For an overview of the research study “What Catholic women think about faith. conscience, and contraception“, see my previous post “What the Church needs to know“
Mary Hasson Rice and Michelle M. Hill draw stark, thought-provoking conclusions from their study “What Catholic women think about faith, conscience, and contraception”. The study highlights the underlying problem of the Church’s ‘contraception problem’ – poor conscience formation, as well as identifies an important and often overlooked group within the Church which they term the “soft middle” (Hasson, 19). The study also emphasised the need for practicality – the truth needs to be presented in practical, real-life ways.
Now that the information has been provided, where is the Church to go from here? What needs to be done to reach the “soft middle”, better form consciences, and support those women who already follow Church teaching?
Hasson and Rice suggest that more research needs to be done especially within the Hispanic community and amongst Catholic clergy. Hispanic youth are often recipients of aggressive sexual education – “education” which undermines the faith of their family and so it is vital that Hispanic women are empowered and strengthened by Church teaching so as to better combat the societal pressures they and their children are facing. Since Catholic clergy are hierarchically and socially responsible for upholding Catholic teaching, it is important to understand how (and if!) they present teaching, as well as what they believe they will require to accurately and persuasively express Church teaching.
Catholic women who already understand and follow the Church’s teaching are in an interesting and exciting place. They are the best witnesses the Church could ask for as they are in a unique position in our culture – where the world seems to scream that women are best served by contraception and the likes of Planned Parenthood, these women stand out. They are doing exactly what society claims will make them miserable and proving them wrong. By upholding Church teaching they are shining lights (dare we say, Guiding Stars?) to other women, able to light the way toward greater fulfillment and peace. These Catholic women (who make up 13% of the women Hasson and Rice studied) can address both the consciences of women, as well as provide the practical, nitty-gritty details.
I’m happy to say that the 13% have not been silent. Catholic women have been finding creative, impactful ways of presenting the teachings of the Church to wide audiences since the beginning of the Church. In our time too, women have been reaching out to other women to offer support, encouragement, and knowledge where they would otherwise be alone, torn down and find confusion.
- Kristin, one of our contributors, founded the website Living The Sacrament: A Catholic NFP Community which is a place for Catholic women to go for more information about NFP. Their private forum also fosters that sense of community, where members support one another, ask and answer questions, and can go to find like-minded women.
- Mommy blogs. There are too many to list here, but I think that mommy blogs are a great tool for Catholic mothers. Not just mommy blogs, but Catholic women blogs too. The Bright Maidens are ” from the oft-mentioned, widely-speculated upon demographic of young, twenty-something Catholic women.” They have been known to host blog-link up about topics from NFP to modesty to vocations, all while striving to live authentically Catholic lives. (Ignitum bloggers Elizabeth and Julie are two of the three)
- NFPandMe, Real Catholic Love and Sex, are two blogs written specifically about NFP (Natural Family Planning) and Catholic morality. They are real, honest glimpses into the lives of Catholic men and women trying to abide by Church teaching.
- Leah Jacobson, one of our contributors, founded the Guiding Star Project and is working to “create centers that honor Natural Law and promote New Feminism; Guiding Star Centers to serve as beacons of hope, joy, and truth in a world that often treats women and family as broken and insufficient.”
- I and my friend Katie (from NFPandMe) founded iusenfp.com, a place where women from all walks of life – Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Atheist, whatever – can come to find information about NFP. We want all women to proudly say “I use NFP!”
- 1flesh.org – “A bunch of college students rebelling against the sexual culture” by promoting natural family planning and abstinence while breaking down the myths of contraception and bringing sexy back!
Where did you learn about Natural Family Planning and how/why did you decide to practice it? If you aren’t, what would you need from the Church and the rest of us to consider it?
3 thoughts on “What the Church Needs to Do”
I suppose one could say that NFP brought me to the Church, rather than the other way around. 🙂 The day I learned that birth control pills were potentially abortifacient was the last day I took one. Fortunately, I have a good friend who teaches the Creighton Model System of NFP, so I knew just what my next step was going to be! 🙂 After that, the dominoes all hit the floor, so to speak, and within months, I was welcomed (though not into full communion just yet) with open arms by my local Catholic parish. I’m grateful to be part of a parish where Church teaching is embraced and followed.
I grew up knowing about NFP from my earliest days. I was born into a very orthodox Catholic family and attended a very orthodox small Catholic college. Using contraceptives never even entered my mind, just as bottle-feeding my babies never entered my mind.
It is heartening to see that Catholics are starting to ask women what they actually think, feel, and believe regarding these issues. I also think it is important not to fall into the fallacy of believing the 13% of Catholic women who fully believe the Church’s teaching on NFP are not using contraception of some sort. I fully believe the Church’s teaching, and I had a sterilization a several years ago because after 10 pregnancies in 10 years, my body simply couldn’t sustain the NFP lifestyle any longer. I became so sick with a chronic illness that I literally could barely function to care for our many children (I also experienced several miscarriage–we have six living children and 4 lost babies). Many times we would be abstinent for 6 weeks or so at a time, only to finally believe we were safe, only to end up with a positive pregnancy test several weeks later. We worked closely with several NFP practitioners and several different methods.
I guess I am what people often refer to as one of the “hard cases”. Anyway, I think it is important to realize that even those of us who believe in the Church’s teachings will often fail to live up to it, given the physical, emotional, and psychological stressors that come along with the many pregnancies that can result when you have underlying physical problems and signs that are mysterious to even the NFP practitioners. After all, everybody that fully believes in all the Church’s teachings still regularly fails to live up to them all, every day in fact. It’s called sinning.
It’s also important to realize that just because people have failed to live up to this teaching doesn’t mean they are now going to have horrible marriages or hate NFP and become anti-life. The sweeping ways in which I often see “contraceptors” painted by NFP-promoters are both alienating and quite often blatantly untrue; the general public knows much of it is untrue and simply turns away at that point.
There is a lot to be said for caring for our bodies, and I think NFP/FAM offers much to men and women who are looking for ways to improve their health and be good stewards of the environment. However, I think green only goes so far, and I have noted on forums around the internet that many women who happily practice FAM (in which they use condoms or other barrier methods during the fertile time) to be healthy and take care of the environment also fully plan to be sterilized once they are done having children. FAM seems to work quite well as a child spacer for many women, but it appears many of them are happy to use sterilization once they consider themselves done with their families, out of convenience and a desire for a greater degree of certainty.
Whenever NFP and/or FAM are simply considered alternative methods of birth control, users will evaluate them as they would any other method of birth control, and when the risks outweigh the benefits, they will convert to a method that works better for them.
I’m all for empowering women with knowledge of their bodies. I think quite highly of NFP am very grateful advances have been made in it. I fully plan to teach my daughters about NFP and hope they will have better experiences with it than I did. But I also don’t sit in judgment on anybody who isn’t able to live the NFP lifestyle. It was a huge stressor to us, continues to be a huge stressor on many, many marriages of our friends and families (we were all NFP-promoters way back in the beginning of our marriages, but two and three decades later, NFP has hardly turned out to be the wonderful antidote to marital unhappiness we once were told it would be), and evaluated sheerly on the basis of its birth control abilities, has plenty of potential negatives for the end user.
If the Church really wants to find a way to make women want to turn away from contraceptive use, She needs to find a way to convince people that contraceptive use hurts Jesus Christ. I’ve read all the books, and I am still not convinced in my heart that this is the case. I believe in the authority of the Church and thus mentally assent, but in all honesty my heart does not tell me that Jesus thinks NFP is just wonderful for marriages but finds condom use offensive enough to send people to hell over it. And my life experience having lived over 4 decades surrounded by orthodox, NFP-practicing Catholics tells me that the state of their marriages is not likely to make any couple throw out the box of condoms in favor of NFP any time too soon.
commoner,
I am sorry that your NFP experience has been so negative. I understand. We’ve had both negative and positive NFP experiences.
Yes, some of the 13% are using contraception, but conversely, the 44% may be very close to Church teaching. For example, a FAM couple may agree with the Church on hormonal contraception, but see nothing wrong with the occasional condom. Or they may see NFP as good for themselves, but not for everyone.
Also, “following the Church’s teaching” is different for each couple. For some it is 4-7 days of abstinence. For the “hard cases”, it may be 4-7 weeks. Big difference.
I do believe that NFP can good for a marriage, but it can also be very hard. It requires couples to do a lot of work. It requires them to learn a lot of biology, faithfully follow the method, and adapt their sexuality to things that are beyond their control. And couples do have to be very careful or they can wreck their marriage with it.
This is part of NFP reality, and something that NFP promoters have handled poorly. Usually, what I see is extreme “NFP leads to marital happiness; contraception and sterilization lead to divorce court.” “NFP is real love, contraception is using your partner.” But this doesn’t match the experience of many couples.
Part of the problem is that some NFP organizations see it as their duty not only to present the science, but to guide the couples toward living a “Catholic lifestyle”. Unfortunately, they are rarely trained to do so and they generally do a poor job.
Some organizations present the rules as a “series of prohibitions”, which the Holy Father cautioned against doing. I’ve also see old pre-Vatican II theology persist long past its expiration date and some bad evangelical Protestant theology creep in.
But the big problem is that these amateur spiritual directors have a very legalistic definition of sin. While many things could be mortal sins, a mortal sin is a true turning from God that requires full consent of the will. Mortal sins are not matters of poor self-control or acts of frustration and desperation.
They also forget the role of grace. Marital chastity (i.e. using the method in the way the Church teaches) is a difficult process. Pushing couples too far too fast sets them up for failure. And yes, we sin. ALL of us sin. But there is grace and there is forgiveness.
Kayla addressed grace and NFP in an excellent post on this site. (Unfortunately, the comments got highjacked.)
Sexual sin is not the only kind of sin. If long periods of abstinence due to medical problems is leading to sexual frustration that is damaging the marriage, sexual sin probably isn’t the problem. A couple that has a loving marriage and uses the occasional condom during a long period of abstinence is probably in better spiritual shape than the couple for who has grown apart from each other and resents the Church over struggles with NFP. Both are sinning, but, IMHO, the latter is probably sinning more.
Most troubling, this “double mission” does create a conflict of interest between the instructor’s obligation to teach an effective method of preventing pregnancy and their “obligation” to convince couples to be generous and open to life. We had one instructor who did not seem to think that a young and healthy couple had any reason to avoid a pregnancy. She was not helpful when we were struggling with using the method to avoid, but rather pushy in wanting to help us conceive. This is not an appropriate role for either a lay Catholic or a medical professional.
As for the medical issues, the good news is that NFP methods are advancing. (Although, unfortunately, not all organizations have kept up with the advances.) I am a big fan of the new Marquette Method, which uses a fertility monitor, for the “hard cases”. Some NFP teachers may frown on using fertility monitors, but the Church does not.
Maybe our children may think of our modern NFP methods the way we think of the old rhythm method.