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John’s Introduction II

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

“In my 30 years in Brazil, I saw many promising apostolates rise and then fall as they abandoned the charisms of their founders.”—Bishop Karl Jozef Romer, Pontifical Council for the Family, 2002 CCL Convention.

Why bother?

It has certainly occurred to me that certain parties may be thinking, “Why are the Kippleys wasting their time on these blogs? Don’t they know that people think they are stupid for doing this or think their whole effort is just a case of sour grapes? Do they really think they can accomplish anything? Don’t they realize they are beating a dead horse in thinking or even hoping that the current CCL management might return to the classic content of the Triple Strand approach to NFP?

Well, yes, we realize that some or many people think this way. First, at this stage in my life I don’t care what people think of me. I have no ambitions that will be affected by adverse opinions. Yes, I do have a few ambitions. I would really like to be able to make good contact with a golf ball, consistently, but if someone thinks I’m crazy for spending time at the keyboard instead of at the course, such negative thinking won’t affect my strokes–either way.

Second, I have been appalled by a few responses that reflect a total absence of critical thinking. What we have witnessed in the CCL campaign to sell the revised program is a classic advertising campaign that uses the common technique of glittering generalities. “Streamlined.” “Up to date.” “Easier to use.” “Easier to teach.” These are all attractive terms, but what is lacking is an adequate explanation about what is behind the language. For example, which is easier to use, a system that offers the earliest possible start of Phase Three (postovulation infertility) consistent with the available evidence or one that requires a later start? Remember, waiting one more day sometimes means waiting a week or more when one of the spouses travels. More on this later.

Third, sometimes when you see something that appears wrong, you simply feel called to do what you can. One day before we were married, Sheila and I were driving on a side street in San Francisco and we noticed a young woman running from a man. It looked bad. So I jumped out of the car to intervene. I was fortunate that time because the gal told me not to worry. Maybe she liked being chased across one front lawn after another. A few years later I read in the newspapers about the local firefighters union president who had been suspended by the safety director of our town for using language that the safety director thought was inappropriate. So I phoned the guy and found out the situation was even worse than the paper reported. This was in Kansas, the great state in which the legislature had recently passed a pro-abortion law that allowed abortion for any reason whatsoever right up to birth. This was the state in which you could not get a glass of wine or a bottle of beer with your dinner in ordinary restaurants but in which you could become a “member” of other restaurants–I think it was $1.00 for an evening’s membership–and get drunk as a skunk. But this was also a state that in 1969 did not require municipalities to recognize labor unions as official bargaining agents. So when the union president was talking tough in support of his men, the safety director could and did regard it as deserving suspension.

I was teaching a college course on Catholic social thought, and perhaps that made me a bit more sensitive to this injustice. At any rate, I told my class that I would be making a few remarks at the city council meeting one afternoon, and at least one of my students came down for the show. I wish I could find the photo that appeared in the paper, and I wish I knew how to get it into this blog, but you will have to use your imagination. They caught me with my mouth open and my finger pointing. It was upsetting to the council members. The next year the college had a new president, and at his first meeting with some council members to assess community support for the college, the first question was, “When are you going to get rid of the ‘perfesser’?” as they called me. Did any good come of it? The firefighter was not immediately reinstated, but he and his wife told me that it really bolstered the morale of the entire department to have a college teacher going to bat for them. A student at the meeting told me it really reaffirmed his faith to see someone confront the council with Catholic social teaching. Anything else? Well, the president reluctantly got rid of me as part of a massive layoff, and that brought me to the Twin Cities where we teamed up with Dr. Konald Prem. Later, the college went under.

Probably the most stupid thing I’ve done from a practical and career perspective was to write my defense and explanation of Humanae Vitae that was published by Alba House in 1970 as Covenant, Christ and Contraception. Today, you cannot imagine the anti-Humanae Vitae atmostphere in the the Church back in 1968-1969. I knew full well that once it was published I would never get a teaching job in a Catholic college except in the smallest and most obscure. I wrote the book not with any hopes of changing things but in the hopes that some future historians might find the book and realize that not everyone had gone along with the massive dissent of the day. There are some things you do because they have to be done.

So, to our friends I say, don’t feel sorry for us. To our enemies and to those in the middle, start to exercise your powers of critical thinking.

To all I express my hope that the Lord will make some good use of these efforts.

John F. Kippley
NFP International
www.nfpandmore.org
Author: Sex and the Marriage Covenant (Ignatius)
Co-author: Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book
(e-book at this website, 2005)

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John’s Introduction

Sunday, June 10th, 2007

“In my 30 years in Brazil, I saw many promising apostolates rise and then fall as they abandoned the charisms of their founders.”—Bishop Karl Jozef Romer, Pontifical Council for the Family, 2002 CCL Convention.

Greetings from JFK.

Along with my wife, Sheila, I am a co-founder of the Couple to Couple League (CCL) for natural family planning. Thus, I am still interested in what CCL does even though I am not longer associated with it.

My interest in natural family planning stems largely from my interest in the Faith and theology. I entered a minor seminary right out of high school, and I struggled the last two years of college with philosophy. I still have unpleasant memories of a two-year history of philosopy course that seemed to me like memorizing nonsense sylables. That is, through faith we know the Creator of the universe and what is important in life, and the efforts of some non-Christians in the Middle Ages to explain the universe without reference to the God of revelation seemed futile at best. I stayed in the seminary for a fifth year called First Theology, and that greatly piqued my interest. At the end of that year, however, my spiritual director and I decided that I did not have a calling to the priesthood. I remain grateful to God for those five years and have felt privileged to attend some of the class reunions in recent years.

I enrolled in the Institute of Lay Theology for the academic year, 1962-1963. Sheila and I were married near the end of the school year, and we embarked on a parish outreach to the uncommitted, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, shortly thereafter. Since we were close to the University of San Francisco, I was able to pursue an M.A. in theology.

My primary parish responsibility was twofold: 1) conducting a regular course on the Catholic Faith, from Creation to the the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick and 2) promoting attendance at the courses. It was a challenging time in which to present Catholic teaching on love, marriage and sexuality, including the teaching against all unnatural forms of birth control. We were not educated on modern systems of natural family planning, and it took us at least a couple years to learn about what we came to call ecological breastfeeding. It was not unusual to hear of other men in my position working up theories to fit in with the increasingly contraceptive culture within the Church, especially among liberal priests, teachers, and theologians, to say nothing of the secular culture. Sheila and I were blessed with the friendship and theological support of Howard and Mary Riordan who were well grounded in the faith; Howard had a real talent for presenting the Faith in its beauty and relevance.

Somehow, I began to support the anti-contraception teaching of the Church with what we now call the Covenant Theology of Human Sexuality. On a Saturday morning early in 1966, I attended a lecture by a man who became a leader in the dissent movement soon after Humanae Vitae in mid-1968. That Saturday morning made it clear that the dissent movement was well under way in the mid-Sixties. I thought the speaker was undermining the teaching of the Church, and I was sufficiently angry to spend the rest of that day and a good portion of Sunday writing a theological essay that compared the conditions for the worthy reception of the Eucharist with the worthy engagement in the marriage act. It was published as “Holy Communion: Eucharistic and Marital” in Ave Maria magazine (Feb 25, 1967), now the fourth chapter in Sex and the Marriage Covenant.

Fifteen months later, on July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical, Humanae Vitae. I breathed a sigh of relief, but then had to deal with the dissent movement organized and widely promoted by Fr. Charles Curran and a few of his cohorts. I had read the reports of the papal birth control commission that were leaked and published in mid-1967 or so, and it was clear that the intellectual acceptance of one unnatural method of birth control logically entailed the acceptance of any and all unnatural methods of birth control, aside from abortion, but including marital sodomy. Despite whatever big words or convoluted sentences or specious arguments were used, the dissenters basically were saying one thing: To follow the teaching of the Catholic Church regarding birth control is a cross for many married couples, and couples today should not be burdened with Christ’s doctrine of the daily cross regarding love, sexuality and marriage.

I thought that such a rejection of basic Christian teaching was not only unchristian but stupid. I mean, if a couple reject Christian teaching that calls for sexual self-control for themselves, how do they transmit to their children, without being hypocrites, the Christian teaching that calls for sexual self-control by their children?

At any rate, I took pen in hand and wrote a book to defend the teaching of Humanae Vitae with the covenant theology of sexuality which can be summarized in 17 words that are easy to understand and remember. “Sexual intercourse is intended by God to be at least implicitly a renewal of the marriage covenant.” I will say more about it in future blogs.

The book was published in 1970 by Alba House as Covenant, Christ and Contraception. Once it was published, I felt obliged to do what I could to provide the practical help of natural family planning. Sheila and I made a fruitless effort to start an organization in the summer of 1970, but the attendees were “closet NFPers.” Yes, some of them were afraid they would lose friends if it became public knowledge that they believed and lived by the teaching of Humanae Vitae. A year later we met Dr. Konald Prem, and he agreed to help. In the fall of 1971 we formed the Couple to Couple League in the parish where I was working, and that effort bore fruit.

John F. Kippley
NFP International
www.nfpandmore.org
Author: Sex and the Marriage Covenant (Ignatius)
Co-author: Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book
(e-book at this website, 2005)

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Ecological Breastfeeding: Clarification Needed

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

“In my 30 years in Brazil, I saw many promising apostolates rise and then fall as they abandoned the charisms of their founders.”—Bishop Karl Jozef Romer, Pontifical Council for the Family, 2002 CCL Convention.
___________________________

Need for a news release by CCL on the breastfeeding
Some might wonder why I have blogged about eco-breastfeeding and the possibility that CCL will drop this teaching. The purpose of this blog is to illustrate how important the teaching of eco-breastfeeding has been over the years with CCL. If CCL is dropping this teaching, then I believe CCL should issue a news release about this major change. CCL had two news releases about incorporating the Theology of the Body throughout their teaching, and one of their news releases dealt with the changes in the teaching of the sympto-thermal method. Certainly the changes that seem to be occurring with eco-breastfeeding require a news release by CCL.

The teaching of the Seven Standards or ecological breastfeeding has been a major part of the teaching in the regular series of CCL classes since 1971. To drop this teaching or to replace it with something else is newsworthy. Catholics and former CCL attendees should know that the CCL teaching in this area is now different. The teaching we brought to CCL has changed with respect to the “triple strand,” and the most drastic change appears to be the elimination of the teaching of the Seven Standards of eco-breastfeeding during the regular series of CCL classes.

The teaching of ecological breastfeeding in 1971 was similar to what it is today. We did research prior to 1971 (the beginning year of CCL) on the standards listed below, and this study resulted in a 1972 publication in a scientific journal. As you will see below, the criteria for this research on ecological breastfeeding or natural mothering were quite similar to what we teach today at the NFP International website. The criteria listed in the 1972 published research were these:
No pacifiers used
No bottles used
No solids or liquids for 5 months
No feeding schedules other than baby’s
Presence of night-feedings
Presence of lying-down nursing (naps, night-feedings)

To see how ecological breastfeeding (EBF) and the “triple strand” are important parts of CCL, I went to the CCL website on April 28-29, 2007 and looked for these two concepts. The message at the website is certainly different from the messages I have been hearing from others and have reported in my recent blogs. As you will see, CCL needs to update its website.

_______________

What follows is what I found at the CCL website on April 28-29, 2007. I have added the boldface emphasis.

“NFP…can also refer to the spacing of pregnancies through Ecological Breastfeeding.”

“Regarding the effectiveness of ecological breastfeeding, it provides an average of 14 to 15 months of postpartum infertility for those women who follow its guidelines.” [more info on EBF followed]

“CCL teaches two basic forms of Natural Family Planning (NFP) — Sympto-Thermal Method and Ecological Breastfeeding. …Ecological breastfeeding is actually the world’s oldest form of NFP.” [more on EBF followed]

“Ecological Breastfeeding is a type of nursing that respects and follows the natural order…It is actually the world’s oldest form of family planning because by providing her baby nourishment and nurturing according to the standards of Ecological Breastfeeding, a mother will almost always experience an extended time of infertility following childbirth.”

“Over the years at CCL we have found that teaching about Ecological Breastfeeding has been the most appreciated aspect of our classes. Many women tell us that they find Ecological Breastfeeding to be truly life-enhancing.”

“The League also teaches the world’s oldest form of natural child spacing — ecological breastfeeding. This is a form of breastfeeding that typically provides over a year of natural infertility after childbirth.”

“A Lesson Learned” expresses one mom’s gratitude for learning about ecological breastfeeding and child-centered mothering.

The following are excerpts from CCL’s official CCL documents, Bylaws and Constitution, both dated July 10, 2005 (not quite two years old).

BYLAWS

“The mission of the Couple to Couple League and the Foundation for the Family is…to teach ecological breastfeeding and encourage its use.”

“Permanent employees of CCLI, both full-time and part-time, shall be fully able and willing to publicly uphold and promote all aspects of the fundamentals of CCLI including its religious and moral teachings, the science and the practice of the sympto-thermal method of NFP, ecological breastfeeding, and the CCL Statement of Principles.”

“All CCL courses will introduce ecological breastfeeding..”

“Promoters who make public presentations and Teachers must fully approve the triple strand of the CCL approach to NFP education. This triple strand includes the STM, ecological breastfeeding and morality education.”

“Teachers, Public Promoters, and CCL staff counselors who have yet to experience childbirth and ecological breastfeeding or are beyond the childbearing years must fully approve of and promote the triple strand of the CCL approach to NFP education.”

“As such, a Teacher or Public Promoter who is a mother will normally breastfeed her baby during the first six months of life by providing 100% nourishment from her breasts, day and night, according to the demands of her baby. Once the baby begins solids, mothers normally continue to let the baby nurse as often as baby wants until baby-led weaning occurs.”

“The magazine, in-house publications and brochures published by CCLI shall focus primarily on the subjects of CCL’s triple-strand approach to NFP.”

CONSTITUTION

“Clarifying the League’s principle on ecological breastfeeding. (Appendix 1)”

“To teach the techniques of ecological breastfeeding and encourage its use.”

“To train couples to teach the CCL triple-strand program of instruction. (See Article XI)”

“To carry on an active program of teaching and counseling married and engaged couples in fertility awareness, its virtuous application within marriage and the techniques of ecological breastfeeding.”

“CCL…teaches the techniques of ecological breastfeeding and encourages its use.”

“Teachers and promoters must support and promote the concepts of mother-baby togetherness and ecological breastfeeding. Teachers are expected to practice ecological breastfeeding unless there is a serious reason that makes this impossible.”

“Permanent employees of CCLI, both full-time and part-time, shall be fully able and willing to publicly uphold and promote all aspects of the fundamentals of CCLI including its religious and moral teachings, the science and the practice of the sympto-thermal of NFP, ecological breastfeeding, and the CCL Statement of Principles.”

“Therefore it has adopted the Triple Strand approach to teaching natural family planning.”

“In its Triple Strand program of NFP education, the CCLI shall teach ecological breastfeeding,[etc.].”

“Ecological breastfeeding can be an appropriate exercise of responsible parenthood; it is not just a child-spacing technique.”

CCL PRESS RELEASES

March 10, 2005: “CCL Teaching Couple Richard and Vicki Braun explained the Sympto-Thermal Method as taught by CCL, the moral aspects of NFP, and the role of ecological breastfeeding in family spacing.”

March 31, 2005: “CCLI remains committed to its “triple strand” educational approach, which combines the Sympto-Thermal Method of NFP, moral theology as it applies to marital intimacy, and the importance of ecological breastfeeding and its effect on the natural spacing of children.” [The main purpose of the release was to announce the incorporation of the Theology of the Body “throughout all of CCLI’s teaching materials and the organization’s affairs.”]

October 17, 2005: [announcement again on CCL’s teaching reflecting “the theological thought of Pope John Paul II” plus the new retooled version of the STM. Nothing was said about breastfeeding in this news release. If CCL can have a news release in March and October 2005 on the changes in two parts of the “Triple Strand,” why not a news release on the changes in the third part of the “Triple Strand?”]

Also found at the CCL website was my “Summary of Ecological Breastfeeding and Natural Child Spacing Program.” A similar summary is found in the original mimeograph first edition of The Art of Natural Family Planning. The brochure “Breastfeeding: Does It Really Space Babies” which John wrote for CCL is still at the CCL website. Both items have much to say about ecological breastfeeding.

As of May 28, 2007, in its website capital campaign promotion, CCL continues to promise several times the promotion of ecological breastfeeding.
______________

From Sheila:
Eco-breastfeeding has been a major teaching in the CCL’s “triple strand” approach to NFP. Is CCL going to promote this teaching in their new main NFP program? From what I hear, it’s not likely.

If CCL plans to drop the teaching of ecological breastfeeding, I would ask the members of the CCL Board to reconsider their decision on this. If, however, CCL does not teach the Seven Standards of eco-breastfeeding in its regular series of classes, then I recommend the following: 1) CCL should make the necessary changes at their website; 2) CCL should produce a news release to inform people of the breastfeeding changes. And 3) CCL should explain why it continues to promote ecological breastfeeding in its capital campaign drive and at their website, especially the by-laws and constitution, if, in fact, that’s not the case. For example, what happened since July 2005 (date of the CCL by-laws and constitution and since early 2006 (date that the promotional capital campaign brochure was sent) to the present day in 2007 that caused CCL to change its teaching?

The Sin of Onan
My husband’s article on that subject was published in the May 2007 issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review. It is now available at our website. The unnamed priest in the article is Fr. Richard Hogan, a member of the CCL Board of Directors.

New Blogger: You will soon be hearing from John in these blogs. I plan to return during World Breastfeeding Week, August 1-7, for daily blogging on the merits of breastfeeding, including the theme for this year: the importance of breastfeeding during the first hour after birth.

An appeal for donations: This is our 9th week of blogging without a “commercial.” We have helped many couples and are now asking for help in our current mission. The mission of NFP International is to promote and teach Natural Family Planning here in the United States as well as in other countries. We teach ecological breastfeeding, systematic NFP, marital chastity, and the call to generosity in having children and raising them in the ways of the Lord. A secondary mission is to uphold traditional Christian teaching about love, marriage and sexuality and to provide materials that people can use to improve their spiritual lives. We also support the NFP apostolate over in Slovakia and in Georgia. Interestingly, the folks in Georgia were trained in the CCL method and later a bishop had the CCL teachers trained in the Roetzer method. The CCl teachers in Georgia, however, prefer the CCL method and want Jozef Predac of Slovakia and David Prentis of Czech Republic to give assistance in teacher training so they can train others in the “old” CCL method.

CCL has assisted other countries for years but in 2005 CCL decided to help only those who were teaching their program in English or Spanish. Thus funding was cut to Slovakia. Jozef and his wife have five young children and Jozef desires to remain in the NFP apostolate. NFP International provides his salary from donations. David Prentis is living off his retirement pensions and works as a volunteer, but Jozef needs a salary to support his family. Jozef sends NFPI a quarterly report of his activites. Some of his work is listed at International Mission at the NFPI website. If you can, please send a donation to:

NFPI at P.O. Box 11216; Cincinnati OH 45211.

We will greatly appreciate your help.

Sheila Kippley
NFP International
www.nfpandmore.org
Author: Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood (Sophia, 2005)
Natural Family Planning: Question-Answer Book (e-book
at this website, 2005)

Posted in CCL, Ecological Breastfeeding | 1 Comment »

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