From the Pastor’s Desk
Dear St. Mary’s Parishioners:
This week, I follow up on last week’s article when I spoke of the gift bestowed on spouses to
collaborate with God in begetting children. As you recall, I noted the moral problems with ART (Artificial Reproductive Technologies) and mentioned that there is a moral and more healthyalternative to ART. That alternative has traditionally been called “Natural Family Planning” or “NFP”for short. NFP is a moral, scientific and natural means of either avoiding or achieving pregnancy. NFP is based on sound scientific knowledge, promotes the love of the couple, helps the couple to integrate their mutual fertility and does not harm the environment. Moreover, NFP is especially valuable to couples struggling with infertility; it can serve as a tool in the diagnosis and treatment of reproductive issues.
NFP (also called “Fertility Awareness Based Method” or “FABM”) encompasses a number of methods which help couples to accurately identify fertile and infertile days in the woman’sreproductive cycle. Thus, there is the Billings Ovulation Method and there is the sympto-thermal method promoted by the Couple to Couple League. Also, there is the Family of Americas method and there is the Creighton Model FertilityCare System. At St. Mary’s, we are blessed to have AndreyaArevalo who, in addition to her other tasks, is a certified FertilityCare Practitioner. Our couples who are preparing to celebrate the Sacrament of Marriage are required to take a FertilityCare introduction class and to complete 5 follow-up sessions. Andreya gives our FertilityCare classes, facilitates the follow-up sessions and is also available for consultation. FertilityCare is especially equipped to help couples dealing with infertility because it employs NaProTechnology, a reproductive health science that works cooperatively with the natural procreative cycle and is a result of forty years of research and medical practice.
NFP is 96.8 percent effective when used properly to avoid pregnancy. It is based on the fact that, normally, a woman is fertile for an average of a week to ten days every cycle. Her body produces signs that identify those days. NFP teaches the woman to learn and interpret those signs. When a couple, after prayer and mutual discernment, intend to wait before trying to have a baby, they simply refrain from marital relations on the “fertile” days. When, with God’s help, spouses want to tryto make a baby, they can benefit from their knowledge about their fertility to bring new life into the world.
NFP couples experience first-hand how NFP safeguards the most sacred, awesome act of thehusband and wife. On the one hand, the use of contraception tends to disregard one’s bodilyfruitfulness and, thus, can disregard the person. On the other hand, NFP calls the husband to be attentive to the bodily fruitfulness of his wife, and, therefore, attentive to her person. (Cf. Humanae Vitae, 17) NFP promotes shared responsibility and invites spouses to develop new paths of communication, to name just a couple of its benefits. Above all, NFP enables couples to open themselves to their physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual fruitfulness. It is a way for spousesto say to each other over and over again: “I take you and give myself totally to you for better, forworse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, without reservation, until death do us part.”
May you have a blessed week!
In Christ,
