A Message from Bishop 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 provided on our website 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.
