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.