Natural family planning

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Rebuilding the Church

This series of blogs started because a picture of a former Catholic Church in the Netherlands now turned into a skate park continues to haunt me. It is a reflection of the neglect of the Church, specifically in Europe but also throughout the West, to proclaim the teaching of Humanae Vitae with confidence and conviction.

The intellectual debate about Humanae Vitae was completed very quickly. It was clear very soon that the rejection of the teaching of Humanae Vitae entailed the rejection of the natural moral law. Dissenters still calling themselves Catholic spelled out the logic of birth control, including even the acceptance of bestiality. Other dissenters spelled out their new principles for moral decision making. I pointed out in a liberal theological journal that Fr. Charles Curran’s principles cannot say no even to spouse-swapping. At least by the end of the 1970s, it was clear that the logic of birth control cannot say no to any imaginable sexual behavior between consenting persons of legal age. That is moral absurdity, and that should have been the end of the so-called “debate” about the merits of Humanae Vitae and Catholic teaching against all unnatural forms of birth control.

Instead, a majority of Catholics as well as other Christians became part of the contraceptive-based Sexual Revolution. Through contraception, sterilization and abortion, the Western once-Christian world stopped having enough babies to replace themselves. The Church and the world are in crisis and in need of a solution.

The solution is both simple and stupendous.

Simple: The Church needs to preach and teach God’s truths about love, marriage, sexuality, and the call to be generous in having children and raising them in the ways of the Lord. The Church has these truths, and everyone in the world needs them. The leaders of the Church need to preach and teach these saving doctrines with the confidence that they really are true and the conviction that they come from God and are for the benefit of every man, woman and child. Then they will also experience the joy that comes from seeing more Catholic couples internalize and live these truths.

Stupendous: The Church needs to inspire its members to say no to themselves and yes to serving God and others. The symbol of Christianity is the Cross. The teaching of Jesus about love, marriage and sexuality involves carrying the daily cross. Somehow, pastors of souls need to reawaken in themselves and their laity a true and personal love for the Lord Jesus. As his disciples, we will understand that the sacrifice of chaste living is just a normal part of walking with the Lord Jesus. Every day young men and women sign up to give their lives, if necessary, for the life of their country. What we need is that every day all men and women sign up again and again to live their lives on the narrow path of Christian discipleship, an adventure that we know involves the daily cross of saying no to ourselves and then the joy of saying yes to the Lord Jesus.

Next Sunday, May 10th, is Mother’s Day.  John F. Kippley, May 2, 2015

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They’re running scared

Articles that have appeared in the media controlled by Catholic dissenters seem to indicate that they are running scared. Humanae Vitae and natural family planning are not their favorite subjects except for criticism. They generally consider these subjects as settled in the negative and not worth discussing. Airplane comments by Pope Francis perhaps have made them almost giddy. After all, if the Pope can be soft on sodomy, what can he have against the use of unnatural methods of birth control that seek to make the marriage act just as sterile as sodomy? Of course, those who actually read what the Pope said and consider the circumstances in which he said it realize that he was not talking about sodomy in general but only whether that sin disqualified a particular priest for a Vatican banking job. On that one, he reserved judgment.

More recently Pope Francis not only presided at the beatification ceremony of Pope Paul VI but also praised his work including Humanae Vitae. The proponents of the Catholic Tradition regarding love, marriage and sexuality have been getting more press, even good press. If I were a dissenter and had been expecting the Pope and the Synod to say some things that further undermine traditional Catholic teaching on birth control and the indissolubility of marriage, I would be very concerned. So they’re writing.

One new trend is to treat systematic natural family planning as an ideal but not as the norm. That’s joined with the use of difficult cases to make the actual teaching of the Church look impossible to follow. For example, a long-absent soldier returns home during the fertile time, and they don’t want to get pregnant. The dissenters’ solution is simple—just contracept. Why? Well, it would be difficult to abstain. In other words, it would be a cross to abstain. Granted.

The problem is that the Lord Jesus told us—and still tells us today—that taking up the cross daily is the price of discipleship for which the reward is eternal happiness. With many words and sympathy-inducing scenarios, the message of the dissenters is the same: you are excused from carrying the cross of Christian discipleship. That is not compassion.

Compassion in this situation starts well before the actual scenario event. At NFP International, we do what we can to identify the fertile time and to keep it as short as possible when abstinence is required. Many of us who have been teaching Catholic NFP have suffered lots of rejection, but at NFP International we persevere simply because teaching chaste and generous NFP is the right thing to do. It’s a response to section 26 of Humanae Vitae that encourages couples to share their NFP knowledge with others.

The other thing that needs to be said is that through their mutual fertility awareness and Catholic faith, the couple in this situation may realize that it may be providential that they are fertile at homecoming. Do they really have a sufficiently serious need to postpone pregnancy? Perhaps seeing what he has seen may lead the military man to be all the more grateful for the gift of life.

Next week: Rebuilding the Church.

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Visible consequences of rejecting Humanae Vitae

In my comment on January 4, 2015 I wrote about abandoned Catholic churches in the Netherlands and Germany now being used as athletic facilities, a mute testimony to the Dutch and German bishops’ general failure to support Humanae Vitae. We have some beautiful churches in Western Cincinnati where I live. Ever since reading the WSJ article the first weekend of January, I have occasionally thought about the fate of the Churches and schools in this part of town. We live within 2 miles of three churches. Extend that to a three mile radius and there are seven more churches.   A five mile radius would include at least another five. You get the picture.

When we started teaching NFP here in 1972, we taught four courses simultaneously in different parts of the city and suburbs. A brief bulletin announcement would bring 15 to 20 or more couples. Most of them wanted spacing, not great limitation. They had formed their consciences prior to the post-Humanae Vitae explosion of dissent. But by 1981, things were different. We were then 13 years after Humanae Vitae, and people with 12 to 16 years of Catholic education had never heard a good word about the encyclical. As far as we can tell, although there are a number of HV-accepting pastors in our part of town, only two of them require their engaged couples to take an NFP course as part of preparation for marriage. All the parish statistics except funerals are down. There’s talk about parish consolidation. You get the picture.

The acceptance of contraception by most of the Catholic laity in the West is having visible effects. It’s not primarily a matter of money—we just recently read of a Catholic school in an affluent Cincinnati suburb being shuttered. Catholics can indeed speculate how their beautiful churches will be used a hundred years from now—as Catholic churches, or as mosques, museums or athletic facilities.

It is not too late to reverse the process, but more than bare bones survival requires more than what’s happening now. The Archdiocese of Cincinnati has embarked on a campaign to raise 130 million dollars for an endowment fund, and it will probably succeed.  Half of it will help with student tuition assistance. The rest goes for other worthy projects. More money can be helpful, but it is certainly not the key problem. The Church in Germany has lots of money, but it’s falling apart because of the lack of believers who have sufficient faith and trust to have children.

What the Church needs more than money is a systematic effort to make every diocese and every parish a Humanae Vitae diocese and parish. That will prepare the ground for a very practical solution to a great need—more families who are generous in having children. More on that on Mother’s Day.

Next week: The dissenters are running scared.

John F. Kippley, April 18, 2015