Natural Family Planning Awareness Week

Natural Family Planning Awareness Week is celebrated each July to help people better understand Natural Family Planning (NFP) and how it can aid a married couple in their desire to either have a child or postpone a pregnancy. By understanding the signs of fertility and infertility, a married couple can better cooperate with God’s plan for their marriage. Natural Family Planning fosters authentic marital love, respect, honesty, and couple communication. It also fosters trust in God and an authentic marital spirituality that deepens the couple's relationship with Christ and his Church.

In 2024, Natural Family Planning Awareness Week is being celebrated July 21-27. This year's theme is Love Beyond Measure. The Lord God calls us to love him and each other as he loves us. In marriage, this takes on a unique quality as the complementarity of husband and wife become the "one flesh" union that sacred Scripture so beautifully teaches. God's gift of children are the fruit of such a noble love!

There are sometimes misconceptions about NFP, but modern methods have been proven to be highly effective. The methods of NFP help spouses to act responsibly in stewarding the gift of fertility they both share. Chastity is an essential element in NFP as spouses embrace God’s design for marital love. That is because couples using NFP who wish to postpone or avoid pregnancy engage in periodic sexual abstinence. In this way, the couple does nothing to harm God’s design of love and life. They simply abstain from the marital embrace during their time of fertility. Through marital chastity, husband and wife learn how to express their love through the wisdom of restraint, meaning that they will discover and live little ways of expressing tenderness, respect, and consideration to each other.

A Message from Bishop James Ruggieri for Natural Family Planning Awareness Week

As our local church in the United States celebrates Natural Family Planning Awareness Week, July 21-27, I would like to share some general reflections about Natural Family Planning, and I would encourage you to check out the link to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops website. It contains some beneficial information about Natural Family Planning.

Natural Family Planning aids a married couple in their conjugal love. Through marital love, a husband and a wife give themselves as a total gift to each other. Conjugal love is free, total, faithful, and fruitful. In many respects, spouses through the marital embrace (sexual intercourse) make visible the invisible reality of God’s love. God is love, and God loves us unconditionally. God’s love for humanity is made real in the Incarnation, that is, Jesus coming in the flesh demonstrates that God the Father loves us with a love that is free, total, faithful, and fruitful. When Jesus comes in the flesh, lives among us, suffers, dies, and rises, God the Father reveals that there are no barriers between his love and us.

In the apostolic exhortation of St. John Paul II entitled, Familiaris Consortio, St. John Paul II writes “...conjugal love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter - appeal of the body and instinct, power of feeling and affectivity, aspiration of the spirit and of will. It aims at a deeply personal unity, the unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul; it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility (cf Humanae vitae, 9). In a word it is a question of the normal characteristics of all natural conjugal love, but with a new significance which not only purifies and strengthens them but raises them to the extent of making them the expression of specifically Christian values." (13) Conjugal love, according to St. John Paul II, involves a “deeply personal unity.” Natural Family Planning supports that deeply personal union by allowing the husband and the wife to share their entire selves with each other in the marital embrace.

Natural Family Planning demands communication and openness. It requires working together. Natural Family Planning is a yes to a more integrated marital union and a yes to a greater openness to God’s gift of fertility. Let us pray extra for our married couples and support them in their parenting by our prayers, kindness, and welcoming environments.