Natural Family Planning International

In our first years of marriage, I worked as a lay evangelist in Santa Clara, and one Saturday morning early in 1966 I attended a lecture on birth control by Michael Novak at a parish in Palo Alto.  I can’t remember a thing he said, but what stayed with me was the manner in which he answered questions; it certainly seemed to me that he was undermining faith in the received teaching.  I was doing my best to uphold this teaching, and his comments left me angry.

By the time I was home again, I was ready to write a defense and explanation of the received teaching that had been reaffirmed by Pope Pius XI in Casti Connubii in 1930.  I began writing that afternoon and concluded my article late Sunday afternoon.  Never before or after have I been able to write like that.    Titled “Holy Communion: Eucharistic and Marital,” it drew a five-fold analogy between the worthy reception of the Holy Eucharist and the worthy marriage act.

I will list them here very briefly and I urge the interested reader to read the article at http://nfpandmore.org/Holy%20Communion%20-%20Eucharistic%20and%20Marital.pdf.

1. Both are the results of sacraments. The first requires the Sacrament of Holy Orders which enables the priest to act in the person of Christ to bring about the changing of the bread and wine into the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus. The lawful marriage act requires that the spouses be married so that their physical union can be a marriage act. The Catholic Church teaches that a valid marriage between two Christians constitutes the Sacrament of Matrimony.

2. Both are the results of a sacrificial offering the first by the Lord Jesus on the cross, and the second by the spouses as they promise to love and to remain faithful to each other for better and for worse till death parts them.

3. Both embody a bodily gift of self. This is quite obvious in the case of the Lord Jesus, but also in marriage the act ought to be a gift of self, at least not in any way opposed to the gift promised in making their marriage covenant.

4. A renewal of the covenant. In receiving the Holy Eucharist, we implicitly renew our baptismal covenant with the Lord Jesus, both affirming our desire to walk with Him and asking for the strength to do so. In the marriage act, spouses are called to renew, at least implicitly, the faith and love and commitment of their original marriage covenant.

5. The manner in which each covenant was sealed. The New Covenant announced at the Last Supper was sealed by the total self-giving of the Lord Jesus on the cross the next day. The marriage covenant is sealed by the spouses’ first marriage act which is a symbol of the total gift of the spouses to each other. Does a contracepted act constitute a true marriage act for purposes of Canon Law? That question goes beyond my competence, but the question certainly has been raised.

This is all too brief.  I hope you will read the original article that was published on February 25, 1967, exactly 17 months before Humanae Vitae.

Tomorrow: a close look at Humanae Vitae, section 11.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant

As the Sixties unfolded with more and more attention being given to the birth control Pill, Dr. G. K. Doering saw the need to test the effectiveness of the Calendar-Temperature system.  In his first system, he predicted that post ovulation infertility started by the evening of the SECOND day of sustained thermal shift.  I do not know what effectiveness he found, but he was surprised at the number of surprise pregnancies.  He changed his post-ovulation infertility rule by adding one more day.  The post-ovulation infertile phase was thus predicted to start on the evening of the THIRD day of sustained thermal shift.

In third-day study, he analyzed two groups.  One group abstained from the marriage act from the beginning of menstruation until the evening of the third day of elevated temperatures. In this group, he found a pregnancy-avoidance effectiveness of 99.2%.

The other group considered the early part of the cycle as infertile, using a calculation based on the thermal shift pattern in previous cycles.  In this group, he found a pregnancy avoidance effectiveness of 96.9 percent.  In both groups he included pregnancies that are now called imperfect-use pregnancies.  This included marriage acts during the fertile time and even at least one pregnancy from a couple using his previous second-day rule.  You can read the entire study at http://nfpandmore.org/Doering-1967-100315.pdf. This is the only English language translation of which we are aware; we hired a Professor of German to do it for us.

The IRONY.  This study was published in a German medical journal on June 9, 1967.  That’s 13 months and two weeks before the publication of Humanae Vitae.  At this time, Pope Paul VI was struggling with the birth control issue.  Seeing this research would have given him great encouragement about the current level of effectiveness of this natural system of avoiding pregnancy.  But did he ever see it?  I have to wonder.  With hindsight we know that the German bishops at that time as a whole did not accept the Traditional Catholic teaching against the use of unnatural forms of birth control.  That seems to be the case also today.  Germany is home of one of the original researchers regarding natural family planning, home of the Catholic priest who invented the Calendar-Temperature form of NFP, home of Dr. G. K. Doering who developed a highly effective Temperature-only system, and also home to the bishops who were highly non-supportive of Humanae Vitae.

As Jesus experienced his agony in the garden of Gethsemane, Peter, James and John kept falling asleep.  As the Church today is experiencing its agony of sexual sins, too many bishops seem to be proving themselves to be the descendants of the Apostles, asleep at the hour of need.  Dear reader, please pray for our bishops that they will wake up and realize what great helps the Lord has given his people to live out the teaching of Humanae Vitae.

Tomorrow:  The Covenant Theology

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant

After it was scientifically established that the human female has a fertility cycle, it became a matter of practical research to further establish the limits of the fertile time—when it starts and when it ends. Researchers on both sides of the world pursued this, and we know two of them—Kyusaku Ogino in Japan and Hermann Knaus in Germany. In February 1930, Ogino published his system of fertility awareness in a German medical journal, and Knaus soon conceded that the Ogino system was better than his. This was the beginning of Calendar Rhythm.

In August of that year, the Anglican Bishops at their periodic Lambeth conference were either ignorant of this new reality of spacing babies or ignored it. Seeing only a dichotomy of permanent abstinence or more and more children, they gave their permission for married couples to use unnatural forms of birth control. This poured gas on the flames of the contraceptive sexual revolution that had been started in the USA in 1914 by Margaret Sanger.

In 1935 a German Catholic priest, Fr. Wilhelm Hillebrand, learned from his brother—a doctor—that other research had shown that a woman’s basal body temperature rose after ovulation. He linked this to the Ogino-Knaus calculations for post-ovulation infertility, thus becoming the originator of the Calendar-Temperature method.

It is horribly ironic that after condemning marital contraception in both 1908 and 1920, the majority of the Anglican bishops abandoned the Christian Tradition just six months after the discovery of a system of naturally avoiding or postponing pregnancy.

Tomorrow:  the second German irony.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant