Natural Family Planning International

The Plan

In 1989 the NCCB Bishops’ Committee for Pastoral Research and Practices strongly urged that all engaged couples should be required to take a full course on Natural Family Planning as a normal part of preparation for marriage. They noted that engaged couples have a need and right to know this information.

Vision Now + 20 is a PLAN to implement this recommendation. Vision Now + 20 looks forward to the day when every priest, supported by professionally trained volunteer married couples, requires a full course of instruction on NFP taught in the context of marital chastity and generosity in the service of life.

In the United States each year, approximately 165,000 Catholic couples enter Christian marriage. (2013: 163,976, OCD; 2000: about 275,000) A national network of NFPI-trained volunteer Teaching Couples will have the capacity to teach every Catholic engaged couple how to practice chaste and generous Natural Family Planning. Each Teaching Couple can teach 35 to 50 such student couples; thus a combination of geography and numbers will require a network of approximately 5,000 volunteer Teaching Couples to serve 165,000 marriages each year.

How does an organization train 5,000 volunteer Teaching Couples?

That’s precisely what we need to talk about with bishops who share this vision.

Next week:  Translating the Vision Goals into Reality

John F. Kippley (September 2014)

The Organization

In its Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, the Fathers of Vatican Council II described the model lay apostolate.

• It would “encourage a closer harmony between the everyday life of the members and their faith”; such associations “must be given primary consideration” (n. 19).
• In order to meet the needs of cities and rural areas, “laymen should not limit their cooperation to the parochial or diocesan boundaries but strive to extend it to interparochial, interdiocesan, national, and international fields” (n.10).
• “In the present circumstances, it is quite necessary that the united and organized form of the lay apostolate be strengthened” (n.18).
• “Scattering of energies must be avoided” (n. 19).
• “Pastors should welcome the laity who work in this apostolate and should make sure that their situation meets the demands of justice, equity and charity” (n. 22).

In the closing passages of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI endorsed a particular form of teaching natural family planning:  “Among the fruits which ripen forth from a generous effort of fidelity to the divine law, one of the most precious is that married couples themselves not infrequently feel the desire to communicate their experience to others. Thus there comes to be included in the vast pattern of the vocation of the laity a new and most noteworthy form of the apostolate of like to like; it is married couples themselves who become apostles and guides to other married couples. This is assuredly, among so many forms of apostolate, one of those which seem most opportune today” (n. 26).

Natural Family Planning International, Inc. (NFPI) is a fruit of Vatican II and Humanae Vitae.

Next week:  A Plan

John F. Kippley (September 2014)