An emailer sends the following information. Money quote:
At this point it will be helpful to review the text of this most recent decree of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued on 13 May 1977 and which Pope Paul VI “approved and ordered to be published”. The Congregation issued the decree in the form of two questions and two answers: 1) Whether impotence, which renders matrimony invalid, consists in the incapacity, antecedent and perpetual, whether absolute or relative, of performing conjugal copula.” Answer: “Affirmative”. “2) In view of the above affirmative, whether ejaculation of semen that has been elaborated in the testicles is necessarily required for conjugal copula.” Answer: “Negative” (3). Finally, then, it is important to review and summarize what the decree obviously means, and what it obviously does not mean. The decree means that it is the current teaching of the Church that the doubly vasectomized male is capable of a marriage act provided erection, penetration, and the ejaculation of secretions from the prostate, seminal vesicles and various other glands is possible; that the grossly normal ejaculate is sufficient to fulfil the canonical concept of “true semen” and to achieve that kind of an act which otherwise would be generative, even though in this case the ejaculate is sterile and contains nothing elaborated in the testicles. While the decree does not explicitly mention that this is likewise true of the castrate, it is clearly implied and the implication is confirmed by the earlier replies of the same Congregation referred to above, which explicitly dealt with cases of castration. Moreover clinical experience indicates the practicality of androgen hormone therapy in cases of castration.
So if you get a little seminal fluid coming out of your stiffy, even if it cannot make babies, you can have sex and marry. Great to see these deep emotional questions being answered by a resort to matters of seminal fluids. And people wonder why the Church is ignored by most Catholics on sexual ethics. By the way, guess what the earliest papal declaration on impotence in 1587 was called? “Cum frequenter.” I’m not making this up.
The Dish 