Natural Family Planning International

I believe that Humanae Vitae teaches the truth about love, marriage and sexuality because I am convinced that it expresses a Tradition that meets the criteria for infallibility or at least the criteria for a teaching that must be accepted with religious submission of mind and will, according to the teaching of Lumen Gentium 25 especially as repeatedly reaffirmed by St. Pope John Paul II.

I am also convinced by reason that its teaching against marital contraception is true because of theological reasons that are further supported by sociological reasons.  Ask any theist “Who put together in one act what we call making love and making babies?”  The theist has to answer, “God Himself put together in one act what we call making love and making babies.”  Quite obviously, contraceptive behaviors are studied efforts to take apart what God has put together in the extremely important area of love, marriage and sexuality.

Further, I am convinced that what the Lord Jesus taught about marriage also applies to the marriage act.  “What God has put together, let no one take apart.”  That teaching was just as countercultural in his day as it is in ours.

When people tell themselves, either as individuals or as a culture, that we are now so enlightened that we can take apart what God Himself has put together, there is no logical stopping point.  That’s where the West is today.  Modernity accepts only the limitations  of mutual consent and legal age.  In 1930 when the Church of England was debating the acceptance of marital contraception, their conservatives warned them that the acceptance of marital contraception logically entailed the acceptance of sodomy.  The conservatives lost, and so now the Church of England even permits its bishops to live in sodomitic relationships.

Your express great concern over population.  These fears have been part of the public square ever since Thomas Malthus, an economist and Anglican minister, expressed his dire warnings in 1798.  His remedy was complete abstinence once a couple had reached its desired family size.  Just a few years later, the neo-Malthusians dropped the moral convictions of Malthus and recommended contraception.

Some sociologists emphasize two things in reducing the birth rate in any given culture.  First, provide good health care and medical care so that couples do not have to have a large number of babies to insure the survival of just a few.  Second, a rising material standard of living tends to reduce family size.  They look at the West and see these factors as important in declining populations in the West.  I understand that almost every non-Muslim European country has a birth rate below replacement level.

My concern is with the individual family.  We have developed a natural family planning program that addresses the key issues.

John Kippley’s letter continues next week.  Thanks for reading and please come back.

Some of the stuff that happened in the summer and fall of 1968 was just ridiculous.  We were living in Regina, Saskatchewan, and I was selected to present the pro-HV side of a debate about Humanae Vitae.  The organizers couldn’t find a priest in the area willing to publicly support the encyclical!  My opponent’s argument was that she was a loving person by nature and therefore her acts were acts of love.  It was immediately clear to me that she was claiming a divine attribute.  There are, after all, only three persons in this universe who are loving by nature, and their names are Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Out of false kindness, I refrained from pointing out the absurdity of her claim, and I have regretted it ever since.

At any rate, I wrote a book to defend the teaching and to show the errors of the dissenters. (Now expanded as Sex and the Marriage Covenant, 2005.)  When it was published in early 1970, from somewhere in the depths of memory, the words of Jesus in Luke 11:46 hit me very hard.  Jesus was criticizing the doctors of the Law for laying burdens on men’s backs but not doing anything to lift the burden.  I had done my best to affirm what so many were calling a huge burden, so what was I going to do to help lift the burden?

In 1970, my wife had already researched and published a book titled Breastfeeding and Natural Child Spacing.  So we knew that the right pattern of breastfeeding could space babies, but there was a lot that we didn’t know as well, so she surveyed breastfeeding mothers and published the results in a nursing journal in 1972 (at website).   Her research showed that mothers who followed the pattern of frequent nursing that we call Ecological Breastfeeding experience, on average, their first postpartum period between 14 and 15 months postpartum.  At the same time we became aware of the calendar-temperature system as presented by Dr. Konald A. Prem, then a full professor of OB and Gyn at the University of Minnesota Medical School.  We met with him and started an organization to provide a three-fold support:  Ecological Breastfeeding, the cross-checking Sympto-Thermal Method of natural family planning (NFP), and a theology based on the marriage covenant.  We call this the Triple Strand approach to NFP.  How I wish that you and your spouse had been able to have this sort of support.  How much I wish I had been able to offer this support when I was a lay evangelist at St. Clare’s.

John Kippley’s letter continues next week.  Thanks for reading and please come back.

John’s recent letter to a man who does not accept Humanae Vitae follows.  The letter (November 2016) will appear in 4 parts.
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Thanks for including me among the recipients of your letter to signers of a letter of support for Humanae Vitae.  As I read your background, I was struck by how much we have in common.  Born also in 1930, I earned my BA in philosophy in 1952 and stayed in the seminary for one year of theology.  Then I did a drafted stint in the Army, having a great time, especially at Fr. Lewis.  Did an MA in Industrial Relations and kicked around the business world for a few years before getting back to theology.  While working as a lay evangelist in Santa Clara and East Palo Alto starting in 1963, I listened to a talk by Michael Novak one Saturday morning in a church in Palo Alto where he was working on his Ph.D at Stanford.  I found his approach so unacceptable that I wrote my first article in support of the received tradition; it was published exactly 15 months to the day before Humanae Vitae—“Holy Communion: Eucharistic and Marital.”

The only surprising thing about that encyclical was that Pope Paul VI failed to mention the acceptance of sodomy in section 17 when he correctly prophesied a number of negative effects following the widespread acceptance of marital contraception.

I also share your frustration with the bishops as a whole.  You criticize them for supporting Humanae Vitae; my criticism is that as a whole they do not take it seriously enough and certainly do not do enough to provide the right kind of support, both practical and theological.

I appreciate your personal situation perhaps more than you might have guessed before sending me your letter.  I recall a young mother of a relatively large family.  She was only 30 and had obvious varicose veins.  She wondered what they could do about birth spacing and/or limitation.  At that point, I didn’t know much about natural family planning, only that our landlord had told me that he and his wife had practiced the OK (Ogino Knaus) method with 100% success during their fertile years in the Thirties, having only three children.  But I didn’t know about the calendar-temperature system that was highly effective but rarely known.  I mumbled something about calendar rhythm but was unable to provide practical help.

Where we separate in our thinking has to do with matters of truth and practical help.  For me, the big question about Humanae Vitae when it was issued was, “Is it true?” That leads to questions about why we should believe it is true.  In turn, that leads to questions about the credibility of the arguments of those who argued for the acceptance of marital contraception.  I read those arguments, and they have nothing to do with Christian discipleship.  They are essentially utilitarian.  The so-called Majority Report certainly can’t say NO to sodomy.  In fact, as I read their report, I thought Pope Paul VI should have taken about one week to digest it, then waited one more week to cool down, and then he should have announced to the world that the reasoning of the pro-contraceptive side in accepting contraception also logically accepted any other sort of sexual union that was a matter of mutual consent.

John Kippley’s letter continues next week.  Thanks for reading and please come back.