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