Day 9 – 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 commits himself to the task of evangelizing NFP (and he has consistently!) and provides final analysis and a charge…
- As archbishop, I commit myself and my offices to supporting my brother priests, deacons and their lay collaborators in presenting the whole of the Church’s teaching on married love and family planning. I owe both the clergy of our local Church and their staffs — especially the many dedicated parish catechists — much gratitude for the good work they have already accomplished in this area. It is my intention to ensure that courses on married love and family planning are available on a regular basis to more and more people of the archdiocese, and that our priests and deacons receive more extensive education in the theological and pastoral aspects of these issues. I direct, in a particular way, our Offices of Evangelization and Catechetics; Marriage and Family Life; Catholic Schools; Youth, Young Adult and Campus Ministries; and the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults to develop concrete ways to better present Church teaching on married love to our people, and to require adequate instruction in NFP as part of all marriage preparation programs in the archdiocese.
- Two final points. First, the issue of contraception is not peripheral, but central and serious in a Catholic’s walk with God. If knowingly and freely engaged in, contraception is a grave sin, because it distorts the essence of marriage: the self-giving love which, by its very nature, is life-giving. It breaks apart what God created to be whole: the person-uniting meaning of sex (love) and the life-giving meaning of sex (procreation). Quite apart from its cost to individual marriages, contraception has also inflicted massive damage on society at large: initially by driving a wedge between love and the procreation of children; and then between sex (i.e., recreational sex without permanent commitment) and love. Nonetheless — and this is my second point — teaching the truth should always be done with patience and compassion, as well as firmness. American society seems to swing peculiarly between Puritanism and license. The two generations — my own and my teachers’ — which once led the dissent from Paul VI’s encyclical in this country, are generations still reacting against the American Catholic rigorism of the 1950s. That rigorism, much of it a product of culture and not doctrine, has long since been demolished. But the habit of skepticism remains. In reaching these people, our task is to turn their distrust to where it belongs: toward the lies the world tells about the meaning of human sexuality, and the pathologies those lies conceal.
- In closing, we face an opportunity which comes only once in many decades. Thirty years ago this week, Paul VI told the truth about married love. In doing it, he triggered a struggle within the Church which continues to mark American Catholic life even today. Selective dissent from Humanae Vitae soon fueled broad dissent from Church authority and attacks on the credibility of the Church herself. The irony is that the people who dismissed Church teaching in the 1960s soon discovered that they had subverted their own ability to pass anything along to their children. The result is that the Church now must evangelize a world of their children’s children — adolescents and young adults raised in moral confusion, often unaware of their own moral heritage, who hunger for meaning, community, and love with real substance. For all its challenges, this is a tremendous new moment of possibility for the Church, and the good news is that the Church today, as in every age, has the answers to fill the God-shaped empty places in their hearts. My prayer is therefore simple: May the Lord grant us the wisdom to recognize the great treasure which resides in our teaching about married love and human sexuality, the faith, joy and perseverance to live it in our own families — and the courage which Paul VI possessed to preach it anew.
+ Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. Cap. Archbishop of Denver July 22, 1998
Copyright – Archbishop Charles J. Chaput
Next! – Our series ends when Archbishop Chaput answers questions raised by his pastoral letter…