Peace Without Poison

and a woman and to decide what is or is not morally acceptable. To ensure the stability of thefamily and thus protect children from the whims of parents and society from the complications offleeting relationships and changing partners the Church made marriage indissoluble.To curb social and material problems due to rapid population growth and prevent individualsuffering from abandonment and want, procreation was limited only to married couples and sexas well as children out of wedlock strictly prohibited. And that is how self-control, abstinenceand faithfulness came to play important roles in Christian society, as indeed they do in all othersocieties regulated by organized religion. That is also why property rights were restricted tomales and in many societies still are. Had that not been the case males would have no way ofkeeping women faithful and thus no way of knowing if they raise their own or someone else’schildren.But the sexual drive is a powerful and at times irresistible instinct and a great incentive to breakor circumvent social rules. Every time social rules designed to limit and regulate birth arebroken it is the innocent who suffer, the children born out of wedlock who then grow up inpoverty and without the protection of a family, the young mothers who must abandon their fleshand blood to keep their place in society, and society itself because it is left to deal with brokenfamilies, neglected children, property disputes, contested inheritances, and the impossibility ofhaving to keep the peace between feuding parties.The continuity of the Church over centuries has given it the perspective necessary to uncoverlong-term trends and to trace social disruptions through their long chains of cause and effect allthe way down to their original sources, which on a society-wide level is unrestrained populationgrowth and on the individual level is selfish living.Population growth outstrips food production and resources leading to hardship, hardship leads towar, war leads to mass death of men, mass death of men leads to women without husbands,women without husbands in a society where women cannot own property leads to desperation,desperation leads to prostitution, prostitution leads to temptation, temptation leads to weakeningof the family, a weakening of the family leads to social instability, social instability leads toconflict, conflict leads to waste of resources, waste of resources leads to hardship, hardship leadsto war. And so the vicious cycle once entered is almost impossible to escape; unless someone iswilling to do the improbable and to be selfless for the sake of society and for the love of man.The Church tried to deal with the consequences of such vicious cycles as best it could. So itcreated religious orders for women who could never find husbands because women outnumbermen even in times of peace but especially after a war and kept them in seclusion in monasteriesbound by the vow of chastity so as not to tempt married men and destabilize the institution ofmarriage.935 | P a g e