Ales Rarus is looking for posts about lent so send them to Funky!
What does this have to do with NFP? The comment box discussion turned to NFP and the conversation interested me but that post isn’t about NFP so I thought I’d write about it here so as not to clutter the comments box.
Steve, who regularly contributes and comments over at Ales Rarus, says that he has a hard time with the Church’s teachings about contraception/NFP/etc and wrote the following:
…contraception is (by my understanding) a grave sin. The problem is that NFP (its allowance in principle) makes it (i.e., contraception) a very difficult sin to detect, since NFP can be used for contraception and that would be a sin. The church’s teaching (by my understanding) is to have as many children as you can rightly raise and afford. NFP is supposed to be practiced ONLY (this is my understanding) for “natural spacing” of children or for cases of serious medical conditions or for serious poverty. This is just too open ended. Either the faithful are “free to choose” (gawd, that phrase grates on me somef’n bad…) when and how many children they should have (with obviously a strong bias in favor of many… say 3 or more) or they aren’t.
and then goes on to say
And, this is really the point, even if I WAS willing and did do so (i.e., practice NFP), I’d have no assurance, according to RCC teaching, that I was doing so for the “right reasons” and might very well be sinning anyway…
I very respectfully disagree with Steve’s reasoning. True, there is a lot of gray when it comes to the whys and hows of postponing pregnancy while using NFP. Mr. B. and I struggle with it monthly. Right now, we feel that it is in our family’s best interest to postpone having a child until Mr. B. can find work using his degree, but every month we discuss it and pray about it. So far, for us, his lack of employment has been a grave enough reason for waiting. We may at some point change our minds about it. This is a space where the Church really emphasizes “talk, pray, follow your heart/conscience.” Grave reason for postponing can be different for every couple and we have no place to judge… only God can do that. Which makes it hard, sometimes, to know for ourselves if our reasons really are “serious enough.” Steve is right that we might very well be sinning, whether intentionally or unintentionally. If unintentionally, we are only held accountable for sins we knowingly and willfully commit… If we sin intentionally and later realize the error of our ways and are truly sorry and want to try to not make the same mistake again, then we have the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the assurance of God’s forgiveness and love.
The thing that separates using NFP from using artificial contraception (whether chemical or barrier) is that using artificial contraception is always a sin because it takes away from at least one, if not both, of God’s intended purposes for intercourse.
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