John’s response to a petition in support of Humanae Vitae:
John F. Kippley
President
Natural Family Planning International, Inc.
MA Theology, MAT Applied theology, MA Industrial Relations
Honorary Dr. of Ethics from Franciscan University of Steubenville, 2008
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius, 2005)
I also want to register my disappointment that the practical support to live the teachings of Humanae Vitae referenced only the fertility awareness based methods (FABM) and made no mention of Ecological Breastfeeding. It was the abandonment of breastfeeding in general and especially of the frequent suckling pattern of the Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding that led to the phenomenon of having two babies in 12 calendar months. That in turn led to a sort of panic and resort to unnatural forms of birth control. Every year new benefits of breastfeeding are published, but the Catholic Church is doing almost nothing to make ordinary Catholics, even those attending FABM classes, aware of these benefits. That simply must change.
I also think that more attention should be paid the concept of the marriage act as a renewal of the marriage covenant. It is my understanding that I am the first to introduce this concept in writing among Catholic writers (1967), and that gives it absolutely no theological legs, so to speak. However, in his 1994 Letter to Families, St. John Paul II used this phrase, and that makes a difference. It is terminology that he did not use in his magisterial Theology of the Body.
John F. Kippley