Holy Sex by Gregory K. Popcak

Author:Gregory K. Popcak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crossroad Publishing Company
Published: 2008-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

The School of Love

P ope John Paul II often referred to families as “schools of love.” Having explored the differences between Holy Sex and eroticism and discovered the five amazing powers of Holy Sex, in Part Three we will examine some simple ways couples can turn their marriages into schools of love where they learn the steps of Infallible Loving and celebrate the fullness of all Five Powers of Holy Sex.

10 QUESTIONS ABOUT NATURAL FAMILY PLANNING

[The Church is not] inconsistent when she considers it lawful for married people to take advantage of the infertile period but condemns as always unlawful the use of means which directly prevent conception, even when the reasons given for the latter practice may appear to be upright and serious. In reality, these two cases are completely different. In the former the married couple rightly use a faculty provided them by nature. In the latter they obstruct the natural development of the generative process. It cannot be denied that in each case the married couple, for acceptable reasons, are both perfectly clear in their intention to avoid children and wish to make sure that none will result. But it is equally true that it is exclusively in the former case that husband and wife are ready to abstain from intercourse during the fertile period as often as for reasonable motives the birth of another child is not desirable. And when the infertile period recurs, they use their married intimacy to express their mutual love and safeguard their fidelity toward one another. In doing this they certainly give proof of a true and authentic love.

—Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae

I have briefly touched on the issue of Natural Family Planning (NFP) in several other sections of this book. Now we’re bringing it all together. In this chapter, after focusing on some important points that have not yet been covered elsewhere, I’ll respond to common questions and objections to NFP.

NFP is a means of both achieving and postponing pregnancy. Thanks to the fine people at the National Association for Conventional Wisdom on All Things Catholic (NACWATC), many believe that the Church rejects contraception because it gives couples the power to choose whether or not to have another child. This view, as the epigraph from Humanae Vitae that began this chapter shows, is ignorant and wrong.

The sin of contraception is that it unnaturally rips apart the natural order that God created in a woman’s cycle. It treats fertility as a disease and children as an unwelcome by-product of sex. It allows men to further victimize women and view them as sexual objects instead of persons and partners. As Pope Paul VI put it in Humanae Vitae:

Reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards…. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use

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