at turning trials into triumph
In your case a scenario like the following would be a good example:
Your vasectomy fails.
Statistically this is far from a zero probability it’s actually about 0.07% or one in about 1400. Another way of looking at it would be several hundred failures that is a woman getting pregnant by a man with vasectomy over a several year period this is out of 1 million men with a vasectomy. Failures when they do occur, occur more frequently with men early on.
To continue with the way God turns bad into good: (remember this is totally hypothetical.) Your vasectomy fails and because of unusual circumstances, the doctors tell you and your wife that following through with the pregnancy is dangerous, but terminating the Pregnancy would be more dangerous; you both decide the safest route would be to have the baby.
And your wife gives birth to one of the most beautiful babies ever born!
… And you yourself becomes born again
Peace be with you
Mallen
You’re too intelligent to be catholic.
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You keep saying “God” when what you really mean is the catholic church.
“Reverence, awe, and respect towards God is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” — Proverbs 1:7
“Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.” — Fulton J. Sheen
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” — Plato
God is the giver and sustainer of life, and Scripture makes that unmistakably clear. Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, Manoah’s wife, and Elizabeth were all barren—or even far beyond child‑bearing years—yet they conceived when God willed it. Even Mary of Nazareth conceived not through human power but solely through God’s initiative, underscoring that life is always God’s work, never ours to control. Their stories remind us that no medical procedure can place human beings outside the reach of God’s creative power.
Because of that, a vasectomy, a change of denomination, or a disagreement with Catholic teaching doesn’t alter the deeper truth: life and fertility ultimately belong to God, not to us.
Catholic teaching on contraception isn’t “nonsense”; it’s a consistent moral vision rooted in the dignity of the human person, the meaning of marriage, and trust in God’s providence. Popular disobedience to a teaching doesn’t invalidate it—if anything, it highlights how countercultural and challenging the Gospel can be.
And perhaps the most important question is one of humility:
Are we receiving life as a gift from God, or attempting to control life and death in His place?
I think the embrace of NFP is actually inconsistent. It’s practiced specifically to avoid having children when you don’t want them, same as any other form of contraception. Isn’t there something about having sex without wanting to/being open to conceiving being immoral?
I’m sure you’re going to throw some convenient loophole at me, but it’s not going to change my view that you are in fact hypocrites on this front so it’s probably not worth your time to type out some big long response to me
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Peace to all,
If the issue is not loving, then I guess the NFP logic could be through correct logical faith by NFP non-conception one cannot pass on the same pattern not loving as a family to the born, I believe.
Peace always,
Stephen
You’re assuming that NFP and contraception are the same thing because they can be used with the same intention. But in Catholic moral theology, intention alone doesn’t determine morality—the moral object matters.
Contraception deliberately blocks the procreative meaning of the marital act.
NFP does not alter the act at all; it simply discerns the natural rhythms God built into the body. The couple still engages in the marital act as it actually is—unmodified, unaltered, and open to life in itself, even if they prudently choose times of natural infertility.
That’s why the Church teaches that periodic abstinence can be moral, while altering the act itself is not. They are not the same moral act, even if someone uses them with the same motive.
And no—Catholic teaching does not say you must desire a child every time you have sex. It says you must not close the act to the gift of life. Those are very different things.
If you’ve already decided that any distinction is a “loophole,” then nothing I say will matter to you. But that doesn’t make the distinction invalid. It just means you’re not engaging with what the Church actually teaches.
And calling this “hypocrisy” misunderstands the word. Hypocrisy isn’t making a distinction someone dislikes. It’s professing a moral standard and then violating that same standard while pretending not to. Here, the standard is applied consistently: NFP leaves the act as God created it; contraception alters it. Disagreeing with that distinction is one thing—but mislabeling it as hypocrisy is simply inaccurate.
And at the end of the day, all of this rests on a deeper truth: God is the giver and sustainer of life. Scripture shows again and again—Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, Manoah’s wife, Elizabeth, and even Mary—that life comes into the world only because God wills it. Human beings can try to block life through procedures or contraception, or they can choose periodic abstinence through NFP, but none of these actions place us outside God’s creative power.
The moral question is not whether we can control life—we can’t. The question is whether we are cooperating with the way God designed the marital act or actively closing it off.
NFP respects the act as God created it. Contraception alters it.
But in both cases, God remains sovereign over life.
Which is why the real issue underneath all of this is humility:
Are we receiving life as a gift from God, or trying to seize control of what belongs to Him alone?
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Which is exactly what intentionally refraining from sex when you can’t get pregnant does.
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No — refraining from sex is not “closing the act to life.”
It is simply not performing the act.
“Closing the act to life” means altering the act itself so that it cannot be fruitful. That’s the moral object of contraception. This also includes sterilization procedures like a vasectomy, which deliberately render every marital act infertile by design.
But when a couple abstains, there is no act to close off.
You cannot “close” what you are not doing.
Abstaining means not doing the act; contraception means doing the act while deliberately sterilizing it.
Those are different moral acts, even if the motive is the same.
This is the same moral distinction as:
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Not eating vs. eating and purging
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Not drinking vs. watering down alcohol
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Not driving vs. cutting the brake lines
Same motive? Possibly.
Different moral act? Absolutely.
That’s why the Church teaches that periodic abstinence and contraception are not morally equivalent.
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It’s not just abstinence though; NFP involves having sex when a woman is not fertile, thereby closing the act off from to life. It doesn’t get any plainer than that.
You’re still confusing “not performing the act” with “performing the act while sterilizing it.”
Having sex during an infertile time is not “closing the act to life.” The act itself remains exactly what God designed it to be — a marital act that is in itself ordered toward life. And natural infertility isn’t something humans create — God designed the female cycle with fertile and infertile periods. A naturally infertile moment is not a human act of “closing” anything; it’s simply the way God created the body.
“Closing the act to life” means altering the act itself so that it cannot be fruitful — like contraception or a vasectomy.
With NFP, nothing is altered. The couple simply chooses when to engage in the act, but when they do, the act remains unmodified, unsterilized, and open to life in its nature.
Abstaining means not doing the act; contraception (and sterilization) means doing the act while deliberately closing it to life. Those are different moral acts, even if the motive is the same.
e.g., intentionally having sex only when a woman is infertile.