Natural Family Planning Awareness Week

NFP Awareness Week

Did you know that this week, July 21-27, is Natural Family Planning (NFP) Awareness Week? The USCCB has dedicated this week to promote awareness of NFP. Many (if not most) Catholics do not properly know what NFP is and very few Catholics practice it. The USCCB should be lauded for attempting to promote awareness, unfortunately the timing is horrible since all of the media attention – including the Catholic media – is rightly focused on World Youth Day. 

What is NFP?

Pope John Paul II: Evangelium Vitae

In his encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul II outlined the appropriateness of NFP:

At the first stage of life, centers for natural methods of regulating fertility should be promoted as a valuable help to responsible parenthood, in which all individuals, and in the first place the child, are recognized and respected in their own right and where every decision is guided by the ideal of the sincere gift of self. (EV, #88)

From the scientific point of view, these methods are becoming more and more accurate and make it possible in practice to make choices in harmony with moral values. An honest appraisal of their effectiveness should dispel certain prejudices which are still widely held, and should convince married couples, as well as health-care and social workers, of the importance of proper training in this area. (EV, #97)

What the Catechism Teaches

The Catechism articulates the Church teaching on family planning. Additionally it sets forth the proper disposition for discerning when to regulate procreation.

2368 A particular aspect of this responsibility concerns the regulation of procreation. For just reasons, spouses may wish to space the births of their children. It is their duty to make certain that their desire is not motivated by selfishness but is in conformity with the generosity appropriate to responsible parenthood. Moreover, they should conform their behavior to the objective criteria of morality:When it is a question of harmonizing married love with the responsible transmission of life, the morality of the behavior does not depend on sincere intention and evaluation of motives alone; but it must be determined by objective criteria, criteria drawn from the nature of the person and his acts criteria that respect the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love; this is possible only if the virtue of married chastity is practiced with sincerity of heart. (NOTE: CCC cites GS 51 § 3 as an endnote).

2370 Periodic continence, that is, the methods of birth regulation based on self-observation and the use of infertile periods, is in conformity with the objective criteria of morality.158  These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage tenderness between them, and favor the education of an authentic freedom. In contrast, "every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible" is intrinsically evil:159  Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality. ... The difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle ... involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality. (NOTE: CCC cites HV, 16; HV, 14; FC, 32 as endnotes).

Links to Documents Cited in CCC:

• Gaudium et Spes (GS)
• Humanae Vitae (HV)
• Familiaris Consortio (FC)

The Hunger Games:Advice for Catholic parents

I meant to write this post last week when the film based on The Hunger Games was released. Perhaps this discussion will help for those who didn't want to fight the crowds or are dealing with children who now want to read the books or see the movie.

My personal position (and of course that's all it is) is that parents have to make those types of decisions based on what they think their children are mature enough to handle. I addressed a similar issue with the last Harry Potter movie. Like I said in that post, the Catholic Church (outside of a movie review service) does not normally make definitive statements about books, movies or other art.

Forget about the content of the book(s) for a moment. A well formed and informed set of parents should be able to make rational decisions about what content they deem appropriate for THEIR children. If they choose to permit their children to watch the film or read the books, no one should call them out as bad parents. Similarly, parents who decide to not allow either should not be condemned as narrow minded. It's their right and responsibility to "be up in their kids' business." (I am envisioning one of my colleagues saying this).

Moreover, parents are responsible for being the primary teachers to their children. Blessed Pope John Paul II expressed this in Familiaris Consortio:

The task of giving education is rooted in the primary vocation of married couples to participate in God's creative activity: by begetting in love and for love a new person who has within himself or herself the vocation to growth and development, parents by that very fact take on the task of helping that person effectively to live a fully human life. As the Second Vatican Council recalled, "since parents have conferred life on their children, they have a most solemn obligation to educate their offspring. Hence, parents must be acknowledged as the first and foremost educators of their children. Their role as educators is so decisive that scarcely anything can compensate for their failure in it. For it devolves on parents to create a family atmosphere so animated with love and reverence for God and others that a well-rounded personal and social development will be fostered among the children. Hence, the family is the first school of those social virtues which every society needs."(FC, 36)

Here are some well balanced reviews of the movie:

National Review, Father Robert Barron

Catholic News Service, Movie Review

Saint Talk: Holy Family

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. Today's Gospel reading is the basis for the Fourth Joyful Mystery of the Rosary.  Instead of giving you my thoughts on the subject of the earthly trinity, I have included some excerpts from the writings of Pope Benedict XVI and Blessed Pope John Paul II.

In the Gospel we do not find discourses on the family but an event which is worth more than any words: God wanted to be born and to grow up in a human family. In this way he consecrated the family as the first and ordinary means of his encounter with humanity. 

In his life spent at Nazareth, Jesus honoured the Virgin Mary and the righteous Joseph, remaining under their authority throughout the period of his childhood and his adolescence (cf. Lk 2: 41-52). In this way he shed light on the primary value of the family in the education of the person.

This Gospel episode reveals the most authentic and profound vocation of the family: that is, to accompany each of its members on the path of the discovery of God and of the plan that he has prepared for him or her. 

Mary and Joseph taught Jesus primarily by their example: in his parents he came to know the full beauty of faith, of love for God and for his Law, as well as the demands of justice, which is totally fulfilled in love (cf. Rom 13: 10). 

From them he learned that it is necessary first of all to do God's will, and that the spiritual bond is worth more than the bond of kinship. 

The Holy Family of Nazareth is truly the "prototype" of every Christian family which, united in the Sacrament of Marriage and nourished by the Word and the Eucharist, is called to carry out the wonderful vocation and mission of being the living cell not only of society but also of the Church, a sign and instrument of unity for the entire human race. (Pope Benedict, Angelus, 12/21/06) 

Pope John Paul II repeatedly emphasized that "the future of the world and of the Church passes through the family." I particularly like what he had to the role of the father was in Familiaris Consortio:

In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God, a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family: He will perform this task by exercising generous responsibility for the life conceived under the heart of the mother, by a more solicitous commitment to education, a task he shares with his wife, by work which is never a cause of division in the family but promotes its unity and stability, and by means of the witness he gives of an adult Christian life which effectively introduces the children into the living experience of Christ and the church.

Catechesis and evangelization starts at home with the family. This is our responsibility and not one we can delegate. We cannot simply dump our children off at the church on Sunday Youth Night or Wednesday CRE and think we have fulfilled our duty as parents. Certainly, formal religious ed has its place, but formation must take place at home. As a school teacher, I can tell you that children don't care so much about what you say as they care about what they see you do. Formation at home means we have to live our faith every day. An integral part of this includes family prayer. Father Peyton was on the mark when he coined the phrase: "The family that prays together, stays together."