Dorothy Day on Married Sex

A commentor asked why people in marriages where one spouse has AIDS shouldn't just practice abstinence. It reminded me of this great vignette from Dorothy Day's (also great) biography by William D. Miller:

Dorothy invariably greeted the arrival of her grandchildren with joy and in her notes, at least, seemed not overly stricken when the persistently fruitful Tamar [Dorothy's daughter, who was married, very poor, and eventually had eight kids] would inform her that another was on the way. Once a priest, though, offended her mortally with a saturnine rejoinder when Dorothy told him of the onset of Tamar's fourth pregnancy. . . . His rejoinder was "not much control there." "Having heard this from other Jansenist Catholics, I could control myself to a certain extent," said Dorothy, "but for a priest to say such things . . . Do you know the facts of life, I wanted to say. Instead I said meekly,'Once a year may produce such a result.'"

Day was dismayed at this priest's thoughtlessness about marital relationships and plenty steamed about his slight of her daughter. Not only did she publish their conversation in the Catholic Worker the next month, Miller says, she recounted it in the same space 24 years later.