Natural Family Planning International

Last year at this time, John was in California undergoing treatment for prostate cancer at the Loma Linda University Medical Center. This place has been the leader in a form of radiation called the proton beam therapy. As you may know, almost all the various treatments have very high success rates in curing prostate cancer, but most of them also have some undesirable side effects such as urinary incontinence and sexual impotence to one degree or another. Proton beam therapy has almost none of the first and a relatively small amount of the latter. Since almost everyone of those being treated was spared the inconvenience of wearing diapers, they were grateful. It was common to hear the guys talking about doing something by way of giving back to the institution that helped them.

NFP International needs that sort of “giving back” spirit among those who have been helped by our work over the past 36 years. We, John and Sheila Kippley, are not asking for any financial support for ourselves. We live adequately on Social Security for the most part, and we are happy to be 100% volunteers for NFPI. We just hope that people who have been helped by us in past years or recently will want to give back to NFPI in order to maintain and significantly expand our current level of service. And just what sort of service does NFPI render?

The website. We opened the NFPI website, www.nfpandmore.org, in 2005 with the intention of making it the “go to” website for Natural Family Planning. We have made significant strides toward that goal but we certainly have much more to do.

● Our online manual, Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, is for self-instruction. It is short, easy reading and free. Most NFP websites promote their NFP course. There’s nothing wrong with that, but many couples can learn very well from our manual. It is far more complete than the material from which we first learned the STM, and users can and do contact us for additional free help via email and phone. You can download a free STM chart from the Home Page.

● The Triple Strand approach to NFP. We founded the Couple to Couple League in 1971 with a unique approach to Natural Family Planning instruction. It was a combination of Ecological Breastfeeding as a form of NFP, the simple and easy-to-grasp covenant theology of sexuality, and a version of Systematic NFP that emphasized the Sympto-Thermal Method but let couples know about other approaches. Within the STM we developed different rules for distinctly different situations. In our opinion, it is unfortunate that the current management of CCL has changed the content of the Triple Strand while continuing to use the label. NFPI continues the original Triple Strand tradition.

● The website section carries articles and research related to NFP and the culture. More work remains to be done, and it is a continuing project.

● Support for Catholic teaching about love, marriage and sexuality is provided in a series of articles dating back to John’s 1971 article in the liberal journal, Theological Studies. “Continued Dissent: Is It Responsible Loyalty?” showed that the decision-making principles of arch-dissenter Fr. Charles Curran could not say a firm NO even to spouse-swapping. It brought exactly zero response from the dissenters, a clear signal that the article was right on the mark. Students doing research on the so-called birth control debate should read it. The talk John gave on Saturday, October 27, was well received at the 2007 annual meeting of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. Titled, “The Sexual Revolution: A Half-Millennium of Regression,” it will soon be posted on our website. Every high-school and college student should read it.

● The blogs provide commentary on current events or topics. They are time-consuming to write but apparently are helpful. Site visits have increased considerably since we started them. We greatly appreciate you and our other readers.

Support for Eastern Europe. This is a very important part of the NFP International apostolate. We fund the salary of a full-time family man working for NFP in Slovakia, and we are very pleased with his work. How many people in the entire world are visiting priests and trying to visit bishops to gently prod them to do what they should be doing to teach marital chastity? We assure you that what he is doing could not be done just with volunteers. With sufficient resources, we hope to duplicate this effort all throughout Europe as well as in the United States.

New classroom teaching program. Some NFP teachers who have enthusiastically taught the traditional Triple Strand content have become disappointed with the changes at CCL, and they’ve asked us to develop a new classroom teaching program based on the content of our online manual. We’re hoping to have this ready early in 2008.

Please pray for the work of NFPI. Yes, we know that you get so many requests for prayers that you can’t remember all of them without making an ever lengthening list. Still, we ask because our mutual prayers are part of God’s Providence for making good things happen. Please pray that thousands of people will visit our website and make good use of the materials there. Please pray that we will develop a truly excellent classroom teaching program that will be used all throughout the United States as well as internationally.

Please pray about helping us financially. Please consider the importance of this NFP apostolate. First, we promote and teach the truth about human sexuality. Is that important? If you read the crime reports in your daily paper, you may notice that most of the crimes of child abuse, domestic violence, and the crimes of young people have a common theme—family breakdown. If there’s a man in the house, he’s not the real father of the child who is in the papers. Marital chastity increasingly isn’t recognized as an ideal or a norm. This is part of the sexual revolution that started with the acceptance of the idea that modern man can take apart what God has put together—marriage-wise and sex-wise.

We are doing what we can on a shoestring. With your help we can do much, much more. Have you or any of your loved ones ever been helped by our work either recently through NFPI or in the past through our previous organization? Do you have any confidence in us based on our record over the past 36 years? Are you ready to give back? We are volunteers, and the couples helping us with the new program are volunteers. But we do need funds for Slovakia, for the website, for promotion, for a printed manual, and for incidental expenses. As founders, we are limited by the IRS as to how much we can give. Please give it prayerful thought.

Please help us financially. After your prayerful thought, we hope that you will want to see the efforts of NFP International continue and increase. We hope you will want to give all that you can. $1,000. $500 $250 $100 $50 $25 $10. NFP International is a registered not-for-profit organization, and all donations to NFPI are tax-deductible. If you want to make regular automatic gifts, we will provide the bank information.

Double your money. A major donor has offered to match all donations in November and December up to a total of $15,000. Please join this effort to help NFP International.

Help spread the word about breastfeeding. We would like to give our donors up to 45 of our new breastfeeding brochure for all donations of $50.00 or more. These brochures are great for promoting breastfeeding in your church and community. Let us know how many you can use—5, 10, 20, 30 or up to 45. You can view and download the brochure at our website, www.nfpandmore.org.

How to donate. Please make checks payable to NFP International or just NFPI and mail them to:
                        NFP International
                        P. O. Box 11216
                        Cincinnati, OH 45211

Be sure to let us know how many brochures you can use and give us your mailing address. (Only the white mother-baby image is printed at this time.)

May God continue to bless you and your family, and may He bless you in a special way for your help to bring about a rebirth of chastity, a stop to contraception and abortion, and a culture of life.

Sincerely in the Lord,

John and Sheila Kippley
Founders, NFP International Inc.

P.S. Please share this blog with family and friends and clergy. Many thanks!

“In my 30 years in Brazil, I saw many promising apostolates rise and then fall as they abandoned the charisms of their founders.”—Bishop Karl Jozef Romer, Pontifical Council for the Family, 2002 CCL Convention.

Why bother?

It has certainly occurred to me that certain parties may be thinking, “Why are the Kippleys wasting their time on these blogs? Don’t they know that people think they are stupid for doing this or think their whole effort is just a case of sour grapes? Do they really think they can accomplish anything? Don’t they realize they are beating a dead horse in thinking or even hoping that the current CCL management might return to the classic content of the Triple Strand approach to NFP?

Well, yes, we realize that some or many people think this way. First, at this stage in my life I don’t care what people think of me. I have no ambitions that will be affected by adverse opinions. Yes, I do have a few ambitions. I would really like to be able to make good contact with a golf ball, consistently, but if someone thinks I’m crazy for spending time at the keyboard instead of at the course, such negative thinking won’t affect my strokes–either way.

Second, I have been appalled by a few responses that reflect a total absence of critical thinking. What we have witnessed in the CCL campaign to sell the revised program is a classic advertising campaign that uses the common technique of glittering generalities. “Streamlined.” “Up to date.” “Easier to use.” “Easier to teach.” These are all attractive terms, but what is lacking is an adequate explanation about what is behind the language. For example, which is easier to use, a system that offers the earliest possible start of Phase Three (postovulation infertility) consistent with the available evidence or one that requires a later start? Remember, waiting one more day sometimes means waiting a week or more when one of the spouses travels. More on this later.

Third, sometimes when you see something that appears wrong, you simply feel called to do what you can. One day before we were married, Sheila and I were driving on a side street in San Francisco and we noticed a young woman running from a man. It looked bad. So I jumped out of the car to intervene. I was fortunate that time because the gal told me not to worry. Maybe she liked being chased across one front lawn after another. A few years later I read in the newspapers about the local firefighters union president who had been suspended by the safety director of our town for using language that the safety director thought was inappropriate. So I phoned the guy and found out the situation was even worse than the paper reported. This was in Kansas, the great state in which the legislature had recently passed a pro-abortion law that allowed abortion for any reason whatsoever right up to birth. This was the state in which you could not get a glass of wine or a bottle of beer with your dinner in ordinary restaurants but in which you could become a “member” of other restaurants–I think it was $1.00 for an evening’s membership–and get drunk as a skunk. But this was also a state that in 1969 did not require municipalities to recognize labor unions as official bargaining agents. So when the union president was talking tough in support of his men, the safety director could and did regard it as deserving suspension.

I was teaching a college course on Catholic social thought, and perhaps that made me a bit more sensitive to this injustice. At any rate, I told my class that I would be making a few remarks at the city council meeting one afternoon, and at least one of my students came down for the show. I wish I could find the photo that appeared in the paper, and I wish I knew how to get it into this blog, but you will have to use your imagination. They caught me with my mouth open and my finger pointing. It was upsetting to the council members. The next year the college had a new president, and at his first meeting with some council members to assess community support for the college, the first question was, “When are you going to get rid of the ‘perfesser’?” as they called me. Did any good come of it? The firefighter was not immediately reinstated, but he and his wife told me that it really bolstered the morale of the entire department to have a college teacher going to bat for them. A student at the meeting told me it really reaffirmed his faith to see someone confront the council with Catholic social teaching. Anything else? Well, the president reluctantly got rid of me as part of a massive layoff, and that brought me to the Twin Cities where we teamed up with Dr. Konald Prem. Later, the college went under.

Probably the most stupid thing I’ve done from a practical and career perspective was to write my defense and explanation of Humanae Vitae that was published by Alba House in 1970 as Covenant, Christ and Contraception. Today, you cannot imagine the anti-Humanae Vitae atmostphere in the the Church back in 1968-1969. I knew full well that once it was published I would never get a teaching job in a Catholic college except in the smallest and most obscure. I wrote the book not with any hopes of changing things but in the hopes that some future historians might find the book and realize that not everyone had gone along with the massive dissent of the day. There are some things you do because they have to be done.

So, to our friends I say, don’t feel sorry for us. To our enemies and to those in the middle, start to exercise your powers of critical thinking.

To all I express my hope that the Lord will make some good use of these efforts.

John F. Kippley
NFP International
www.nfpandmore.org
Author: Sex and the Marriage Covenant (Ignatius)
Co-author: Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book
(e-book at this website, 2005)

“In my 30 years in Brazil, I saw many promising apostolates rise and then fall as they abandoned the charisms of their founders.”—Bishop Karl Jozef Romer, Pontifical Council for the Family, 2002 CCL Convention.

Greetings from JFK.

Along with my wife, Sheila, I am a co-founder of the Couple to Couple League (CCL) for natural family planning. Thus, I am still interested in what CCL does even though I am not longer associated with it.

My interest in natural family planning stems largely from my interest in the Faith and theology. I entered a minor seminary right out of high school, and I struggled the last two years of college with philosophy. I still have unpleasant memories of a two-year history of philosopy course that seemed to me like memorizing nonsense sylables. That is, through faith we know the Creator of the universe and what is important in life, and the efforts of some non-Christians in the Middle Ages to explain the universe without reference to the God of revelation seemed futile at best. I stayed in the seminary for a fifth year called First Theology, and that greatly piqued my interest. At the end of that year, however, my spiritual director and I decided that I did not have a calling to the priesthood. I remain grateful to God for those five years and have felt privileged to attend some of the class reunions in recent years.

I enrolled in the Institute of Lay Theology for the academic year, 1962-1963. Sheila and I were married near the end of the school year, and we embarked on a parish outreach to the uncommitted, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, shortly thereafter. Since we were close to the University of San Francisco, I was able to pursue an M.A. in theology.

My primary parish responsibility was twofold: 1) conducting a regular course on the Catholic Faith, from Creation to the the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick and 2) promoting attendance at the courses. It was a challenging time in which to present Catholic teaching on love, marriage and sexuality, including the teaching against all unnatural forms of birth control. We were not educated on modern systems of natural family planning, and it took us at least a couple years to learn about what we came to call ecological breastfeeding. It was not unusual to hear of other men in my position working up theories to fit in with the increasingly contraceptive culture within the Church, especially among liberal priests, teachers, and theologians, to say nothing of the secular culture. Sheila and I were blessed with the friendship and theological support of Howard and Mary Riordan who were well grounded in the faith; Howard had a real talent for presenting the Faith in its beauty and relevance.

Somehow, I began to support the anti-contraception teaching of the Church with what we now call the Covenant Theology of Human Sexuality. On a Saturday morning early in 1966, I attended a lecture by a man who became a leader in the dissent movement soon after Humanae Vitae in mid-1968. That Saturday morning made it clear that the dissent movement was well under way in the mid-Sixties. I thought the speaker was undermining the teaching of the Church, and I was sufficiently angry to spend the rest of that day and a good portion of Sunday writing a theological essay that compared the conditions for the worthy reception of the Eucharist with the worthy engagement in the marriage act. It was published as “Holy Communion: Eucharistic and Marital” in Ave Maria magazine (Feb 25, 1967), now the fourth chapter in Sex and the Marriage Covenant.

Fifteen months later, on July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical, Humanae Vitae. I breathed a sigh of relief, but then had to deal with the dissent movement organized and widely promoted by Fr. Charles Curran and a few of his cohorts. I had read the reports of the papal birth control commission that were leaked and published in mid-1967 or so, and it was clear that the intellectual acceptance of one unnatural method of birth control logically entailed the acceptance of any and all unnatural methods of birth control, aside from abortion, but including marital sodomy. Despite whatever big words or convoluted sentences or specious arguments were used, the dissenters basically were saying one thing: To follow the teaching of the Catholic Church regarding birth control is a cross for many married couples, and couples today should not be burdened with Christ’s doctrine of the daily cross regarding love, sexuality and marriage.

I thought that such a rejection of basic Christian teaching was not only unchristian but stupid. I mean, if a couple reject Christian teaching that calls for sexual self-control for themselves, how do they transmit to their children, without being hypocrites, the Christian teaching that calls for sexual self-control by their children?

At any rate, I took pen in hand and wrote a book to defend the teaching of Humanae Vitae with the covenant theology of sexuality which can be summarized in 17 words that are easy to understand and remember. “Sexual intercourse is intended by God to be at least implicitly a renewal of the marriage covenant.” I will say more about it in future blogs.

The book was published in 1970 by Alba House as Covenant, Christ and Contraception. Once it was published, I felt obliged to do what I could to provide the practical help of natural family planning. Sheila and I made a fruitless effort to start an organization in the summer of 1970, but the attendees were “closet NFPers.” Yes, some of them were afraid they would lose friends if it became public knowledge that they believed and lived by the teaching of Humanae Vitae. A year later we met Dr. Konald Prem, and he agreed to help. In the fall of 1971 we formed the Couple to Couple League in the parish where I was working, and that effort bore fruit.

John F. Kippley
NFP International
www.nfpandmore.org
Author: Sex and the Marriage Covenant (Ignatius)
Co-author: Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book
(e-book at this website, 2005)