Marriage
is intended to be fruitful; God said so Himself! God's plan for the sanctification
of the married couple includes their cooperation with God in procreating new
souls destined for Heaven. NFP doesn't explicitly fly in the face of such an
understanding but it is dramatically not
submissive to God. NFP is all about a degree of control that is objectionable
in any traditional Catholic understanding of marriage or Catholic spirituality
in general.
NFP promoters
attempt to elevate non-abstinence to the level of a virtue, achieved by gaining
knowledge of God's designs so as to frustrate them. In other words, NFP
promoters see the marital act as having “unitive” value that trumps its
procreative value; therefore, engaging in marital intimacy when there is no risk
of pregnancy is a good in and of itself.
But sex
is not an end in itself. To long for
sex but seek to avoid its consequences is, objectively, concupiscence seeking a
remedy. Certainly we would say this of an unmarried couple. The traditional
understanding of marriage is threefold: 1) the procreation and education of
children; 2) mutual care and support for the married couple in their journey to
Heaven; and 3) a remedy for concupiscence. And once upon a time, people
actually got married first and then
realized those ends. Some couples probably got married primarily as a remedy
for concupiscence; nowadays, we have a Pill for that.
Taking
the traditional view of marriage, if a man and a woman long to engage in the marital
act, but are not prepared to have children, they should postpone marriage until
they are truly “open to life”. They should not be thinking of ways to have sex
that allows them to avoid that "consequence."
The
same goes for a married couple, really. When a married couple thinks the time
is not right for pregnancy, the first option is abstinence; but, if desire is
too strong, then charity and justice demand that they engage in the remedy for
their concupiscence. This remedy may be NFP. NFP as a "remedy for concupiscence"
sounds, to me, a lot more honest in its presentation than touting it as a
"way of life" or a "virtue." From a marketing standpoint,
though, NFP as a "remedy for concupiscence" doesn’t sound nearly as
appealing as "NFP as a way of life", or “God’s plan for the family”.
It seems
silly to claim that one is "open to children" when one is organizing
one's life around having sex that is not likely to be fruitful! The NFP
"way of life," when not practiced to achieve pregnancy, is all about sterile
sex – sex that is meant only to make the couple feel good, with no consequences
attached to that pleasure. The "background music" of the NFP way of
life is always about sexual intimacy: "when we can, when we should, when
we can't and when we shouldn't".
Our
culture has a lot to do with our understanding of human sexuality. In a recent
article addressing this issue, an insightful author notes that “Teen
Pregnancy is Not the Problem”. Instead, she says, the problem is how the
world presents the topic of “sex”:
The world says sex is primarily
for pleasure. That sex doesn’t have to be for unity or procreation. That
everybody’s doing it. That there is something wrong with you if you aren’t.
…The world tells us to act on
all our urges as soon as possible. To get what we want, when we want it,
always. To control our fertility instead of ourselves if we aren’t prepared to
become parents.
...It’s time to use our lives
to tell the world sex is primarily for procreation and unity. That we aren’t
supposed to marry people because it feels good to have sex with them, but to
create a pleasurable sexual relationship with the person to whom we are
married.
Couples
marry today with certain expectations about both marriage and sex shaped by
public media. Sex is supposed to be "good" with a "good partner"
and "personally satisfying"; in other words, sex is "all about
the couple” – a variation on the theme of “it’s all about me”. People enter marriage
today with a culturally-conditioned expectation that "sex is like what
I've seen in the movies” – which is to say it looks really great, and fun, and
exciting! The NFP ideology (and that is what it is) does nothing to teach the
true meaning of marriage, sex, or chastity, but is a subtle participant in the
unchaste sexuality that is rampant in our culture. To teach engaged couples
about "family planning" of any kind is conceding that "family
planning" (a.k.a., birth control) is a presumed need and value in today's
Catholic marriages.
Certainly,
today, the Church is teaching badly in this area. Part of the reason for that
is that the Church took seriously the warnings from secular “experts” that the
world was becoming overpopulated. Birth control was cautiously embraced because
Church leaders didn’t recognize the errors in the overpopulation argument. The apparent needs of the temporal world
loomed larger than the spiritual needs of parents that are met by generous
parenthood truly orchestrated by God. For a brief moment, it seems that Church leaders
wondered if God maybe needed a little help in controlling population. Hence, the concept of “responsible”
parenthood, and the subtle movement from condoning periodic abstinence in
certain serious situations to the idea that couples should rely on their own
consciences to determine whether or not to conceive a child.
I
predict that, in the future, the Church will clarify what it teaches today,
dramatically redefine the "serious reasons" necessary for use of NFP,
and encourage NFP as a "remedy for concupiscence" rather than a
positive, virtuous practice. My prediction stems in part from my belief that
what is being taught today, and the
verbiage being used to teach it, is, for the most part, wrong – at least on the
very liberal end of the NFP spectrum.
There’s
another, more pragmatic reason for my prediction: far from becoming overpopulated, the world is now beginning to suffer from the effects of decades
of population control. We need more babies. People are now coming to an
understanding of some principles of the economics of population growth which
were previously unknown, unexplored, or ignored. I’m not an expert in this
area, but even in the secular media we are beginning to see a growing awareness
and concern about the need for more young people. And so if the Church wants to
continue to meet the needs of the “modern world”, She will have to acknowledge
that birth control should never be touted as a Catholic principle, and that now
more than ever Catholic couples should be open to life, open to “generous
parenthood” that puts the procreative end of marriage in its rightful place of
primacy.