MARRIAGE MATTERS: Awkward at first, NFP classes provide new strength

I’ve already accepted the fact that I probably come off as terribly naïve to readers who have been married decades and know intimately the ups and downs of those wedded years.

That’s fine. I’ll be the first to admit that experientially I have no knowledge or understanding of marriage. How could I? But I really don’t want to seem preachy, which is why this next topic is kind of a minefield.

Passions run deep in the Catholic Church over a number of teachings and issues, but over the past few decades — at least in the United States — it seems that contraception has been a particular flash point.

When the first contraceptive pill was introduced to the world in 1960, Pope John XXIII put together a commission to study questions about birth control. After his death, Pope Paul VI added to this commission theologians, priests, bishops, cardinals, physicians and women.

There were 72 members all told, and in 1966 they wrote to the pope that they did not find artificial contraception to be intrinsically evil and that it should be a valid option for married Catholic couples. The commission was not unanimous on this finding, but there were very few dissenters.

Paul VI, however, rejected the commission’s recommendation in his encyclical Humanae Vitae and upheld the traditional Church teaching that artificial contraception may not be used.

In the encyclical, the pope wrote that contraception “impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into [the conjugal act], frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life.”

Furthermore, “to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator,” Paul VI wrote.

“Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source,” he wrote.

Battle lines were drawn pretty quickly. I get the sense from people of my parent’s generation that the fight over contraception in the Church was a very big and trying ordeal. I know today of some people who avoid Masses where the priest includes a petition to end “the evils of contraception” in the prayers of the faithful.

Once again, I feel lucky that I didn’t have to come of age during the ’60s or ’70s, because I think my fiancée and I have been able to bypass all the horrible contention and internecine fighting over contraception.

And it’s left us much more open to the Church’s teaching, I think, than if we were getting married three decades ago. At any rate, there was never a question that we would forgo the use of contraception in our marriage.

Bolstering marriage

At the same time, there was very little romanticizing about our only alternative, Natural Family Planning, which, according to one Web site, “is a thoroughly researched, safe, medically effective and family-supportive method of fertility regulation which can be used either to avoid a pregnancy or to achieve one.”

Basically, it’s a way of charting a woman’s fertility cycle every day. If she is potentially fertile on a particular day, the couple can choose to abstain from sex, thus avoiding pregnancy for the time being. Conversely, if you wish to achieve pregnancy, NFP is very effective in that regard, as well.

Practiced faithfully, the method has about a 99 percent effectiveness rate, and the divorce rate is less than 4 percent for couples who use it.

Perhaps the divorce rate for that group is so low in part because the Catholics who practice NFP generally tend to be the same ones who take the Church’s prohibition of divorce very seriously.

But I don’t think that’s the main reason for the statistic. NFP requires a great deal of communication between spouses. You learn this quickly on the first — very awkward — day of class.

It also requires a great deal of mutual support and sacrifice because of the number of days of abstinence — if you’re avoiding pregnancy — each month. Couples who teach the method often say that this kind of communication and support bolsters every aspect of their marriage.

It keeps them strong and connected to each other, they say. And that probably helps to keep them married.

But I’m still trying not to romanticize the method, and sometimes I think that preachers of NFP must downplay the difficulty of remaining abstinent for a decent stretch of time each month. They say these days provide an opportunity to show your love to your spouse in a non-sexual way.

All in all, though, Sarah and I feel at peace. And the classes have really deepened our relationship and improved communication between us in really unexpected ways.

Let’s just say that she was really not looking forward to that first class. Now, she’s a real disciple of the method.

And I’m pretty sure that I’m the best diviner of fertility charts since those creepy guys employed by the pharaohs thousands of years ago whose actual title was “diviner of fertility charts.” Really, the charts are complicated, but I’m a regular savant at it.

And now I sound like a regular idiot.

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