§ 4. How The Confessor Ought To Act With Spouses Practicing Onanism Or Otherwise Sinning Against Chastity

704. Conjugal onanism has become so widespread in our times and can be eradicated with such difficulty that it has become both a true cross for confessors and an imminent danger to the common good of the republic. On March 10, 1886, the Sacred Penitentiary established that a confessor who learns, whether from a spontaneous confession or from prudent questioning, that a penitent practices onanism is bound to admonish the penitent concerning the gravity of this sin just as concerning that of other mortal sins, to reprove the penitent with paternal charity, and to impart absolution only when it is established by sufficient signs that the penitent is sorry for the past and has a purpose of no longer acting onanistically. Therefore confessors act badly who never question spouses concerning the sin of onanism. For good faith concerning the liceity of onanism persevering for a long time can be admitted only with difficulty.

The confessor ought to act more severely with an onanistic husband, because the husband can almost always avoid onanism. For wives are accustomed rather willingly to consent to total or partial continence; and therefore, if the husband were willing to preserve the same continence, onanism would cease by that very fact.

The confessor can sometimes be more indulgent with a wife cooperating in onanism, but he is also bound to admonish her not to furnish consent in any manner to the husband's sin. The executing cause of onanism is indeed almost always the husband; but the impelling cause is not rarely the wife, who by night and by day raises complaints concerning the troubles of pregnancy, childbirth, education, and so forth, and thus induces the husband to onanistic intercourse. Hence let the confessor not always believe women who say that they contributed nothing toward the perpetration of onanism. On the other hand, women who accuse themselves of complacency perceived in onanistic intercourse are not immediately to be charged with mortal sin. For not rarely women by no means rejoice in the evil act, but in the good effects thence following, namely, in the pleasure of intercourse, in preservation from the troubles of pregnancy, and so forth. Now such joy is not something intrinsically evil, although it is dangerous. - Conscientious physicians can also furnish the best assistance in the struggle against onanism if they do not exaggerate the dangers of childbirth to spouses and instead openly explain the harms which onanism causes to the health of the spouses.

Note. In the entire matter of the chastity of spouses, let the confessor always keep before his eyes the principle stated above: Nothing is a mortal sin of lust between spouses unless it gravely injures one of the two goods of matrimony, namely, either the good of fidelity or the good of offspring. Ballerini writes most excellently concerning this matter:⁴¹⁸ "Among these or those authors you will find now these acts, now others, denounced as gravely culpable; but indeed in these you have merely certain particular opinions, and those deduced almost not from solid and certain principles, but rather from fanciful apprehensions. They resort, namely, to the reason of indecency and turpitude and, conducting the matter almost by exclamations, proclaim the thing horrible, unspeakable, most shameful, and so forth; as though either the character of sin in general or the gravity of fault were to be sought from the character of indecency in that kind of matter in which even those things which are most licit, indeed commanded, by the leading of nature itself ought to be committed in secret and darkness by reason of indecency. Others resort to the character of unbridled lust; as though lust does not show itself most unbridled in that in which the end of matrimony is consummated; or as though matrimony had not also been instituted so that it might be a remedy for unbridled lust; or as though matrimony could be a remedy for lust in any other way than that the appetite for vehement pleasure is satisfied, with only that law ultimately placed upon it, which St. Thomas also intimates, that it neither run forth outside legitimate matrimony nor oppose the end of nature! - And certainly, unless sin is committed against one or the other of these, nowhere does there clearly appear a solid reason on account of which some other disorder can certainly be charged with grave sin; with this principle established, as is fitting, a most ready method is available to the confessor, both that he may provide for the sanctity of the sacrament and that he may provide for the salvation of penitents."

⁴¹⁸ In the notes to Gury II, 919.