Posted on 08/16/2005 1:48:10 PM PDT by NYer
Having married in 1985 when both were medical students, Ann and Michael Moell had their life together planned out.
Once they established medical practices and had a big house with a sprawling back yard, they would begin to have children. Until then, Ann would take the birth-control pill.
Although both had grown up in large Catholic families in Ohio, neither was well versed or much interested in the Church’s teaching on birth regulation.
“While we were in medical school and residency, we didn’t think we had time for a child,” Ann says. “We had the American dream in mind, not just for ourselves but for the children we would have.”
Their plans began to unravel four years into the marriage, when Ann stopped taking the pill because of persistent headaches.
“Here we were, both studying medicine, and neither of us knew anything about the pill and its side effects,” she recalls. “It just isn’t a topic in medical school because the pill is assumed to be a good thing.”
They used periodic abstinence, condoms and other barrier methods but, within a year Ann became pregnant. They welcomed the child into their lives, yet continued to contracept.
After their third child arrived, Ann says, “That was it. We were still young, with three children and growing medical practices. We thought we had to do something foolproof that would keep us from having more children.”
They discussed the possibility of a vasectomy for Michael.
“We thought it would be the best thing for our family,” Michael explains.
Something happened, though, in the Moells’ pursuit of the American dream. Ann began to pray. The couple had begun attending Mass again with the birth and baptism of their first child, but they were “just doing the Catholic thing,” Michael says. “We didn’t know anything about contraception being sinful or that Jesus is present in the Eucharist. We were missing so much.”
“To actually ask God to give us an answer was something new,” Ann admits. “I was praying at Mass, ‘God, show us what to do about this issue.’ A month later, I was pregnant. It was God’s answer. It was so immediate, so direct, and I was elated. It changed our whole attitude about who was in charge of our lives and our marriage.”
They began using natural family planning, and have welcomed two more children into their lives.
But God was not finished with them yet. Ann was a family-practice physician who prescribed the pill. Michael was a pediatrician who was prescribing the pill for young girls. Someone gave them the videotape “Contraception: Why Not?” by Janet Smith. “It changed the whole direction of our practices,” Ann says. “We started looking into the side effects of the pill and I knew I had to stop prescribing.”
Now Dr. Ann Moell is a stay-at-home mother who volunteers as a prenatal-care physician at a pro-life pregnancy center in Dayton, Ohio. Michael left a pediatric partnership to open Holy Family Pediatrics, in the same building as the pregnancy center. About half his patients are pregnant teens referred by his wife. They recommend abstinence before marriage and NFP in marriage to their young patients. Many Catholic parents travel long distances to bring their children for routine care to Holy Family Pediatrics.
“This has been a huge spiritual journey as well as a growth and learning experience in proper health care,” says Ann.
“It was a huge financial leap and leap of faith, to give up the partnership and open my own medical practice,” Michael adds. “Four months after I opened the door, our fourth child was born. I was questioning God the whole way. But it’s worked out better than I could have dreamed.”
Conversion is a word Penny and John Harrison use often to describe their experience with birth control. They were married in 1983 in Penny’s Protestant church; a Catholic priest witnessed the ceremony for John, who was raised in a Catholic family.
They used various forms of contraception for the first 10 years of marriage and had two children “pre-conversion,” as John describes it.
A Catholic Marriage Encounter weekend opened Penny’s heart to the Church, and, when she decided to become a Catholic, all the assumptions of their lives were uprooted. While she was going through a parish RCIA program in their hometown of Kansas City, Mo., John began looking at his own faith and asking questions. He had no problems with the sacraments or the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, but his vague knowledge of the Church’s teaching on contraception nagged at him.
When he and Penny asked a priest about the issue, “we got some confusing and unspecific answers,” John recalls. “We ultimately were told to ‘follow our conscience.’ Unfortunately, that’s the answer too many Catholic couples get today, and they’re not being told the full beauty of the truth.”
Penny entered the Church at the Easter Vigil in 1993 and shortly thereafter she and her husband went on a 10th-anniversary vacation without their two children.
“We were both very uncomfortable using contraception on that trip,” John said. “We came back and just stopped using contraception of any kind, and prayed and hoped for another child.”
Key to their decision was hearing a talk by Catholic evangelist Scott Hahn, a former Protestant minister, and reading Rome Sweet Home, in which Hahn and his wife, Kimberly, defend the Church’s teaching on contraception.
“We date our deeper conversion to the heart of the Church primarily from the fervor we took from listening to Scott Hahn’s talks,” John says.
Since their conversion, the Harrisons have had three more children, including twins in 1999.
“I come from a Protestant background where it is considered irresponsible not to practice contraception, so I’ve come a long way,” Penny says. “The problem was that when I was preparing to enter the Church, we knew what Catholics were supposed to believe but we couldn’t find any Catholics who actually lived the teaching on contraception.”
As teachers with the Couple to Couple League, which promotes NFP, John and Penny are seeing “more and more couples open to the gift of life,” she says. “I tell them that, in the Nicene Creed, we call the Holy Spirit ‘Lord and Giver of Life.’ If we take that title seriously, we cannot shut the Holy Spirit out of our marriages.”
John says he tells couples who are not particularly religious that contraception is “disrespectful to your wife’s body. You expect a woman to take these hormones that make her body think she’s pregnant just so she can be available to you sexually all the time. And it goes the other way too. Your wife expects you to put on a special device. That’s not very respectful of the man, either.”
“Love means giving your whole self to your spouse,” adds Penny. “And that’s the great gift of NFP.”
Having read all your post......you have hit on part of my problem which is - WHY must the Church have any approved Method for regulating births. Why doesn't the Church disapprove all methods? NFP and artificial birth control do accomplish the same ends, and yes people, I know all about the means, etc. The "means" by which a couple plays mad scientists and uses charts, temperatures, cycles, etc are, in my opinion, playing God too. They too have taken God out of the equation or they would have to do science experiments every month. The point is,,,,,why doesn't the Church condemn all forms of regulating births.
I know all about the full and final Authority of the Church, infallibility, etc, etc. I must reiterate.....I am trying to fully understand this NFP method from an intellectual standpoint. And Maximillian, I'm not addressing you so much,,,,,as those who are about to jump on me for my intellectual departure from Church teaching. I have prayed about this, I have tried so hard to put my mind around NFP and I can't do it. Yet, I'm called by the Church to trust in it's infallibilities.
As you have so eloguently put it Maximillian,.....those couples who neither use artificial birth control or NFP are the honorable couple before God Amighty and it is they who trust, without any human reservations, in His Divine Authority.
I'm trying to digest all your posts.....there is a lot there. I do need to ask you a simple question about the Church's teaching on sexuality. It teaches the sex act must be "unitive" and "procreative." Does this mean "unitive" and "procreative" must both be present in every sex act or does only one or the other have to be present to be in accordance with Church teaching?
Because continence is virtuous, and because it is better to abstain from having sex than to have sex if one is able, just like it is better to fast and abstain from meat than to eat whatever one wishes until one is satisfied.
The Church does not dissaprove of the use of continence to regulate or prevent births because the Church cannot condemn the practice of a virtue.
Those familiar with ecclesiastical history know that many married couples in the early history of the Church (and later) used to practice continence by refraining from all intercourse after the birth of only a few children, while remaining married. In fact, the Church used to require this of all her clergy, since the clergy in the early Church was frequently made up of men who had been married, but who gave up marital intercourse with their wife once ordained.
NFP is merely a different way of practicing the same virtue with less difficulty for most people.
"The Catholic Church has also ruled that it is worthy to accomplish the end of avoiding a pregnancy by abstaining, since this tends to bring the sexual appertite under the control of right reason."
It's worthy for what, abstaining 48 hours.........sexual appetite under control for what.....48 hours! And then it's carry on your wild passion for the next 28 days. And then, the process is repeated. "Hold the line, honey, we are fertile, we only have to wait another 18 hours and then we're good to go." That is the practical application for the majority of Catholic couples. I suppose I'm just a hard-headed obstinate individual who has problems with NFP. I've heard all the flowery and beautiful Church definitions and explanations for NFP but when it's true applications are used in the bedroom, a couple has engaged in the sex act WITHOUT the probality of conception. And I'd say they make up for the "abstained period" to which the Church addresses. As a matter of fact, I'd say that "appetite" you speak of is mitigated by a couple who engages passionately up to that small window where they can't engage in sex. They know the froth off their sex drives leading up to that window! I'm just trying to get people to think about the practical application of NFP. And you can't tell me the way I've described the NFP application above isn't the way most Catholics go about it.
"They know the froth off their sex drives leading up to that window!"
Should read: they KNOCK the froth of their sex drives
Please explain how you acquired this information.
I've interviewed 100 couples using NFP!
This article from Crisis magazine by HW Crocker (author of "Triumph, the 2000-year history of the Catholic Church") will most likely ring true for you. He has the chutzpah to say what so many others like yourself have been feeling and thinking:
Making Babies: A Very Different Look at Natural Family Planning
The best part about an article like Crocker's is the huge relief it provides from the humorlesness of the NFP cult.
For a complete sexual act to be totally without blame it must:
1) Occur between a married couple
2) Have a motivation apart from lust or pleasure
3) Result in the man climaxing inside the woman in the normal way
4) Be open to the creation of life if that is physically possible (this is obviosuly not required during pregnancy or after menopause)
5) Occur without the use of force
So it must be marital, unitive, unlustful, procreative if naturally possible, and naturally performed. If any one of these requirements is not met, a sin is committed, since the sexual function is being distorted from its proper ends and means. As noted the only exception to your question then becomes the continued use of sexuality during pregnancy or after menopause, when procreation is not physically possible. In that case, it may only be used rightly if it is motivated by something other than the seeking of pleasure or the satisfaction of lustful urges and thoughts, i.e. as expressing love, or allaying concupiscence, or for strengthening ones marriage.
It is no more right to have sex merely because it is pleasurable than it is to eat food merely because it tastes good without regard to an actual need for food.
And that constitutes "a majority" of every couple practicing NFP in the world. How interesting. They do say statistics is a mystery.
The last thing I will say, is that I find your desire to judgmentally gloat over the moral state of other people's marriages, with a distinct undertone of pornographic hyperventilating, to be ... eeeewww.
Have a nice day.
Why the ugliness towards me? Why do you seem vindictive for my posts here and my internal struggle with a teaching of the Church? Why the attack?
I've done nothing but try to catalogue my frustration with NFP with sincerity and I'll grant maybe some hardheadedness BUT you go and get extremely ugly.....WHY DID YOU DO THAT?
Dear Maximilian,
Your link doesn't seem to work quite right.
Thanks,
sitetest
Let's hope this one works better:
Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. ...Neither the Church nor her doctrine is inconsistent when she considers it lawful for married people to take advantage of the infertile period but condemns as always unlawful the use of means which directly prevent conception, even when the reasons given for the later practice may appear to be upright and serious. In reality, these two cases are completely different. In the former the married couple rightly use a faculty provided them by nature. In the latter they obstruct the natural development of the generative process. It cannot be denied that in each case the married couple, for acceptable reasons, are both perfectly clear in their intention to avoid children and wish to make sure that none will result. (Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, §14-15)
Contraception is sinful because it is against nature; exercising the marital act on days of natural infertility is obviously not sinful. The intention itself to avoid children, as long as it is for just reasons, is not sinful, even if it is held by those using contraception.
Separately from these considerations of sins against the Sixth Commandment, men are also obliged under the Seventh Commandment, in social justice, to have a sufficient number of children for the propagation and gradual increase of society. Failing to fulfill this duty, even if NFP and not contraception is used, is also a sin, but one separate from the malice of contraception itself. Thus Pope Pius XII states:
The matrimonial contract, which confers on the married couple the right to satisfy the inclination of nature, constitutes them in a state of life, namely, the matrimonial state. Now, on married couples, who make use of the specific act of their state, nature and the Creator impose the function of providing for the preservation of mankind. This is the characteristic service which gives rise to the peculiar value of their state, the bonum prolis. The individual and society, the people and the State, the Church itself, depend for their existence, in the order established by God, on fruitful marriages. Therefore, to embrace the matrimonial state, to use continually the faculty proper to such a state and lawful only therein, and, at the same time, to avoid its primary duty without a grave reason, would be a sin against the very nature of married life.
Read your post #84, and its descriptions of your imagination of other people's marital relationships, if you want to see "ugly." I'm almost throwing up looking at it again.
And have a nice day. (That's a closer, btw, indicating that I've nothing further to say.)
Actually, I understand for NFP to work generally requires abstinence on the order of 10-15 days, not 2 days.
A marriage that is one of "wild passion" does not sound particularly Catholic to me. Catholics traditionally abstained from sex on days of fast and abstinence and before and after receiving Holy Communion. In an ordinary week, this would require no sex Friday through Sunday evening, since Friday and Saturday are the traditional days of fast and abstinence, and Sunday we go to Mass. Additionally, Catholics were to abstain from sex for the duration of Lent and Advent, the Ember Days and Rogation Days, and the Vigils and Days of major feasts. If that were followed, you would be abstaining about 190 days per year for purposes of prayer.
If the majority of couples do not follow this, it is because even fewer people can be bothered with following the traditional ascetical rules of the Church than can be bothered to follow her rules on the use of marriage.
As a matter of fact, I'd say that "appetite" you speak of is mitigated by a couple who engages passionately up to that small window where they can't engage in sex. They know the froth off their sex drives leading up to that window! I'm just trying to get people to think about the practical application of NFP.
This whole attitude is foreign to me, and I don't discuss the sex lives of others with them, so I wouldn't know. I believe in following the traditions of the Church, and abstaining from sex for prayer to control the sexual appetite, not giving in to immense gratification. If someone is using NFP, they need to approach this from a similar perspective. Similarly, if someone is trusting in divine providence, they also need to approach sex from this perspective. Marital life should be a time of ascetical struggle to obtain perfection and purity of heart, not an indulgence in passion and lust with or without the intention of procreating children.
And you can't tell me the way I've described the NFP application above isn't the way most Catholics go about it.
I wouldn't know. Most Catholics use contraceptives.
The Church does not dissaprove of the use of continence to regulate or prevent births because the Church cannot condemn the practice of a virtue.
Continence is virtuous, true (cf. 1 Cor 7:5). But is the continence of NFP-using couples virtuous? It seems to me that continence is virtuous because it is a sacrifice "for the kingdom of Heaven" (Matt. 19:12). This is a point which JP II also made in 1982: "Continence, even if consciously chosen or personally decided upon, but without that finality ["for the kingdom of heaven"], does not come within the scope of the above-mentioned statement of Christ." (General Audience of 17 March)
When couples abtain in the practice of NFP, are they making a sacrifice "for the kingdom of Heaven", or is their intention not rather to avoid children for those just reasons which are admitted by the Church?
Thanks.
If you don't want to use NFP, don't. But why harass and try to convict as sinful those who follow the church on NFP?
Hermann's response to Max earlier is spot on.
Frankly, I think you are weird. Please try to not to fantasize about my sex life.
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