Natural Family Planning International

Blog 14 for Sept 23, 2007 re Human Body n 3

This is the third installment of my commentary on The Human Body: a sign of dignity and a gift by Fr. Richard M. Hogan.  For publication details, see the blog for September 9, 2007. 

Is it really true that “through the human sexual powers we can love in a more profound way than through any other of our physical attributes”?  Father Richard Hogan thinks so, but I have some questions.  Imagine the followers of Mother Teresa, tired after a long week of using their hands to pick up, nurture, bathe, and care for the poorest of the poor in Calcutta.  Imagine a married couple who are enjoying a prosperous life and have enjoyed the full expression of their sexual powers several times that week during the infertile time of the cycle.  On what basis can we say that the latter couple has loved in a more profound way than those Missionary Sisters of Charity?  Or take that same couple taking care of a sick child all night or exercising great patience with a troublesome two-year-old or a wayward teenager.  On what basis do we say that they exercise a deeper, more profound love in their ordinary marriage acts than in these other acts of love? 

Yes, the marriage act is a unique act of married love even though it is common.  And, yes, it can be profound.  It has both the potential to co-create another person destined for eternal life with God and the potential for the spouses to consciously and willfully renew their marriage covenant.  But in my opinion there is something off base in comparisons that make our fun-filled couple in the example above somehow superior in their expression of love to those who labor with their hands and hearts to care for others.  Fr. Hogan’s way of expression reminds me of some college students who had heard a liberal Jesuit extol the virtues of marriage.  He told them that at the moment of orgasm the floodgates of sanctifying grace were opened, and the students wanted to know what I thought of that.  I told them that I thought Father was confusing sanctifying grace with sperm count.  (The priest later became a dissenter, left the Society, and married.)  I do not doubt that spouses can and should grow in grace and holiness in marriage and in the marital communion.  I do not doubt that individuals can and should grow in grace and holiness in receiving the Eucharistic Communion.  But neither is automatic.  For each communion to help them to grow in holiness, they need to have the proper dispositions.  (See Chapter 4, “Holy Communion: Eucharistic and Marital” in Sex and the Marriage Covenant.)

After his confusing talk about the marriage act, Father Hogan writes in an even more confusing way about natural family planning.  “NFP examines our fertility.  It investigates our sexuality, the window to the soul.  In the NFP classes, couples are taught about their own fertility.  NFP is the knowledge of fertility.  There is a distinction between knowledge of fertility and its application.  Married couples may apply the knowledge of their fertility to plan their families, but this application is actually responsible parenthood.” 
 
Pardon the long quotation, but I have to put my comments in context.  First, NFP is NOT identical with the knowledge of fertility.  NFP stands for Natural Family Planning, and “Planning” entails an activity, not just knowledge.  In the NFP movement, the terms “fertility awareness” and “NFP instruction” are widely used to denote the intellectual aspect of NFP, and Fr. Hogan’s identification of NFP with intellectuality is the first I have seen.  It doesn’t make sense.  Ordinary people talk about “practicing NFP” and they don’t mean studying.

Second, who says that the application of their knowledge is responsible parenthood?  Yes, it should be.  But is it?  That depends on whether couples use their knowledge properly.  Systematic NFP can be used generously and it can be used selfishly, and how can we call the selfish use of NFP “responsible parenthood”?

Father Hogan did point to an important part of NFP instruction when he wrote, “It investigates our sexuality, the window to the soul.”  Again, that’s the norm or the ideal, but it is certainly not done just by studying the bodily aspects of human sexuality.  What is extremely important to understand about human sexuality can be known by most people only through faith.  It is faith that teaches us that we are made in the image and likeness of the Triune God who has no body.  It is faith that teaches us that the human act of intercourse is essentially different from the anatomically similar act by high primates in that it ought to be an expression of married love and commitment, not just a satisfaction of instincts.  It is faith that teaches us that this act ought to take place only within marriage.  It is by faith that we accept the description of this act as “the marriage act.”  In Latin ecclesiastical documents it is called “usus matrimonii,” literally the use of marriage.  It is by faith that we learn that attempting the “marriage act” outside of marriage is the grave matter of mortal sin.  It is by faith that we learn that distorting the marriage act with contraceptive behaviors is also the grave matter of mortal sin. 

One does not learn these things at the local community college course on human reproduction.  That’s why Catholic priests and others send engaged couples to courses on Natural Family Planning.  They don’t want just an anatomy course.  What they want is a course that includes fertility awareness and also the Christian use of our sexual powers, the call to generosity in having children, and Catholic teaching against unnatural forms of birth control.  Knowledgeable priests will also want their couples to learn about ecological breastfeeding as a form of NFP as well as being best for baby and mother. 

Is this what couples get in any given NFP course?  It is not in my power to make such a judgment with any certainty.  In our website manual, we teach in this manner.  We will also do so in the classroom teaching program that we are now developing and that we hope to have ready in early 2008.  I think is unlikely that any other NFP program is teaching in this comprehensive way, but I am more than willing to be corrected.  

Next week: more on responsible parenthood.  Are “serious reasons” obsolete?

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, a short, readable, and free e-book available for downloading at www.NFPandmore.org .

This is the second installment of my commentary on The Human Body: a sign of dignity and a gift by Fr. Richard M. Hogan.  For publication details, see the blog for September 9, 2007. 

The use of a person: good and bad
At the end of his Introduction, Fr. Hogan makes the point that when we use someone’s body, we use that person.  Further, “…we should never use someone’s body or treat it like a thing.  The human body should never become an object of use.  To use the body is to use the person.”  I agree.  In the context of this booklet, it is clear that Fr. Hogan is addressing the common problem of people using each other as tools for sexual pleasure.  How many hearts have been broken when one of the persons realized he or she was just being used in this very negative sense and then discarded. 

There are, however, two distinctly different meanings of “using” other persons.  There is a good sense and there is a bad sense.  The classical example of the good sense is the Virgin Mary who responded to God through the Angel Gabriel, “Be it done unto me according to your word.”  Okay, that’s a very special case dealing with supernatural realities.  But something like that happens at the purely human level.  Some people join communities, religious or secular, with a Rule in which they place themselves under complete obedience to the Superior.  In effect they are saying, “Use me to help achieve the goals of this community and my personal growth as well.” 

A common case of one human person being used by another human person is the employment relationship, and it is here that some people treat others with the dignity due them as human persons while others treat them as things, to be used and then discarded.  Every realistic person knows that sometimes things happen in organizations that make it necessary to disemploy one or more employees.  Where there is proper management, the manager will explain the reasons for the decision and make some effort to convey that he or she appreciates the personal pain and difficulty the separation is causing.  Some companies offer separation packages that respect the dignity of human persons.  On the other hand, imagine a company that had long-time relationships with certain employees.  Imagine that there was a change of management.  Imagine that the new management disemployed these long-time employees simply by not giving them any work to do.  No discussion.  No reasons given.  No letter of disemployment.  Just nothing.  Would you say that such a treatment was in accord with respect for human dignity?  Or would you say it was an example of using people in the bad sense and discarding them as things? 

The marriage act
After his Introduction, Fr. Hogan treats of Marriage and Family Life, calling this a Theology of the Family.  Here he distinguishes between the theology of the body and the theology of the family.  He believes that the former emphasizes “man’s dignity, especially in regard to the body” while the latter emphasizes “the noble and almost unbelievable vocation of man and woman to enter into a familial communion in imitation of the Blessed Trinity.”  Personally, I don’t find such distinctions helpful in a booklet such as this.  It comes across to me as too many uses of the word “theology” and distinctions that are more important for academic tests than for the real life needs of young people today. 

This section proceeds well until the very last paragraph.  Here he writes eloquently about the marriage act, but he carries it too far.  “Even though other human relationships of love are expressed in and through the human body, the union of husband and wife in marriage is of a totally different order because marriage depends on the body in a way that no other human relationship does!  The act of married love is the defining characteristic of marriage.”  While I certainly agree with the last sentence, I have to wonder what Fr. Hogan means when he says that “marriage depends on the body in a way that no other human relationship does.”  Certainly, the propagation of children doesn’t depend on marriage; just look at the increasing rates of out-of-wedlock sex and births.  Further, I   think Fr. Hogan has forgotten another important human relationship.  We can also say “Breastfeeding depends on the body in a way that no other human relationship does!”  Literally, for most of human existence, a baby’s life depended upon the bodily act of breastfeeding.  In her book, Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood, Sheila Kippley makes eleven comparisons between the marriage act and breastfeeding.

 • Both the marriage act and breastfeeding are voluntary acts between two persons.
 • Both acts are normally essential for life.
 • The wife offers her body to her husband in the marriage act and to her baby in the breastfeeding act.
 • Both acts are used in Sacred Scripture to describe God’s love for his people. 
 • The Pope’s theology of the body applies to both acts. 
 For an explanation of these and the remaining six comparisons, please read this light-shedding book. 

The fact that there are artificial substitutes today does not take away from the unique bodily relationship of breastfeeding any more than out-of-wedlock sexual behavior takes away from the unique character of the marriage act.  But what is that unique character? 

In my opinion, what is unique about the marriage act is that it ought to be a renewal of the marriage covenant.  The physical act ought to be much more than physical.  I believe it is intended by God to be, at least implicitly, a renewal of the marriage covenant.  The marriage act ought to reflect and renew the commitment, the fidelity, the openness to life, the caring love, and the for-better-and-for-worse permanence of the marriage vows they pledged on their wedding day.  This, of course, is the covenant theology of sexuality that Father Hogan has dismissed as objective, deductive and principled and therefore irrelevant today. 

It seems to me that the best explanation of Fr. Hogan’s assertion that “marriage depends on the body in a way that no other human relationship does” is to explain it in terms of the marriage covenant.  When the physical act is truly a renewal of the marriage covenant, the spouses are implicitly pledging that they will raise their children in a family setting and that they will strive to raise that child in the ways of God.  That is what marriages need, not just more and more sex but marriage acts that serve to renew their commitment to God and to each other.

Next week: Is natural family planning well defined as just knowledge and study?  What is the difference between a course on the human reproductive cycle and a course on natural family planning? 

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, a short, easy-to-read, free, downloadable e-book available at
www.NFPandmore.org

Rev. Richard M. Hogan, The Human Body: a sign of dignity and a gift, Cincinnati, The Couple to Couple League, 2005, 40 pp booklet.

Pope John Paul II produced the Theology of the Body (TOB) in a series of 129 lectures between 1979 and 1984.  In this booklet Father Richard Hogan applies his interpretation of the TOB to natural family planning and sexual morality.  Our review serves the purpose of these blogs which is to discuss matters related to natural family planning including publications.

Disclosure.  This review is critical, so by way of disclosure a few comments are in order.  It will become clear to any reader that Fr. Richard Hogan and I are not members of a mutual admiration society.  In 2006 Fr. Hogan used his status as a public person to twice publicly dismiss the covenant theology of sexuality that I pioneered.  He called it deductive, objective and principled and therefore irrelevant in today’s world of inductive thinking and subjectivism.  (I have not seen him criticize John Paul II for incorporating the key concept of the covenant theology into his 1994 Letter to Families.)  On December 5, 2006 and again on April 20, 2007 I wrote Fr. Hogan by email for an explanation of his negative judgment but never received a reply.  It is my understanding that this booklet is required reading for candidate teachers in the CCL NFP program.  In my opinion it is highly inadequate for NFP teacher training, and I will elaborate the reasons for that negative judgment in this review as it unfolds.

Father Hogan is not only an author but is also a member of the CCL Board of Directors.  In this booklet, Fr. Hogan several times concludes his treatment of a sinful activity with the sentence, “[This behavior] violates both human dignity and the wondrous vocation of love given to all of us as images of God.”  Fr. Hogan was at the Board meeting on December 7, 2003, Pearl Harbor Day.  It was at that meeting that Sheila and I received treatment that we believe “violates both human dignity and the wondrous vocation of love given to all of us as images of God.”  That played a big part in our decision to resign from the Board of the organization that we had founded 32 years previously.   There is much more, but that’s enough to indicate that we are not in a positive relationship, and it is possible that this may color my analysis.  You will have to judge for yourself.  If you want to see if I am taking anything out of context or otherwise being unfair, you are welcome to obtain a copy of the booklet from its publisher. 

The first thing a reviewer will notice is that The Human Body does not list an ecclesiastical “permission to publish”, formerly called an Imprimatur.  That’s unfortunate because a good ecclesiastical reader can raise questions, ask for qualifications on statements, and generally help make a work better. 

The first paragraph of the booklet is somewhat mysterious.  Fr. Hogan writes, “…the thought of the Church on human sexuality, marriage, and family life has undergone a profound development since … Humanae Vitae … in 1968.  This development is reflected in the Second Vatican Council…”  Vatican II concluded in 1965.  How do documents of 1965 reflect something not produced until three years later?  They don’t, but perhaps they anticipated it.  On the other hand, the Theology of the Body of John Paul II was certainly a reflection of what he helped to write during the Council some 15 years or so previously. 

In my opinion, any discussion of the papal theology of the body is seriously incomplete without the following direct quotation from section 24 of Gaudium et Spes (The Church in the Modern World):

“For He [the Lord Jesus] implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and in the union of God’s sons in truth and charity.  This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”  (Emphasis added.)  The footnote to that sentence refers to Luke 17:33.  That text reads: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (RSV, Catholic edition).  That text has parallel texts in Mt 10:39 and 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24, and Jn 12.25.  The passage in Luke 9:24 is more Christo-centric: “For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it.”  (Emphasis added.)  The same is true for Mt 10:39 and 16:25, and Mk 8:35.  
Nowhere in the booklet does Fr. Hogan refer to Gaudium et Spes n. 24, and thus nowhere does he tie the papal theology of the body back to Sacred Scripture through GS n. 24.  How can one understand the papal TOB without the scriptural foundation that gives it force?  Count that as one reason for the inadequacy of this booklet.

Fr. Hogan completes his first paragraph by telling us that “The theology of the body shows us that we should never use ourselves as things.”  There’s no argument about using ourselves or others as things, but such a teaching is simply part of the social doctrine of the Church, and Fr. Hogan provides no reference for it in the TOB. 

He continues this theme on the second page.  “The most important principle of the theology of the body is that human beings—body and soul—have a dignity and value unparalleled and unequaled on earth.”  Who says it’s the “most important principle” of the TOB?  Did the Pope ever say that?  If so, he should have been quoted.  It is disturbing that Fr. Hogan puts forth his opinion as fact in a booklet intended for non-theologians.  Count that as a second inadequacy of this booklet.

I’m not sure how someone decides what is the “most important principle” of the papal TOB, but I take issue with Fr. Hogan’s interpretation.  First of all, the dignity and the unique value of the human person is a traditional teaching of the Church.  It is the basis of all its great social teaching and has been repeated in the social encyclicals starting with Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 up to the present time.  We certainly did not need the TOB to remind us of this basic teaching. 
   Second, since we are dealing in the area of opinion, I suggest that the most important principle in the Pope’s TOB might be his development of the theology of gift as applied to love, marriage and sexuality.  This is clearly a continuation of what he had helped to write in Gaudium et Spes 24 previously quoted, but it does not stand out in a first reading.  I read the various lectures that make up the TOB as they appeared or were collected into small paperbacks, and I was one of the many who had difficulty reading them.  The papal biographer George Weigel encouraged me a bit by saying that the TOB is very tough reading, and he helped me considerably when he summed up the entire TOB as “the theology of gift.”  That had not come through to me in my personal reading.  I was somehow seeing only the trees and not the forest, but Weigel helped me see the big picture, the forest.  Sometimes a commentary can be helpful.

It could be argued that we didn’t need the Theology of the Body in the light of the gospel texts and the teaching of Vatican II.  So why did John Paul II write it or what is special about the TOB?  It seems to me that what is unique in the TOB is its application of the gospel texts and Lumen Gentium 24 to the marriage relationship and especially to the marriage act. 

Perhaps John Paul II was hinting at this in the very last paragraph of the last of the TOB lectures.  “…to face the questions raised by Humanae Vitae, especially in theology, to formulate these questions and seek their reply, it is necessary to find that biblical-theological sphere to which we allude when we speak of the redemption of the body and the sacramentality of marriage.  In this sphere are found the answers to the perennial questions in the conscience of men and women, and also to the difficult questions of our modern world concerning marriage and procreation.”   (Emphasis added.)

And thus ended the papal Theology of the Body. 

 I think the emphasized statement above is important.  The papal TOB is a long commentary on Sacred Scripture and the Tradition of the Church.  It is sprinkled with biblical texts, but it is a commentary and it does not have the teaching authority of either Scripture or Tradition.  When people write books and booklets about the papal TOB, they are writing commentaries on a commentary, and these necessarily have less authority then the original commentary.  Sometimes they might be just vehicles for expressing one’s opinions.  The same applies to commentaries such as this about one of those booklets. 

That’s all for this week.  There will be more next week as we move into page 3 of Fr. Hogan’s booklet where he writes about “using.”
John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, a short, easy-to-read, free, downloadable e-book available at
www.NFPandmore.org