Natural Family Planning International

Demographics and parish closings. There is no doubt that changing demographic patterns have led to some school and church closings.  There is also little doubt that fear of an influx of black families, especially single-parent families who scrape by to live in Section 8 housing, has led many traditional parishioners to move out of city parishes to the suburbs.  There are other factors at work, but I want to focus for a moment on the influx of black single-parent families.

Nationally, black Americans have a 70% out-of-wedlock birth rate.  In an area such as Over-the-Rhine, the rate is probably closer to 100% than to 95%.  The result is that most of these children are raised without a father in the home.  This has bad effects on their education and their discipline.  Raised without religion and morality, they fill our jails and prisons.  Their actions lead others to feel unsafe around them and to move away.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan drew national attention to the plight of the black family in 1965 when the black illegitimacy rate was 24% and the white illegitimacy rate was about 4%.  The only result was the effort to shower the country with condoms and the pill, and then to make abortion legal in every state without any meaningful restrictions.  As a result, the white out-of-wedlock rate rose about six times to around 25% and the black rate rose about three times to 70% overall.  One definition of insanity is to continue to do the same thing and expect different results.  Our social policy on these matters is absolutely insane.

What can be done? What can be done to get people to accept marital chastity and both kinds of NFP?

Preaching from the pulpit?  It can be done but it is very difficult considering the family makeup of most congregations at Sunday Masses.

Education?  Yes.  Everyone should attend the right kind of NFP course.
Engaged couples.   Baptismal couples.   Parish council members and candidates.  Choir members.   Lectors and distributors.

Value of the right kind of NFP course
–Not Catholic birth control: the call to generosity
–Respect for the way God has made man and woman
–Respect for God’s plan for love, marriage and sexuality. The marriage act is exclusively a marriage act.  Within marriage it ought to be a TRUE marriage act, a renewal of the marriage covenant.
–Respect for Christ and the teaching authority of his Church

So you earnestly pray and then go to your pastor. What will happen?
He might say Yes, and you say Hallelujah and thank him on behalf of all the couples who will be aided by his decision.

Or he might give you the canonical objection.  “We can’t make a requirement that would prevent the couple from exercising their human and canonical right to marry in the Church.”

Response:  Offer the stubborn couple the rectory option.  Which parlor would you like?

Next week:  More reasons to promote NFP

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant

Catholics today and NFP Use

Catholics today are, for the most part, quite thoroughly secularized.  A recent study indicates that less than one percent of church-going Catholics are using any form of NFP.  Actually, it’s worse than one percent.  An analysis of the 2010 periodic NIH Family Growth Survey says that only two-tenths of 1% of self-identified Catholics said they use some form of NFP.  Among church-going Catholics, the figure reported was four-tenths of one percent.  One problem with these figures is that they do not include women who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or just letting the babies come as they made.  But the numbers very strongly suggest that not over five percent of Catholics in their fertile years are living according to the teaching of the Church.

Schools and parishes are closing. A priest of the Diocese of Peoria recently (Fall, 2010) closed his parish school and posted on the parish website that the primary reason for this school closing was the lack of children due to the practice of contraception.  That school was in a small town in eastern Illinois.  It was not affected at all by demographic factors such as the traditional parishioners leaving because of an influx of black largely fatherless families.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant