|
What exactly is NFP? Isn’t it just Catholic birth control? Does it actually work? Come to the Natural Family Planning Wine and Cheese Evening on Saturday, February 20th at 7pm in the Fr. Burak room and find out! Let me try to hit a few basic points to excite your interest. NFP is Natural Family Planning. It is the way for married couples to plan their families, yet respect God’s plan and intention for marriage and sex. It is not simply Catholic birth control, because it’s a whole different way of thinking and acting than what our society refers to as birth control or contraception (sterilization, the pill, condoms, etc). NFP instead involves observing the signs and symptoms of fertile and infertile phases of a women’s cycle. The two ways, NFP and contraception, might produce the same results in terms of limiting or spacing births, but they use radically different means. That makes all the difference because NFP is moral and contraception is immoral. Let me explain. One of the promises made in the rite of Marriage is, “Will you accept children lovingly from God…?” Marriage is naturally ordered by God for the couple to grow in love and bring new life to the world. Sex is the sacred sign of marriage. It is where everything the marriage is about comes together: love, unity, total giving, and openness to new life. Once you take one of those things out of the marriage, you are on dangerous ground, and so too with sex. Contraception does exactly that by removing all openness to life. It is a redefining of marriage and sex from God’s plan to our own plan. Never a good idea, because God’s plans are always better than the best of our own plans! In fact, our own plans can be downright sinful. NFP on the other hand does not remove the openness to life but cooperates with God’s plan in a way that keeps sex sacred. A big problem in our society is that we’ve lost our sense of the sacred and of how truly good things can be and we’ve settled for something far less. If this intrigues you, please check out NFP. It’s never too late to change. The Lord is always drawing us nearer to Himself, and that always requires conversion and a change in action and attitude. And yes, NFP does work; it is 99% effective when practiced correctly to space and limit births, plus it also can be very effective the other way in helping achieve pregnancy too. Don’t be afraid, check out the NFP night here to find out more exactly what it’s all about. -Fr. Greg If you would like submit a question, please write it out and place it in the “Ask a Priest” box in the vestibule or email me at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
. |
