Dear Friends at Saint Frances Cabrini Parish and Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish:
Praised be Jesus Christ! The last week of July has been dedicated by the United States Bishops for many years now to the promotion of Natural Family Planning (NFP). For those not familiar, NFP is a way to allow married couples to more easily conceive children, or to plan to do so, by carefully learning the natural fertility rhythms of the body. Something of the reverse is therefore the case as well in that a married couple can be mindful of the same fertility rhythm in order to avoid conceiving a child if they prayerfully discern that it is not opportune to do so at a particular time.
For many years NFP was written off by large sectors of people in and out of the Church as something of an odd, Catholic loophole that substituted as a practice to regulate births in a framework of Church teachings that has never allowed (and still does not allow) the use of contraceptives or sterilizations. Nonetheless, every year in late July the Church does attempt to raise the NFP flag to look for takers, no matter how silly we may have looked over the years doing so in the face of a staunchly secular culture.
However, NFP seems to be enjoying a better status of late, even if the progress is slow. One thing that has always been true about it is that it is remarkably consistent with Catholic teachings about the meaning of human sexuality. Our teachings that contraception and sterilization are morally illicit are in fact accurate. As the wider cultural scene gets more and more wildly off course on matters of sexuality, gender, children, identity, etc, etc, more and more people are realizing what we have said all along: that once procreation is no longer viewed as integral to sexuality then all Hell breaks loose. Indeed it has done so in a major way since the advent of widespread artificial contraception in the 1960’s.
NFP has also enjoyed a rebirth with the rise of the Green Movement. Artificial contraception is medically very nasty stuff and as medicine seeks to grow more natural in its approaches, people are realizing in greater numbers why NFP is healthier and also usually cheaper. Not only that, when learned well it is extremely accurate. Also, as couples get married later in life and have children later in life, and for a host of other reasons, fertility problems seem to be on the rise meaning that these days if one is going to get pregnant at all, one is well-advised to learn NFP.
Lastly, the Church has also been saying for a long time that the fertility rates in the West in our highly contraceptive and birth-controlling culture are dangerously low for the survival of society and our way of life. It may look good for a decade or two to suppress births and play god with low fertility, especially as everyone watched their standard of living rise. However, it now seems to finally be hitting home that we have a serious problem on our hands with our demographics. We need more young people if we are going to maintain the life that we have always known.
No one can find enough workers right now. So much of the infrastructure that we are all used to runs on people. Our shortage of workers right now is only partially the result of outrageously high unemployment benefits. A major contributor is that for too many years we did not have enough children and now we are going to pay the price in a major way. It is not wise to mess with fertility in the manner and scale that artificial contraception has allowed us to do.
Natural Family Planning is not easy. However, it is an indispensable element of what it means to ensure that our world and population is truly focused on the good of the human person as God has created us. It would be a real blessing if its popularity (finally) grew.