Day 4 – With permission NEO-NFP is presenting Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M, Cap. lucid explanation of NFP. We hope this series is helpful in communicating to others the benefits and logic of NFP!
In today’s installment Archbishop Chaput discusses how the Catholic view (a view fitting for the whole human person, regardless of era, nationality, faith perspective, etc.) fosters hope, unity, healthy life…
- WHAT HUMANAE VITAE REALLY SAYS
- Perhaps one of the flaws in communicating the message of Humanae Vitae over the last 30 years has been the language used in teaching it. The duties and responsibilities of married life are numerous. They’re also serious. They need to be considered carefully, and prayerfully, in advance. But few couples understand their love in terms of academic theology. Rather, they fall in love. That’s the vocabulary they use. It’s that simple and revealing. They surrender to each other. They give themselves to each other. They fall into each other in order to fully possess, and be possessed by, each other. And rightly so. In married love, God intends that spouses should find joy and delight, hope and abundant life, in and through each other — all ordered in a way which draws husband and wife, their children, and all who know them, deeper into God’s embrace.
- As a result, in presenting the nature of Christian marriage to a new generation, we need to articulate its fulfilling satisfactions at least as well as its duties. The Catholic attitude toward sexuality is anything but puritanical, repressive or anti-carnal. God created the world and fashioned the human person in His own image. Therefore the body is good. In fact, it’s often been a source of great humor for me to listen incognito as people simultaneously complain about the alleged “bottled-up sexuality” of Catholic moral doctrine, and the size of many good Catholic families. (From where, one might ask, do they think the babies come?) Catholic marriage — exactly like Jesus Himself — is not about scarcity but abundance. It’s not about sterility, but rather the fruitfulness which flows from unitive, procreative love. Catholic married love always implies the possibility of new life; and because it does, it drives out loneliness and affirms the future. And because it affirms the future, it becomes a furnace of hope in a world prone to despair. In effect, Catholic marriage is attractive because it is true. It’s designed for the creatures we are: persons meant for communion. Spouses complete each other. When God joins a woman and man together in marriage, they create with Him a new wholeness; a “belonging” which is so real, so concrete, that a new life, a child, is its natural expression and seal. This is what the Church means when she teaches that Catholic married love is by its nature both unitive and procreative – not either/or.
Copyright – Archbishop Charles J. Chaput