The Catechism is a great resource for looking up official Catholic teachings to use in lessons to support any topics being studied. It is written by the magisterium (official teaching authority of the Church) and is therefore an important source of authority, trusted by Catholics to inform their conscience on belief, practice and morality. In section 2366–2372 you will find the assertion that the two purposes of sex are to create new life and to unite the couple. Anything therefore which deliberately and artificially violates this is against moral law. However, in 2368 it recognises that ‘spouses may wish to space the births of their children’ and recommends natural methods for this as long as the reasons for this are just and not selfish. Natural family planning (NFP) is considered part of responsible parenthood and not in violation of moral law since the couple works with nature not against it.

In Catholic tradition, popes might write encyclicals (letters) to address concerns of the day. With the contraceptive pill becoming available to women in the 1960s, Pope Paul VI wrote to Catholics to express the Catholic teaching in this context and warn of the damage it could do. He reasserted the dignity of human sexuality and that sex should be marital, procreative and unitive. He then stated that using contraception could lead to a loss of morality and a loss of respect for women through objectification (because sex with contraception avoids burdening the couple with unwanted children). This could be a great scholarly resource to prompt discussion in the classroom – students could discuss questions such as ‘Can casual sex be damaging to a person?’ or ‘Is it ok for people to have sex purely for pleasure?’ where they put the Pope’s teachings to the test.

In 2010, the media reported that Pope Benedict XVI had said that contraception could be used if it was to avoid transmission of HIV infections. However, this article explains what was actually stated by Pope Benedict in his interview. While he was agreeing that the transmission of infection is unacceptable, he made the point that instead of using contraception to avoid this, people should consider it wrong to use a person for sex in the first place. This links to the Catechism teachings that sex should be marital, procreative and unitive. The Pope was reasserting the teaching of the dignity of the human body in his calling for the ‘humanization of sexuality’. This article would challenge students to apply their knowledge of Catholic teaching on contraception to the problem of sexually transmitted infections. They could discuss why the Church would still teach that contraception is wrong even if it prevents suffering and evaluate how useful this teaching is to Catholics today.

In RE, not only do we teach a religion’s beliefs but also how the religion is practised. It is therefore interesting to consider sociological data on topics to see how Catholicism is lived in today’s world. This article says that ‘it’s clear from this data that there is a tremendous disconnect between the Vatican’s teaching on contraception and the behavior of more than 60 million Catholics in the United States’ and the findings show that Catholics do use artificial contraception methods in reality. It would be interesting for students to consider why some Catholics might not follow official teachings on contraception by linking their knowledge to their understanding of beliefs about creation, for example by discussing whether ‘the environmental damage of overpopulation means Catholics should use contraception’.