Natural Family Planning International

I want to draw attention to two points in section 11 of Humanae Vitae, so here’s the text from the Vatican.va website.  The translation is slightly different from the one published in 1968.

11. The sexual activity, in which husband and wife are intimately and chastely united with one another, through which human life is transmitted, is, as the recent Council recalled, “noble and worthy.” (11) It does not, moreover, cease to be legitimate even when, for reasons independent of their will, it is foreseen to be infertile. For its natural adaptation to the expression and strengthening of the union of husband and wife is not thereby suppressed. The fact is, as experience shows, that new life is not the result of each and every act of sexual intercourse. God has wisely ordered laws of nature and the incidence of fertility in such a way that successive births are already naturally spaced through the inherent operation of these laws. The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life. (12) (Boldface added.)

The first boldfaced sentence clearly refers to the basis of Natural Family Planning.  This natural spacing has two forms.  Readers of this blogsite may be inclined to think first of systematic natural family planning which is based on knowledge of the fertile time of individual cycles.  True enough.  But there is also another natural cycle and spacing—that of Ecological Breastfeeding which is an effort to replicate the pattern of baby care that spaced babies in past centuries but which was lost in the first half of the 20^th century.

The key words in the second boldfaced are each and every marital act. 

As we will see in Section 14, the pro-contraception party wanted the Pope to accept a big-picture morality in which contraceptive acts would take their morality from the non-contraceptive act.  More on that in the next blog in this weeklong series.  The “each and every” terminology is part of his response to that argument.

Tomorrow: a close look at Humanae Vitae, section #13.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 24th, 2019 at 2:00 am and is filed under NFP, NFP Week 2019, Priests & Parishes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.