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by William E. May, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
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 When God made man, he did not make a conscious subject aware of
itself as a self to which he then added a body as an afterthought.
Rather, when he made man, "male and female he created them," and he
blessed them, saying: "Be fertile and multiply" (Gen 1:27-28).
In other words, when God created man he created a bodily being,
made in his own image and likeness and thus endowed with the gifts of
intelligence and free choice, sexually differentiated into male and
female. And he loves specific, individual human persons, male and
female, and not humanity in general. He made them to be the kind of
beings they are (human in nature), namely, bodily persons sexually
differentiated into male and female, precisely so that they could
freely receive from him the gift of his own divine life (grace) so long
as they freely choose, with his help, to give themselves away in
love--in a sincere gift of self--and thus form a communion of persons,
ultimately the communion of saints living fully the life of the Triune
God.
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04/30/2009
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by William E. May, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
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 Introduction
Long ago St. Augustine distinguished three cardinal goods of marriage:
the good of offspring (bonum prolis) who are to be begotten lovingly,
nurtured humanely, and educated religiously; the good of steadfast
fidelity (bonum fidei) between husband and wife; and the good of the
sacrament (bonum sacramenti), which entails both the holy bond of
indissoluble unity (sacrum vinculum) and sacramental sign (sacramentum
signum), the good of the sacrament in the strict sense as the good
pointing to and inwardly participating in Christ’s bridal union with
his spouse, the Church (St. Augustine developed his teaching on the
threefold good of marriage principally in On the Good of Marriage (De
bono coniugali),On Marriage and Concupiscence ( De nuptiis et
concupiscentia),and The Literal Meaning of Genesis ( De genesi ad
litteram). Subsequent Catholic tradition made these goods its own,
constantly affirming them; in fact, Pope Pius XI structured his 1930
encyclical On Chaste Marriage (Casti connubii) around these three
Augustinian goods..
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03/31/2009
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by William E. May, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
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A major and most important difference between the culture of life and the culture of death is the different ways in which they understand the meaning of human acts. The culture of death understands human acts primarily in terms of what our acts get done in the external world, i.e., it assesses and evaluates human acts in terms of their consequences or states of affairs that they bring about, whereas the culture of life, while recognizing that human acts get things done in the external world, assesses and evaluates them primarily in terms of what they have to say about ourselves, about what they do to us as persons who make ourselves to be the kind of persons we are in and through the acts we freely choose to do every day of our lives.
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01/29/2009
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by William E. May
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The use of condoms to prevent transmission of a disease is intrinsically evil because the object freely chosen that specifies the moral nature of the act is not the marital act, an act in which husband wife give and receive one another and become literally “one flesh,” but a different kind of act, one that in no way unites them but rather changes utterly the “language of the body.” by William E. May, Michael J. McGivney Professor of Moral Theology Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family
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11/13/2007
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by Joe Capizzi, Ph.D.
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Conservative Protestants are beginning to join faithful Catholics in recognizing the harm done to society by widespread contraception.
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05/09/2006
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Save the Date:
Culture of Life Foundation's 2nd Annual
William E. May
Award for Promoting Ethics and the Human Person
September, 2009
Washington, DC
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