“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)