Archive for November, 2012

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The logic of contraception

Sunday, November 25th, 2012

One of the great evils of contraception is that it establishes as a working principle that modern man and woman can  take apart what God has put together.  That’s what contraception is all about — taking apart what God has put together in the marriage act.  Once a culture accepts that “philosophy,” it cannot say a firm “No” to any imaginable behavior between consenting persons.  In that way of rationalizing, all that counts is mutual consent so adultery, fornication, sodomy, prostitution become logically permissible.  The natural law is abandoned.  One dissenter wrote that his rejection of Catholic teaching on birth control also involved his rejection of the natural law, and that meant he had no way to say no even to bestiality — humans having sex with animals.  That is the logic of contraceptive birth control.

John F. Kippley
Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach
Sex and the Marriage Covenant
Battle-Scarred: Justice Can Be Elusive

Posted in Abortion-Contraception | 1 Comment »

The Triple Strand of Natural Family Planning

Sunday, November 18th, 2012

NFP International is the only organization in the United States that teaches the Triple Strand.  What is the Triple Strand of NFP?

The classic content of the Triple Strand consists of three concepts.  We have taught these concepts since 1971.
1.  Ecological breastfeeding as a distinct form of natural baby spacing.  It has now been further standardized as the Seven Standards of eco-breastfeeding.
2.  The covenant theology, which is more completely stated as the renewal-of-the-marriage-covenant theology.
3.  An open-to-choice version of the Sympto-Thermal Method of systematic NFP oriented to reducing abstinence as much as possible according to the evidence.  We teach all the common signs and we teach rules that attempt to maximize the benefits and minimize the limitations of each of the signs.  That’s why we teach a rule that allows us to see the start on Peak Day + 2 when the temperature sign is very strong. Other rules require three or four days of mucus drying past Peak Day.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant
Battle-Scarred: Justice Can Be Elusive (memoirs)
Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach

Posted in Covenant Theology, Ecological Breastfeeding, Sympto-Thermal Method | Comments Off on The Triple Strand of Natural Family Planning

The Church, Natural Family Planning and the Election

Sunday, November 11th, 2012

In the aftermath of Humanae Vitae in 1968, the American bishops apparently decided not to exercise their teaching authority and thus have largely lost it among rank and file Catholics.  As the old saying goes, “Use it or lose it.”  Despite surveys showing the lack of acceptance of Catholic teaching on birth control by Catholics, our bishops have continued to do almost nothing.  Thus President Obama put them in the uncomfortable position of having to defend what they had been ignoring for the past 44 years.  In 1989, a group of bishops authored a booklet on marriage in which they urged that every engaged couple should be required to attend a full course on natural family planning.  Only six or seven dioceses have implemented that policy in the subsequent 23 years.  In my opinion, if the Church had even half its married couples believing and living out the teaching of Humanae Vitae, there would be a Catholic vote in favor of life and good sexual morality, and the results of Tuesday’s election would have been different.

John F. Kippley
NFP International
www.NFPandmore.org

Posted in Education, Humanae Vitae, NFP | Comments Off on The Church, Natural Family Planning and the Election

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