Natural Family Planning International

My request for your prayers for the NFPI apostolate is not just pious window dressing for a fund appeal.  The battle is spiritual.  Bishops and priests have been either misled or cowed into ignoring the elephant in the sanctuary.  Please pray for them generically and by name.  If you have a speaking relationship with them, ask them to make the NFPI course part of their New Evangelization effort.  Pray for them to call or write us.  We provide an excellent service, but the bishops and their priests have to create the demand.  In any diocese, the judicious use of the NFPI Home Study program could make our service immediately available to every parish no matter how remote. And, of course, I would be most happy to share our goals and efforts with seminarians.

I am sure that many of you realize that what NFPI really needs is someone younger to take over its leadership.  To accomplish that, we need to raise our level of funding enough to fund a small staff plus office and travel expenses.  So Sheila and I ask your prayers for the wisdom & prudence and the manpower & the money to make NFPI a long term service to our Church and culture.  Please include these needs of NFPI in your Mass and Rosary intentions.

Activity
Is there anything else you can do?  Here’s a short list.  Perhaps you could become NFP teachers with us if your pastor will make the course a normal part of preparation for marriage. . .  We want to advertise the Home Study Course, and we could use your help.  Can you suggest any magazines that are read by young people? . . . Perhaps you could sign up for Google Alerts on Natural Family Planning or Ecological Breastfeeding, and then provide informed commentary. . . . Also, become familiar with the NFPI website and the many articles posted there including several dealing with the sexual revolution.  These might be helpful in your discussions with others or letter writing.  There’s also a recent article on NFP as an agent of evangelization, and there will be more.

Financial Support
Please support NFP International.  It very definitely IS an agent of the New Evangelization—just read or reread Chapter 1 of our users manual, Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach.  Admittedly, NFPI is very small but we are making a difference here and around the world.  In our fiscal year ending September 30, we had 4,644 registrations to download the NFPI manual.  Of those, 4097 were from the States, and 547 were from 102 different countries around the world.  That’s an average of 387 per month, and tabulating the day’s registrations is frequently the bright spot of my NFPI day.

A major donor is eager to match all gifts received during the month of December up to a total of $10,000.  So please take advantage of stretching the power of your donation.  Thanks very much for whatever you can do.

In His service,
John F. Kippley
President
NFP International is a 501-c-3 non-profit charity.  All gifts are tax deductible.

Last month John and I received a retirement letter from Ann and K.L. Berry.  They had taken a sabbatical and after much contemplation decided with heavy hearts to retire from teaching NFP.  They started Lamaze couple-to-couple teaching in the spring of 1971 that culminated in the 1980s with childbirth preparation and labor coaching for unwed mothers. In 1986 they became CCL teachers and then became NFPI teachers in the fall of 2007.  Over the 40 years they have taught almost 4000 couples.  While many NFP teachers only offer 2 to 3 NFP courses a year, Ann and K.L. Berry taught 8 NFP courses each year and loved it!

The Berrys realize how important teaching NFP is for the Church.  As they said: “While natural family planning is largely given only lip service from the Catholic pulpit, it is perhaps the most essential, most fundamental aspect of right-to-life and the marriage covenant.”

We thank them for their service to the Church in the Denver archdiocese.  K.L. was especially helpful to us in the formation of NFPI with regard to the design of the logo, graphics, letterhead, etc.  We are so grateful for their support of NFPI.  The Berrys believed “that the course CCL had taught for over 30 years remains essentially valid and vital.”  When CCL changed, the Berrys continued to teach the original Triple Strand by joining NFPI.

In their 2007 analysis of the evaluations from 500 engaged couples who were required to be at a full NFP course, Ann and K.L. concluded the following for the archdiocese of Denver:
•  Virtually all couples understand and can use the Sympto-Thermal Method.
•  Many engaged women have begun Sympto-Thermal charting.
•  Some of the many cohabitating engaged couples cease pre-marital sexual relations, apparently embracing the courses’s Sex and the Marriage Covenant theology.
•  Most couples express very positive regard for the class on natural mothering and ecological breastfeeding—the world’s oldest form of natural child spacing.

Ann and K.L., You will be missed!  God bless you and yours.  John and Sheila

Battle-Scarred: Justice Can Be Elusive by John F. Kippley
Why did Macleans magazine write a page-one article titled “Why do they want to drive John Kippley out of Saskatchewan?”  Learn the history of the NFP movement and the dissent history of Humanae Vitae from the years 1963-2010.  What mistakes did John make?  What advice does he give?  Why did my husband and I begin a new NFP organization in the fall of 2004? Get a copy and enjoy.

Sheila Kippley