Month: July 2014

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Do Biblical Themes Apply Today?

In his homily on the readings for July 24th (Jeremiah 2:1ff and Matthew 13:10-17), our priest noted that much in our culture today parallels the things against which both Jeremiah and Jesus spoke. That struck a resonant chord for I have long wondered if the current attacks on the Church are analogous to the attacks that the Lord allowed his Old Testament people to suffer when they became unfaithful.

In the prophets and the psalms it is very clear that God has selected the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not for any merits of their own but simply to show God’s love, mercy, and power at work in the world. They would exist only by his very special protection. The Babylonian exile, however, represented God’s lifting his special protection since the people no longer wanted to walk in his ways. Their return to Israel was due to a moral miracle worked through a pagan, not by any virtue of their own except repentance.

By analogy, if we acknowledge that the Church was suffering internal corruption during the 15th and early 16th centuries, can the rise of Protestantism be compared to the Old Testament assaults? And what about today? After Vatican Council II ended in 1965, its work was widely misinterpreted as permission to become worldly in the worst sense of that term instead of a call to evangelize the world. This came to a head in 1968 with the massive rejection by Catholics of almost 2,000 years of Catholic teaching against marital contraception. The result is that in these United States it is estimated that less than one percent of fertile-age Catholics are living out the teaching of Humanae Vitae.

To tighten the analogy, the Chosen People settled in the land of Canaan among peoples who were worshipers of Baal, considered the god of fertility. Ritual prostitution was common and even required. As OT scholar Fr. Bruce Vawter wrote someplace in his book, The Conscience of Israel, a young woman might not like the idea, but playing the part of a temple prostitute was part of their religion. This proved to be a great temptation for all too many of the Chosen People who chose to join the Canaanites in these practices.

Can we not say that all too many of God’s chosen people—his baptized—once again have fallen into the trap of pagan sexual immorality? And can we not say that this time around these sins may be even worse—and especially for those who benefit from the teaching authority of the Catholic Church—because the participants are hoping not for the gift of fertility but in their idolization of contraceptive sex are hoping for infertility?

Is it not possible that God has somewhat lifted his mantle of protection of the Church in recognition of the failure of Church leaders to really confront this massive moral heresy?

Regardless of the value of this speculation, I suggest that all Christian parties ought to agree on a few things.

First, we all ought to be praying for authentic reform and renewal all throughout the Church in the widest meaning of that term. We all ought to be praying for a rebirth of modesty and chastity, for a stop to contraception and sodomy and abortion and FOR a culture of life.

Second, all Catholics ought to be praying for the conversion of North America, for the reconversion of Latin America, for the reconversion of Europe, for the conversion of Russia, for the conversion of Islam and the Jews, and for peace in the Holy Land and all throughout the Middle East and the entire world. If we love these peoples, we want what is best for them, and that means that we want them to have lives of full Catholic faith and holiness.

To me these things are so obvious that I sometimes wonder: Why don’t we hear these petitions at Mass? Why don’t we hear these petitions before the start of group rosary prayers? Certainly, someone might say, God knows all these needs, so why should we tell him what he already knows?

Well, if that’s the case, why pray in petition for anything? Maybe the Lord just wants to see if we are sufficiently interested in these projects to give a bit of our time in prayer.

At any rate, please join me in making these intentions part of your daily prayers and intentions. The current wars are not going to be resolved just by guns and more killings.   And really, you cannot reasonably want your descendants to have to live under Sharia law.

John F. Kippley, July 26, 2014

See also Sheila’s blogs at the NFPI website, www.nfpandmore.org.

(A 30% discount is now offered on all Kippley print books at lulu through August 7 in recognition of NFP week and World Breastfeeding Week.  In addition, Sophia is offering a 25% discount on Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood through August 7.  The code for the Sophia discount is “motherhood.” Ignatius Press is offering Sex and the Marriage Covenant for only $6.00 through August 31.)

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Did Bottle-feeding Increase the Use of Contraception?

Early this summer, a physician who is knowledgeable about natural family planning and its statistics asked this question: Is there any study that shows a connection between bottle-feeding and the acceptance of contraception?

The short answer is that Sheila and I are not aware of any study that attempted to measure that relationship.

A more helpful answer, however, is found in the work of Dr. Otto Schaefer, a physician who worked among the Canadian Eskimos in the 1950s. He went there as an advocate of formulas and bottle-feeding. What he experienced led him to become a champion of the pattern of nursing that we call ecological breastfeeding.   He saw that the birth interval in this culture before the arrival of bottle-feeding was three to four years. With the advent of the trading post and formula and bottles, the babies were coming every year, and the mothers were complaining. In short, he witnessed a very clear example of hyper-fertility caused by the loss of breastfeeding.

This was very similar to the hyper-fertility of the 1950s here in the States. The WWII vets had returned and many wanted nothing more than to get a job, get married and have children. They were soon joined by the veterans of the Korean War (1950-1953). Prosperity was in the air. If formula-feeding made child-rearing much more expensive, so what? And they couldn’t wait to use jar after jar of Gerber-type baby food.

The result among many of these young families was the hyper-fertility of a baby every year. Breastfeeding was so rare in the United States in the Fifties that no one seemed to know that having a baby every year was highly unusual in breastfeeding cultures.

Nor did most married couples of the Fifties and Sixties know much about the first form of systematic natural family planning—Calendar Rhythm. Our landlord told us that he and his wife had practiced the Ogino-Knaus rhythm—they called it the O-K method—during the 1930s with a hundred percent success and three children. But that knowledge seemed to get lost in the postwar years. A great book on Catholic marriage published about 1956 referred to Calendar Rhythm, but instead of giving the formula, the author told couples to see their priest, assuming he would know.

The result was hyper-fertility. Contraception became widely practiced among those who had no moral/religious objections to it, and faithful Catholics and other Christians had large families. But even among the faithful, there were some real questions. A mother of seven who had married right after college was experiencing obvious varicose vein problems. She was about 30 and realized she had another 15 years of fertility; so she asked me, the parish lay evangelist, point blank, “What are we to do?” At that point I didn’t know enough even to give her accurate Calendar-Temperature rhythm rules.

However, there were certainly others who were very clear in saying that they were sure that the Church was going to change its teaching, so they hinted that it was okay to go ahead and use unnatural forms of birth control. Their articles were in periodicals read by Catholics, and their brochures and pamphlets might be found in church literature racks. There was little vocal opposition from the local clergy.

This is the background for my conviction that the demise of breastfeeding and its consequent hyper-fertility played a big role in the acceptance of contraception.

That’s why Sheila and I have always included ecological breastfeeding in our natural family planning instruction. When mothers follow the Seven Standards of ecological breastfeeding, they will experience, on average, 14 to 15 months of breastfeeding amenorrhea (no periods). They have a right to know this, and they also have a right to know that without following the seven standards they will most likely have a relatively early return of fertility.

Aside from the extended natural infertility that God Himself built into this pattern of baby-care, there are a plethora of demonstrated health benefits for babies and even for the mothers. In our manual, Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach, we list 21 health benefits for babies and 8 for the mothers. It seems to me that everyone who loves mothers and babies would want young couples to know these things. That’s why we think ecological breastfeeding should be incorporated into every church-affiliated NFP program. We don’t think that young people should have to wait for a July freeze in Texas for this information to be made universally available in church-affiliated educational efforts.

Are programs that relate breastfeeding-in-general, commonly called cultural breastfeeding, with delayed fertility really being fair with couples? That was the sort of talk common in the early 1960s before Sheila did her research and published the importance of mother-baby closeness and frequency of nursing. Cultural nursing almost guarantees an early return of fertility.

For accurate information, see www.nfpandmore.org, the manual mentioned above, and especially Sheila’s most recent book, The Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding: The Frequency Factor available at that website. Faithful Catholics and other interested parties need and deserve every help they can get in countering the sexual revolution and anti-family propaganda, and this sort of down-to-earth help simply must become a common part of the help that is given.

John F. Kippley, July 19, 2014

 

 

 

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Homosexuality and the Future of Marriage

I recently received a notice about a conference dealing with homosexuality and the future of marriage. I did not recognize the named lecturers, so I replied to my source: Who is going to talk about the connection between the acceptance of contraception and the acceptance of sodomy?

In recent discourse about sodomy under the title of “same-sex marriage,” it is common for critics to say that the acceptance of “same-sex marriage” will lead to the destruction of traditional Christian marriage. I have to disagree with them even though we share the same convictions about the immorality of sodomy. It seems to me that the growing societal acceptance (or imposition) of sodomy-as-marriage is more of a sign that modern society and federal judges have already rejected traditional Christian marriage.

Let’s go back a few years. I don’t know when the America anti-sodomy laws were enacted, but it was in 1873 that the Comstock anti-contraception laws were first passed by essentially Protestant state legislatures for a basically Protestant America.   It was exactly 100 years ago in the spring of 1914 that Margaret Sanger began her successful campaign to legalize the sale and distribution of contraceptive devices and information. In the national census for 1910, there was one divorce for every eleven marriages, a divorce rate of 9 percent.   The “philosophy” of Margaret Sanger was that unlimited sex and very small families would yield great family happiness. With the nearly universal acceptance of Sanger’s ideas, today we have a divorce ratio of 1 divorce for every two marriages, a rate of 50%. If we assume that the divorce rate is an indication of marital unhappiness, we can conclude that a 500 percent increase in the divorce rate indicates a very serious increase in marital unhappiness, just the opposite of Sanger’s predictions.

During the next 15 years there was increasing speculation about contraceptive marriage. The so-called progressives were openly advocating deliberately childless marriages for which they even had a special name—companionate marriage. In brief, within a few short years, the societal acceptance of contraception had led to the destruction of the idea of marriage as a divinely instituted and permanent relationship for having children and raising them in the ways of the Lord.

In 1920, the bishops of the Church of England were faced with this growing debate and reaffirmed the Christian Tradition against marital contraception.

In 1929, secular humanist Walter Lippmann wrote that the progressives were following the logic of birth control, not the logic of human nature.

But in 1930 the Anglican bishops folded and accepted marital contraception, thus earning for themselves the distinction of being the first organized Christian communion to accept contraception. In the course of their debate, the more conservative Anglican bishops warned the others that the acceptance of marital contraception would lead logically to the acceptance of sodomy. The history of the Church of England has proved that prediction as all too true. If you want a specific event to mark the start of the sexual revolution, I submit it was the Anglican acceptance of contraception in August 1930.

That was quickly followed by the acceptance of contraception by the Federal Council of Churches in February 1931, which led to the general Protestant acceptance of contraception despite some very strong initial opposition. The introduction of the birth control Pill in 1960 added gasoline to the fire, and the widespread rejection of Humanae Vitae by Catholics starting in 1968 tragically added more fuel to the flames.

Martin Luther was correct when he called the contraceptive sin of Onan a form of sodomy. Further, while every unnatural form of birth control can be called a form of heterosexual sodomy—seeking to make the act just as sterile as homosexual sodomy—some heterosexuals engage in the same anatomical acts as homosexuals as their form of birth control. This acceptance of sodomy by heterosexual couples certainly makes it difficult for them to call “evil” the same sterile acts performed by homosexuals.

In the language of baseball, the acceptance of marital contraception by those who call themselves Christian was strike one against the societal acceptance of Christian marriage.

Strike two against the societal acceptance of Christian marriage was the acceptance of no-fault divorce. Governor Ronald Reagan signed legislation on September 5, 1969, making California the first American state to grant no-fault divorces, and by 1985 every state had a no-fault divorce law. As Maggie Gallagher wrote some years ago, in this country, the government won’t let you get married for keeps. Even though both spouses marry with the best intentions and enter a valid, sacramental marriage, if the relationship goes sour and one spouse wants a divorce, there is no legal support for permanence. The one who wants out wins.

To the extent that there is societal acceptance of sodomy as same-sex marriage, that is the third strike against the societal acceptance of the Christian Tradition of marriage as permanent and ordered toward the social purpose of having children as well as the personal hopes of marital happiness. Sodomy has been with us since early biblical times, so why is it having greater acceptance today? I submit that it is because so many of those who call themselves Christian have turned their backs on the demands of Christian married love.

This brings us back to the early years of the Church. From what I can gather, Roman society was as debased as contemporary post-Christian and non-Christian cultures. The witness of our Christian ancestors living chaste and fruitful marriages gradually changed that aspect of the culture.   Those Christians who deplore sodomy but practice contraception are inconsistent. They may be simply ignorant and therefore not hypocritical, but they need the same conversion that they are urging on those with same-sex attractions and behaviors.

The renewal of contemporary and future society is truly dependent, once again, on Catholic leaders and the faithful living the Faith to the full.