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Post by copper on Jun 3, 2021 22:04:36 GMT
Contraceptives are wrong. Abstinence is required and offered to the Holy Spirit for fortitude. I never practiced nfp and just practiced abstinence. Therefore I have the number of children I wanted and God ordained. I think I'm repeating myself. NFP isn't illicit, nor is it contraception. What part of NFP disrupts the body's normal hormonal functions or creates a physical barrier? It's basically regimented abstinence. A lot of couples use it poorly and abuse the practice, but many couples use it to get pregnant. I myself used it to pinpoint health issues that were an impediment to conceiving.
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Post by copper on Jun 3, 2021 22:08:03 GMT
No couple has to use NFP, but the Church teaches us that they may, if they have reasons that have, at various times, been judged "grave", "serious", "just", or "well-founded". True, certain methods of attaining fertility awareness aren't exactly dinner-table conversation, they may be gross, but committing the mortal sin of contraception is far more objectionable, and has eternal consequences that mere "grossness" doesn't. There are various technologies nowadays, none of them per se offensive to traditional Catholic morality, that give NFP a high degree of reliability and do not require unappetizing self-diagnosis.
Tbh, NFP isn't that high in terms of reliability. It also depends on what method is being used. It's effective for delaying but most couples are unable to maintain that level of stringency, and it's difficult to do for a long time. You are correct that NFP doesn't require outside barriers or messing of hormones.
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Post by katy777 on Jun 4, 2021 0:07:37 GMT
Contraceptives are wrong. Abstinence is required and offered to the Holy Spirit for fortitude. I never practiced nfp and just practiced abstinence. Therefore I have the number of children I wanted and God ordained. I think I'm repeating myself. NFP isn't illicit, nor is it contraception. What part of NFP disrupts the body's normal hormonal functions or creates a physical barrier? It's basically regimented abstinence. A lot of couples use it poorly and abuse the practice, but many couples use it to get pregnant. I myself used it to pinpoint health issues that were an impediment to conceiving. Yes. Thank you. I know a family that has 10 kids using nfp. My grandparents had 12 siblings on one side and 10 on the other. Contraception is not llicit.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 4, 2021 7:14:31 GMT
I agree with katy777. NFP seems like a moral cop out to me. It might satisfy Rome's "letter of the law" on contraception, but it certainly violates the spirit of the law. It just feels too much like trying to have one's cake and eat it too. Abstience is the way of the Fathers. It's the preferred way, and arguably ought to be the way encouraged by all priests everywhere to couples who find themselves in a position where they can't have more kids at that time. I think NFP is the result of the Church catering to the times. They know how promiscuous and sex-driven people are these days, even within marriage, and asking a married couple to abstain is "too hard" and places too great of a "burden" on them. So cue in "pastoral accompaniment" and take all expectations away and do some mental gymnastics to create a moral grey area to permit an act that may or may not be sinful and is, at the very least, problematic from a theological stand point.
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Post by homeschooldad on Jun 11, 2021 13:56:00 GMT
I agree with katy777. NFP seems like a moral cop out to me. It might satisfy Rome's "letter of the law" on contraception, but it certainly violates the spirit of the law. It just feels too much like trying to have one's cake and eat it too. Abstience is the way of the Fathers. It's the preferred way, and arguably ought to be the way encouraged by all priests everywhere to couples who find themselves in a position where they can't have more kids at that time. I think NFP is the result of the Church catering to the times. They know how promiscuous and sex-driven people are these days, even within marriage, and asking a married couple to abstain is "too hard" and places too great of a "burden" on them. So cue in "pastoral accompaniment" and take all expectations away and do some mental gymnastics to create a moral grey area to permit an act that may or may not be sinful and is, at the very least, problematic from a theological stand point. (I had a longer reply to this written out the other day, but for some reason, either my computer glitched, or I hit a key and wiped out everything, or I don't know what. So let's give this another try --- thanks, HSD)
It is never morally illicit, in and of itself (putting aside matters of intent or sinful, selfish use of the faculties), for a married couple to have relations outside of the fertile time. Indeed, that is usually the case. NFP is basically gaining observable, scientific (or at least scientifically-derived) knowledge of when that fertile time exists, and when it doesn't. For a couple to say "it's the fertile time, let's abstain" is to make an implicit judgment "are we justified in trying to avoid a pregnancy, or are we not justified?". That stands distinct from saying, in effect, "we won't even attempt to observe signs of the fertile time, we will just have relations 'whenever', and if this results in a pregnancy, so be it". It has only been in recent years that science has evolved to the point where people could even do such a thing reliably --- relying upon a calendar only works if a woman is rock-solid regular in her periods, which is more uncommon than not. I really don't know how far back in history that people even had a concept of a "fertile time". Keep in mind that in medieval times, people didn't even know about ovulation --- they thought that the male element coagulated into a homunculus, and that the female was just a place for it to grow, like a garden. Please forgive me, everyone, but it sounds like those "Thingmaker" or "Vac-U-Form" toy-making kits that we had when we were kids. (I assume those have now been banned because they were basically little ovens, they got hot, and you could burn yourself. Kind of like the old-time chemistry sets, my father once got me a Gilbert set with all kinds of cool stuff, my mother shrieked "oh, no, he'll be able to make gunpowder", to which I thought "you mean I can do something like that? --- that is just too cool, thanks for the idea, Mom, you're the best!". I didn't make gunpowder, but I managed to stink up the house a few times. They gave me a spare room in the house to use as a lab.)
But I digress. Fast-forward to the present era of highly-reliable (though not infallible, no method of conception avoidance is, aside from castration or total abstinence, more on the latter in a moment) natural fertility awareness. Yes, in a perfect world, with prodigiously healthy, fertile mothers, fathers capable of going out into the world and bringing home unlimited resources, and no social or economic reasons why mega-families shouldn't be the norm, everyone would be able just to throw all care to the winds, and welcome a new child every two or three years, all mothers basically either being pregnant or lactating. But that is not the world we live in. People can't quit getting married and having families just because the world isn't like that.
One of the first things that needs to be brought up in any marriage preparation is that assuming you are fertile, you as a couple can end up falling pregnant at any time, desired or not, unless you practice total abstinence. If that's an issue, then don't get married. If you absolutely could not handle having a child in the first year, two years, three years, due to "needing to get on your feet", needing to finish that degree, needing both incomes, or whatever, then just wait to get married until those issues aren't issues anymore. Nobody ever has to get married. "Wanting to be together" needs to be tempered by that unofficial motto of my old high school, an adage I'll always treasure, "it's not what you want, it's what God wants" --- nil sine numine. Using NFP has to contain an element of joyful abandonment to Divine Providence. Even when my wife and I used NFP sinfully (I can only speak for myself, I don't know what her confessor told her, and no confessor of mine ever questioned it --- I had to come under conviction all on my own, and say "whatever excuses I may have had up to this point, I can no longer in conscience make those excuses, for not being willing to father a child" --- and Jone backs me up in saying that confessors may ask about such things), there was always the remote possibility, in the background, that "it might not work, and what then?". There were a few times that we thought we'd had our bluff called, and we were okay with that. I will grant that NFP may be imperfect as compared to the total abstinence that you call for. Yet in defense of NFP, it does call for that abandonment that I described above, an abandonment that even selfish, sinful users of NFP without grave/serious/just/well-founded reason must have. When a couple uses artificial contraception, they, too, sometimes "get surprised" --- God and nature will not be mocked! --- and then you either have the concept of the "oops baby", embraced with various mixes of joy and "oh, no", or the mother hies herself off to an abortion clinic, and it is never known to anyone except the parents. I would hope with all my heart, that the latter would never be an option for Catholic couples, or indeed couples of any faith who believe in the sanctity of human life. (I cannot fathom a couple using NFP having an abortion when the pregnancy isn't desired. If that ever happens, I'm not sure I would ever want to know about it. I'll content myself with thinking "nobody does that".)
I referred above to "grave/serious/just/well-founded" reasons for using NFP. It is the teaching of the Church (Pius XI, Casti connubii, Pius XII's allocution to Italian midwives, and of course Paul VI, Humanae vitae) that NFP cannot simply be used "for any reason or for no reason at all". I have gotten some "pushback" on other forums for bringing this up, and there are many otherwise faithful, orthodox Catholics who think "as long as it's NFP, then you're good, you can use it, or not, as you see fit, no need to justify it". That is not true. I have also heard the opinion, not mainstream by any stretch of the imagination, that NFP could be used throughout the entirety of one's marriage, from the wedding day forward, to avoid having children, no reason needed other than "we just don't want children". Closely related to this is the objection that "some couples simply have sex rarely, if at all, and they shouldn't be expected to 'try for a child' ". I am not referring to people who have abundant reason for avoiding pregnancy, such as genetic defects or grave harm to the mother if a pregnancy occurred. If two fertile people with incredibly low, or non-existent, libidos, or even people who are 'asexual', who desire love and companionship, but not sex, want to get married, but not have sex (or have it very rarely), then I suppose that's fine, and my only hesitation would be in those cases where the marriage is never consummated --- the Pope can dissolve marriages that have never been consummated (ratum sed non consummatum). I find that kind of far-fetched, in that I am a normal male with a normal libido (though celibate for now, and may always remain that way), but we're hearing so much these days about all these kinds of diversity in sexual expression and identity, I guess anything's possible. I've never heard of a couple going around telling people "we're married, but we hardly ever have sex, that's just not our thing, so we won't be having any children", but then again, that's not something people would typically share. If two asexuals, or near-asexuals (and it would have to be two, not just one), find each other and want to get married, so be it. I had always "just understood" that the Church had the expectation, possibly even as a condition for validity, that a couple getting married, with no grave or serious reasons to the contrary, and capable of conceiving, would at least attempt to have, at a minimum, one child, but I concede that "just understood" doesn't constitute moral theology. As I have noted elsewhere on this forum, I drafted an inquiry about this to the CDF in February 2020, but then the pandemic basically shut Italy down, so I never received an answer and may never. I'm not going to pester them by asking again, and I think I know what their answer would be, something along the lines of "there are so many variables, and each marriage is unique, that the Church cannot set down binding norms in such things, couples in such situations must rely upon their own correctly formed consciences, and possibly the direction of their confessor or spiritual director". I'd buy that. I don't mindlessly and stubbornly adhere to long-held (and possibly baseless) ideas when the truth of the matter is something different. In short, I'm not Archie Bunker.
My inquiry to the CDF appears at:
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