Friends Don't Let Friends NFP

The week of July 23-29, 2017—as my dear, humorous wife informed me out of the blue, earlier today—is National NFP Awareness Week. For the five or so Catholics in America who are blessed never to have heard of NFP, it stands for "Neither Fun nor Posterity."

The USCCB has produced an extensive media kit and educational program on its website, complete with suggested homily talking points, bulletin inserts, and prayers of the faithful. This year's promotional poster, attached immediately below, is indicative of the narcissistic, child-fearing culture in which the Gospel of NFP intends to find purchase: a 20-something couple drinking terrible alcohol whilst announcing their engagement to friends and family with a so-called selfie by way of text and/or social media. The fearful look in his eyes complements her look of vacant inebriation.

But let's hope "the time" doesn't happen on the honeymoon!

The recommended bulletin inserts range from the banal to the obscene. Some of these risqué selections will have parents burning the bulletins and scattering the ashes before the little children (who may or may not exist) can get their wee hands on this lewd material:

NFP is an umbrella term for certain methods used to achieve and avoid pregnancies. These methods are based on observation of the naturally occurring signs and symptoms of the fertile and infertile phases of a woman’s menstrual cycle. Couples using NFP to avoid pregnancy abstain from intercourse and genital contact during the fertile phase of the woman’s cycle.

The couple... are acting as “ministers” of God’s plan and they “benefit from” their sexuality according to the original dynamism of “total” self-giving, without manipulation or alteration. [All quotation marks sic, by the way.]

Couples who adopt NFP to space the births of children find that it brings about many positive changes in their relationship and even becomes a way of life. It begins with acceptance, and even wonder, at the way the human body is made.

But enough sex ed. For all the "wonder" and "total" self-giving that NFP is supposed to engender, "God's Plan for Married Love" in fact baffles and frustrates newlyweds who are unhappy with the insertion of periodic celibacy into their marital bliss. The FAQs about the whens and whys of NFP practically forbid any tangible interaction with the grave reasons (translated less gravely here as "serious") that permit its practice. Instead, the assumption is that regular continence should be the norm and the old method of "just havin' them babbies" is for third-world weirdos who don't know any better:

In this view of "responsible parenthood" married couples carefully think about the just reasons they may have to postpone pregnancy. When making decisions about the number and spacing of children in their family, they weigh their responsibilities to God, each other, the children they already have, and the world in which they live.

Or, well, they don't.

Not so long ago, experienced adults would have recommended to young men and women who were itching for a scratch that they had better be prepared for parenthood before walking down the aisle. Indulging in God's gift of intercourse between the sexes came with the great joy of fatherhood and motherhood, which was its natural end. Those who presume to indulge had better be ready for the results, emotionally, morally, and financially. The perversion of this end used to be so despised that it was even illegal in the secular state. Now it is claimed as a right.

"Be Her Joseph!" one JP2-generation Catholic writes, but one can hardly imagine the chaste St. Joseph penning something like this about the Blessed Virgin: "Much to my surprise, I also learned how grateful my wife was that I was willing to learn how her body worked!" But one might suppose that the celibate marriage of Joseph and Mary is a somewhat fitting model for the quarter-celibate lifestyle promoted by NFP missionaries and mommy bloggers who cannot abstain from venting their periodic frustration on the rest of us innocent bystanders.

Evelyn Waugh mocked the rise of the birth control movement in his 1932 novel Black Mischief, when the Minister of Modernization in a small African nation attempted to spread propaganda to the uneducated masses by means of a colorful poster design:

It portrayed two contrasted scenes. On one side a native hut of hideous squalor, overrun with children of every age, suffering from every physical incapacity — crippled, deformed, blind, spotted and insane; the father prematurely aged with paternity squatted by an empty cook-pot; through the door could be seen his wife, withered and bowed with child bearing, desperately hoeing at their inadequate crop. On the other side a bright parlour furnished with chairs and table; the mother, young and beautiful, sat at her ease eating a huge slice of raw meat; her husband smoked a long Arab hubble-bubble (still a caste mark of leisure throughout the land), while a single, healthy child sat between them reading a newspaper. Inset between the two pictures was a detailed drawing of some up-to-date contraceptive apparatus and the words in Sakuyu: WHICH HOME DO YOU CHOOSE?

Interest in the pictures was unbounded; all over the island woolly heads were nodding, black hands pointing, tongues clicking against filed teeth in unsyntactical dialects. Nowhere was there any doubt about the meaning of the beautiful new pictures.

See: on right hand: there is rich man: smoke pipe like big chief: but his wife she no good: sit eating meat: and rich man no good: he only one son.

See: on left hand: poor man: not much to eat: but his wife she very good, work hard in field: man he good too: eleven children: one very mad, very holy. And in the middle: Emperor’s juju. Make you like that good man with eleven children.

And as a result, despite admonitions from squire and vicar, the peasantry began pouring into town for the gala, eagerly awaiting initiation to the fine new magic of virility and fecundity.

Our desires are today so divorced from nature that those few who welcome all of God's gifts are expected to explain themselves to the "normal" married couple with 1.5 children and a dog. Anyone can slap "God's Plan" on a poster. Few consider the consequences.

"Dear St. Joseph, please make my husband like you: young, hunky, and never too grabby."