Natural Family Planning International

Church Teaching on NFP
What is the most difficult apostolate in the Catholic Church?  The effort to teach chaste natural family planning is the most difficult apostolate in the Church because it defends and supports the teaching affirmed by Humanae Vitae, and no other moral teaching has been so widely attacked and/or ignored right within the Church by both clergy and laity.

This rejection has had disastrous results.  The 2010 version of the periodic NIH Family Growth Survey indicates that only one-tenth of one percent of the survey responders use some form of NFP.  Among Catholic responders, the overall figure was two-tenths of one percent, and among regular church-going Catholics the percentage was still only four-tenths of one percent.  There is a problem with these numbers because they do not include women who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or just letting the babies come as they may, but even after making all sorts of allowances for errors, there is no reason to think that over five percent of Western fertile-age couples are living according to the teaching of the Church.  Considering the ubiquity of International Planned Parenthood, the figures are probably not much better in less developed countries.

The effort of the NFP International apostolate is even more difficult because this apostolate also promotes ecological breastfeeding.

Third, the NFPI apostolate sometimes meets additional difficulties because we teach marital chastity.  That is, we know that some or many married couples will be tempted to engage in masturbation or marital sodomy during the fertile time, so we pass on the traditional Christian teaching against these sinful behaviors.  This is certainly not our favorite subject, but in today’s culture, these things need to be said.  Fortunately, it takes us only about a minute or less to say what has to be said.

If you want the double satisfaction of working to meet a challenge and then knowing that you have helped some other couples in this extremely important area of life, consider teaching NFP with us.

If interested in teaching for NFPI, please read our teaching manual on the home page, Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach.  After completing the reading, we hope you are even more excited about teaching with us and will get in touch with us.  You can contact us by email at our website.

John and Sheila Kippley

The Triple Strand During the Early Years
When we began to teach NFP in the late Sixties, we wanted to teach couples how they could enjoy a natural spacing of babies through ecological breastfeeding.  We had done the research, and would publish it in early 1972.  We knew that mothers who breastfed according to what we now call the Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding would experience, on the average, 14 to 15 months of breastfeeding amenorrhea (the absence of menstruation due to breastfeeding).  In 1971 this knowledge was even rarer than it is today.  Every couple deserves to know this information about the way God has made woman.

We wanted to teach couples how to practice a form of systematic NFP—the Sympto-Thermal Method—as taught by Dr. Konald A. Prem and others.  This was intended to help couples who truly had sufficiently serious reasons to postpone their next pregnancy or to limit the expansion of their families.  Every couple deserves to know this information about how God has made woman with identifiable fertile and infertile times of her menstrual cycle.

We wanted to support the teaching of Humanae Vitae, and we wanted to do so in a way that is simple and easy to grasp.  That’s why we incorporated into our NFP course from the very beginning the easy-to-understand covenant theology of sexuality.  Its primary statement consists of 17 words:  “Sexual intercourse is intended by God to be at least implicitly a renewal of the marriage covenant.” I had first stated that in my 1967 article, “Holy Communion: Eucharistic and Marital,” and we knew from experience that it helps people to understand why Pope Paul VI taught that marital contraception is “intrinsically dishonest” (HV 14).  It was and remains today a basic and simple “theology of the body.”  Everybody deserves to know this basic information about God’s plan for love, marriage, and sexuality.

These three subjects—ecological breastfeeding as a form of NFP, the Sympto-Thermal Method as the most complete form of systematic NFP, and the covenant theology to support Humanae Vitae—constituted the Triple Strand Approach to natural family planning.  These are the principle charisms we brought to the natural family planning movement.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant
Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach