Columbia July 2018

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K N I G H T S O F C O LU MBUS

J ULY 2018

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K N I G H T S O F C O LU M BU S j u ly 2 0 1 8 ♦ V o l u m e 9 8 ♦ N u m b e r 7

COLUMBIA Humanae Vitae

at 50

Fifty years ago, the Catholic Church anticipated the consequences of the sexual revolution.

BY MARY EBERSTADT

12 #MeToo and Humanae Vitae Revelations of sexual assault invite our culture to take a second look at how we got here, and how the Catholic Church can show us the way out.

Life Is a Gift Two generations of Knights of Columbus families reflect on the joys of having children and being open to life.

BY ALTON J. PELOWSKI

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10 The Prophetic Vision of Blessed Paul VI

19682018

F E AT U R E S

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C O M M E N TA RY

NFP: Truly a Godsend

BY HELEN ALVARÉ

28 The Integrity of Human Love (Why Marriage, Sex and Babies Belong Together) The Church, as a loving Mother, seeks to articulate and preserve the meaning of marriage.

BY DAVID S . CRAWFORD

Natural family planning helped us to both avoid and achieve pregnancy, and it saved my wife’s life.

BY JAMES CUEVA

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Our Cross and Our Blessings

30 St. John Paul II: Missionary of Love and Life John Paul II’s revolutionary vision of marriage and family, which reinforced the teaching of Humanae Vitae, grew out of his pastoral work.

Suffering from infertility expanded our understanding of fruitfulness in marriage.

BY ELIZABETH KIRK

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BY GEORGE WEIGEL

A Husband and a Healer An OB-GYN Knight seeks ethical fertility treatments for his wife and patients.

13 What Ever Happened to the Population Bomb?

BY STEVEN W. MOSHER

BY JENNIFER BRINKER

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The ‘Yes’ of Chastity

14 Natural Family Planning vs. Contraception: What’s the Difference?

A young, single Knight shares how virtue and sexual integrity can help build a culture of life and love.

BY CHAD ETZEL

22

BY JANET E. SMITH

25 Dangers of Hormonal Birth Control

BY KATHLEEN M. RAVIELE, M.D.

Good News About Hard Teachings

With additional informative sidebars

An interview with Msgr. David Toups about accompanying those who struggle with the Church’s teachings about sex and marriage.

D E PA RT M E N T S

BY COLUMBIA STAFF

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Our Four Sons

3

BY TOM AND KATHY NUTTLE

From Brokenness to Bliss

Thinkstock

Sterile and seeking divorce, my wife and I thought our days of faithful, fruitful marriage were over.

BY GREG ALEXANDER

Building a better world On the eve of the World Meeting of Families, Pope Francis reaffirms the important connection between life ethics and social ethics.

BY SUPREME KNIGHT CARL A. ANDERSON

A couple shares how trading contraception for natural family planning allowed their marriage to thrive.

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PLUS

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Learning the faith, living the faith Despite opposition, Pope Paul VI humbly promoted the Church’s teachings on marriage and human life.

BY SUPREME CHAPLAIN ARCHBISHOP WILLIAM E. LORI

JULY 2018

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Celebrating Life and Love FIFTY YEARS AGO, the sexual revolution was in full swing. The reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which ended nearly three years earlier, had raised expectations that the Catholic Church would overturn her longstanding prohibition against contraception — a teaching opposed by many, including outspoken theologians at the time. When Pope Paul VI finally published the encyclical Humanae Vitae on July 25, 1968, reaffirming the Church’s perennial teaching, it was met with widespread dissent. Still today, polling reveals that the large majority of Catholics believe artificial birth control to be morally acceptable — or not a moral issue at all. Such evidence suggests that Humanae Vitae was, ultimately, a colossal failure. What reason, then, could we possibly have to celebrate the encyclical’s 50th anniversary?

The first answer to this question lies in section 18 of the document itself.

There, Paul VI anticipates the encyclical’s rejection, writing: “It does not surprise the Church that she becomes, like her divine Founder, a ‘sign of contradiction’; yet she does not, because of this, cease to proclaim with humble firmness the entire moral law, both the natural law and the law of the Gospel.”

The Holy Father then goes on to explain that, contrary to popular belief, the Church has no authority to change such teachings about morality. Rather, she only interprets and proclaims them in order to defend human dignity and promote “the true good of man.” To ask if the encyclical was a “success,” therefore, is to ask the wrong question. To paraphrase Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, God does not call us to be successful; he calls us to be faithful.

Humanae Vitae is, in the end, actually more relevant today than ever before, especially in light of cultural, ecclesial and scientific developments over the past five decades. For one thing, it has become increasingly clear 2 ♦ COLUMBIA ♦

JULY 2018

that the sexual revolution, despite its promise of “free love,” brought neither authentic freedom nor authentic love, but the reverse. Indeed, the expansion of the culture of death and the breakdown of the family have proved Paul VI’s warnings in Humanae Vitae to be prophetic (see page 10).

Moreover, the Church has developed a deeper appreciation and understanding of the encyclical’s message about married love, especially through the pontificate of St. John Paul II, which has inspired a new generation of priests eager to share the Gospel of Life (see pages 22, 30). Finally, Catholic physicians and researchers, in answer to Paul VI’s call, have done an extraordinary service to society by advancing the science of fertility (see page 20).

At the heart of each of these developments are real people and relationships, demonstrating the concrete impact of understanding, accepting and proclaiming the Church’s wisdom about life and love. This brings us to another document of Paul VI, published seven years after Humanae Vitae.

In his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, which effectively called for a new evangelization, Paul VI explained: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (41). In other words, the primary way the Church evangelizes is through the living example of her members.

This commemorative edition of Columbia is filled with compelling testimonies from people who have discovered the Church’s life-giving message about marital love. We invite you to read their stories of hope with an open mind and heart so that you, too, might come to a better understanding of why Humanae Vitae is truly something to celebrate.♦ ALTON J. PELOWSKI EDITOR

COLUMBIA PUBLISHER Knights of Columbus ________ SUPREME OFFICERS Carl A. Anderson SUPREME KNIGHT Most Rev. William E. Lori, S.T.D. SUPREME CHAPLAIN Patrick E. Kelly DEPUTY SUPREME KNIGHT Michael J. O’Connor SUPREME SECRETARY Ronald F. Schwarz SUPREME TREASURER John A. Marrella SUPREME ADVOCATE ________ EDITORIAL Alton J. Pelowski EDITOR Andrew J. Matt MANAGING EDITOR Margaret B. Kelly ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Venerable Michael McGivney (1852-90) Apostle to the Young, Protector of Christian Family Life and Founder of the Knights of Columbus, Intercede for Us. ________ HOW TO REACH US MAIL COLUMBIA 1 Columbus Plaza New Haven, CT 06510-3326 ADDRESS CHANGES 203-752-4210, option #3 addresschange@kofc.org PRAYER CARDS & SUPPLIES 203-752-4214 COLUMBIA INQUIRIES 203-752-4398 FAX 203-752-4109 K OF C CUSTOMER SERVICE 1-800-380-9995 E-MAIL columbia@kofc.org INTERNET kofc.org/columbia ________ Membership in the Knights of Columbus is open to men 18 years of age or older who are practical (that is, practicing) Catholics in union with the Holy See. This means that an applicant or member accepts the teaching authority of the Catholic Church on matters of faith and morals, aspires to live in accord with the precepts of the Catholic Church, and is in good standing in the Catholic Church.

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Copyright © 2018 All rights reserved ________ ON THE COVER Jim and Maureen McLane are pictured with their daughter Colleen, son-in-law Louis, and six of their grandchildren in Edmonton, Alberta.

(See story on page 6.)

ON THE COVER: Photo by Curtis Trent

E D I TO R I A L

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BU I L D I N G A B E T T E R WO R L D

The Dignity of Every Human Life On the eve of the World Meeting of Families, Pope Francis reaffirms the important connection between life ethics and social ethics

by Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson In my Columbia columns for January and April earlier this year, I reflected on Blessed Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae and its enduring messages on marriage and the gift of life — messages further discussed throughout this issue. The following month, on May 25, Irish voters repealed the Eighth Amendment to that country’s constitution, which for decades had protected the lives of countless unborn children from abortion.

Providentially, Pope Francis had the courage to place the World Meeting of Families in Ireland next month. He has set the stage for the meeting with the recent publication of his apostolic exhortation on the call to holiness, Gaudete et Exsultate (Rejoice and Be Glad).

There is much to reflect upon in Gaudete et Exsultate. In one section, the pope writes: “Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly…. We cannot uphold an ideal of holiness that would ignore injustice in (the) world” (101).

No organization knows this better than the Knights of Columbus. We have been “clear, firm and passionate” in our defense of the dignity of every human life.

Our Ultrasound Initiative alone, which has sought to protect the lives of both mother and child by providing more than 950 ultrasound machines to qualified pregnancy resource centers, has already saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Pope Francis goes on to write in Gaudete et Exsultate, “We often hear it said that … the situation of migrants, for example, is a lesser issue. Some Catholics consider it a secondary issue compared to the ‘grave’ bioethical questions. That a politician looking for votes might say such a thing is understandable, but not a Christian” (102).

The pope is right. These are not “secondary” issues because there are no “secondary” people. There are public issues that involve intrinsically evil acts, such as the intentional killing of an innocent human being as in the case of abortion. And there are other issues that involve prudential judgments about which reasonable people may disagree. But that does not mean such issues are “secondary.” In most countries, poverty and disease are the leading causes of death. In the United States, it is abortion: approximately 60 million since Roe v. Wade.

Here again, the Knights of Columbus has been a leader — during the last fraternal year providing more than $185 million and more than 75 million hours of volunteer service to charity.

St. John Paul II, in Evangelium Vitae, explained the strong link between life ethics and social ethics: “A society lacks

solid foundations when, on the one hand, it asserts values such as the dignity of the person, justice and peace, but then, on the other hand, radically acts to the contrary by allowing or tolerating a variety of ways in which human life is devalued and violated, especially where it is weak or marginalized” (101).

Catholics have a responsibility to insist that those responsible for the public good focus public debate where it belongs: on respect for the dignity of every human being and the sanctity of every human life.

This is why Pope Francis reminds us that holiness, evangelization, charity and human development are profoundly linked. And as will be apparent during the upcoming World Meeting of Families, all of these aspects of the Christian life find their home in the family.

The Order has always sought to evangelize and strengthen the spiritual life of our Catholic families.

We are now strengthening our Building the Domestic Church initiative through our new Faith in Action program model, which encourages councils to do even more in the areas of faith, family, community and life.

As Knights of Columbus we will more clearly live in a way that witnesses to the Christian call to holiness, evangelization, charity and social justice.

Vivat Jesus!

JULY 2018

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L E A R N I N G T H E FA I T H , L I V I N G T H E FA I T H

A Wise, Loving and Courageous Pastor Despite opposition, Pope Paul VI humbly promoted the Church’s teachings on marriage and human life

by Supreme Chaplain Archbishop William E. Lori ON OCT. 14, Pope Francis will can- the dignity of human life and on God’s onize Blessed Pope Paul VI. Pope Paul plan for human love. was elected to the Chair of Peter in A deeper look at Humanae Vitae re1963, during the Second Vatican veals that Paul VI did not merely reassert Council, and served until his death in a ban on contraception — rather, he of- respect for women, and the breakdown 1978. He was responsible for advanc- fered a teaching that opens the way for of the family — all of which and more ing the teachings and reforms of the a virtuous respect for the gift of human have come to pass. By contrast, the council, a daunting task which he im- life and the meaning of human sexuality. Church’s teaching respects the gift of plemented with wisdom, love and Writing in an era of rapid change and human life and shows married couples courage. social upheaval, he acknowledged that how to relate to one another in a reThis saintly pontiff was first spectful, loving manner. and foremost a follower of In Humanae Vitae, the Holy Jesus. He was a man of deep Father called upon married couprayer and rigorous penitence. ples to form a loving union in The time has come for people Steeped in culture, he was an the sight of God, a union that is intellectual who followed to the gift of new human everywhere to discover Pope Paul’s open closely 20th-century developlife, a love that is total and faithments in philosophy, theology ful, a love that is ordered toward wise and loving teaching. and contemporary debates that the procreation and formation of helped pave the way for the children in the loving setting of council. He showed us a pastor’s a family. He reminded Catholics heart in his profound encyclicals on au- people were grappling with new atti- and all people of goodwill of the Godthentic human and economic develop- tudes toward sexuality and that new given link between the unitive and proment and on the spread of the Gospel methods of birth control had raised creative dimensions of human sexuality. in today’s world. questions about the Church’s teaching. He invited couples to consider morally When he issued the landmark en- In fact, many urged the pope to change licit ways to exercise responsible parentcyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human the Church’s teaching out of compassion hood, rejecting unnatural forms of birth Life, On the Regulation of Birth) in July for married couples. Many also said that control that do not invite dialogue and 1968, Blessed Paul VI addressed the relaxing this teaching would strengthen cooperation. contemporary issue of birth control family life and make the Church’s misToday, many people have awakened with the same wisdom, love and sion of spreading the Good News more to the negative social consequences of courage that characterized his entire credible — empty claims that subse- the sexual revolution. But awareness is life and ministry. Unfortunately, his quent history has disproved. not enough. Evils such as the breakprophetic teaching was greeted by Blessed Paul VI knew that shortcuts down of the family cannot be overcome many with hostility and today remains in matters such as human love, life, mar- without a renewed appreciation for and widely ignored. However, the time has riage and family lead to profound un- practice of the virtues of chastity, modcome for people everywhere to discover happiness and to terrible social esty and self-control, together with what many faithful married couples consequences. He foresaw an increase in deep respect for others. Pope Paul has have already discovered — namely, infidelity, the lowering of moral stan- shown us the way of wisdom, love and Pope Paul’s wise and loving teaching on dards, lack of respect for life, lack of courage. Let us follow his lead.♦ 4 ♦ COLUMBIA ♦

JULY 2018

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SUPREME CHAPLAIN’S CHALLENGE

This is the first in a new series of monthly reflections and practical challenges to Knights (and other readers) from Supreme Chaplain Archbishop William E. Lori: “The apostles gathered together with Jesus and reported all they had done and taught. He said to them, ‘Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while’” (Mk 6:30, from the Gospel for July 22).

If we are honest, we know that we men are not that good at “coming away … to a deserted place” to “rest a while.” In fact, over 80 percent of us check our smart phones even before brushing our teeth in the morning and spend time on them in the last hour before we go to sleep. Like the apostles, we focus on getting a lot done. But let’s imagine what would happen if we truly responded to the challenge of Jesus to

H O LY FAT H E R ’ S P R AY E R I N T E N T I O N

TOP: Thinkstock — POPE FRANCIS: CNS photo/Evandro Inetti, pool — BLESSED PAUL VI: CNS photo

Offered in Solidarity with Pope Francis That priests, who experience fatigue and loneliness in their pastoral work may find help and comfort in their intimacy with the Lord and in their friendship with their brother priests.

L I T U RG I C A L C A L E N DA R July 3 July 6

July 11 July 14 July 25 July 26 July 31

St. Thomas, Apostle St. Maria Goretti, Virgin and Martyr (optional memorial) St. Benedict, Abbot St. Kateri Tekakwitha, Virgin (United States) St. James, Apostle Sts. Joachim and Anne, Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary St. Ignatius of Loyola, Priest

“come away” to pray in solitude every morning, resting in His presence and holy Word. Jesus invites us to put first things first. Let’s take him at his word and make the changes we need to make.

Supreme Chaplain Archbishop William E. Lori’s Challenge: This month, I challenge you to “come away” to a quiet place by praying at least five minutes a day, first thing in the morning before you check your electronic devices or turn on the TV. You will likely have stops and starts, but strive to be as consistent as possible. In addition, I challenge you to respond to Jesus’ invitation to “rest a while” by doing something truly restful on Sunday, the day of rest.♦

C AT H O L I C M A N O F T H E M O N T H

Blessed Paul VI (1897-1978) GIOVANNI BATTISTA Montini was born in Concesio, in northern Italy, in 1897. His father was a lawyer and newspaper editor, and his mother was active in the Catholic Action movement. One of three brothers, young Montini was formed by Jesuits and Oratorians in nearby Brescia, where he entered the seminary.

He was ordained to the priesthood in 1920 and sent to Rome, where he trained as a diplomat. For more than three decades, he then served in the Vatican Secretariat of State. He collaborated closely with Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII in 1939 and later named Montini archbishop of Milan in 1954.

Pope John XXIII, within months of his election in 1958, elevated Montini to the College of Cardinals. Five years later, Montini was himself elected pope, taking the name Paul VI. On the second day of his pontificate, he set forth his agenda: to continue the Second Vatican Council, revise canon law, work for justice and peace, and seek Christian unity.

He was the first pope to travel extensively, visiting Asia, Africa, the Holy

Land and the United Nations headquarters in New York, where he pleaded for world peace and called the Church an “expert in humanity.” Of his seven encyclicals, Populorum Progressio (1967) and Humanae Vitae (1968) are the most remembered.

In April 1978, the pope thanked the Knights of Columbus Board of Directors for the Order’s loyal support. “I rely on you … the Knights of Columbus to bring holiness to the world,” he said. “Christ needs you to bring fraternal concern to your neighborhoods, to exemplify justice in your communities, to spread peace and truth in the world.”

Paul VI died Aug. 6, 1978, at age 80.

Beatified by Pope Francis Oct. 19, 2014, he will be canonized Oct. 14.♦

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LIFE IS A GIFT Two generations of Knights of Columbus families reflect on the joys of having children and being open to life

W

hen he was in veterinary college in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, marriage and family were not the first thing on Jim McLane’s mind. He had put dating on hold to focus on his studies and had only a vague intention of someday marrying — and maybe having a couple of kids.

After graduation, Jim did get married and gradually grew open to having a larger family. He and his wife, Maureen, became active at their parish in North Battleford, and Jim served as pro-life chairman for St. Joseph Council 7336.

They eventually had seven children and today have 17 grandchildren and counting. Last year, the McLane family was named the first runner-up for the Knights of Columbus International Family of the Year, and when Jim and Maureen recently celebrated their 40th anniversary on June 17, immense gratitude for his marriage and family was very much on Jim’s mind.

I first learned of the McLanes through their oldest child, Colleen Rouleau, who was my classmate at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family

in Washington, D.C. Colleen and her husband, Louis, were newlyweds when I met them in late 2004. I have fond memories of getting to know them and, after their first daughter was born the following year, hearing about their joys and struggles as new parents. Today, Colleen and Louis live in Edmonton, Alberta, and their own family has grown considerably.

Colleen is currently pregnant with their seventh child — Jim and Maureen’s 18th grandchild. Louis, who is trained as a theologian, is a member of Edmonton Council 1184 and has been working as a Knights of Columbus field agent for the past five years.

Not every couple is called or able to have seven children, but all who welcome children as “the supreme gift of marriage” serve as privileged witnesses and participants of God’s generous love (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 50; Humanae Vitae, 9-10). I recently had the chance to talk with the McLanes and the Rouleaus about their experience of parenthood, and what follows are some highlights from those conversations.

— Alton J. Pelowski, Editor

Jim and Maureen McLane of Battleford, Saskatchewan, join their daughter and son-inlaw, Colleen and Louis Rouleau, and the Rouleaus’ children at a playground in Edmonton, Alberta. The McLanes, who recently celebrated their 40th anniversary, were finalists for the Knights of Columbus International Family of the Year in 2017.

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Jim McLane plays with his 2-year-old granddaughter, Inès, as his wife, Maureen, looks on. The McLanes have seven adult children, and their oldest daughter, Colleen Rouleau, is pregnant with their 18th grandchild.

✼✼✼ MAUREEN: When Colleen was expecting our first grandchild, I felt a little bewildered. We still had three teenagers at home. At first, we felt like we were pretending to be grandparents, but we quickly got used to being called Grandma and Grandpa.

JIM: We really enjoy seeing all of our grandchildren get together with their cousins. We do that usually once or twice a year, and it’s just nice to see them being friends and getting along. They really look forward to seeing one another. ✼✼✼ MAUREEN: One thing I would change if I could go back is to spend a little more time with each of our children. When they are growing up, you spend so much time scolding them, especially the little boys, and you also tend to treat them as a group. I just wish I had spent more time letting each one know how much I love them individually.

JIM: I would agree, but another real blessing that you don’t anticipate is relating to your children as adults. They’re not just our sons and daughters, but have become good friends.

Without our children, my life would just not seem as fulfilled. And as we grow older, it’s comforting to know that they will be there to love us no matter what. Knowing that there are so many lonely people with no extended family makes us acutely aware of how blessed we are.

Photos by Curtis Trent

MAUREEN M CL ANE: In family life, so much can be said about the love and joy that you experience through sacrifice and suffering. I learned from my parents’ example that the sacrifices you make are nothing compared to the beauty and happiness that come from them.

I’m the second child in a family of 13 children, and my parents developed in us a love of Jesus and the Church. They instilled in us the necessity of never missing Mass on Sunday, and they never worked on Sundays, even though they were farming. They also taught us there’s no sex before marriage and that contraception was wrong, and we just accepted it.

JIM MCLANE: I’m the middle child of seven, and I also grew up knowing that going to Mass on Sundays was important and that sex before marriage was wrong. But I just thought that when we got married, we would probably use the pill and that a couple of kids would be a nice family.

When Maureen first told me about natural family planning, I was studying fertility cycles of animals in veterinary school, so it made sense to me. Once we got married and used NFP, I became more open to life. Then, when Colleen was born and I looked into her eyes, I was suddenly open to God’s will much more than before. ✼✼✼ MAUREEN: We became a certified teaching couple with the NFP group Serena Canada even before Colleen was born. And we have been teaching on and off throughout our married life.

JIM: Recently, a young woman came back and said, “NFP has completely changed my life, and I want to tell all my friends. I feel so much better not being on contraception.”

Hearing that feedback really makes it worthwhile. ✼✼✼ MAUREEN: Breastfeeding naturally spaced our children, so we didn’t use NFP to postpone pregnancy. Instead, I charted to see the fertility signs, and it helped us to conceive.

When we had two children, some people said that if we got pregnant again, they’d know that NFP doesn’t work. Around that time, a Protestant friend gave us a book that encouraged us to be open and confident about having a larger family in this secular milieu.

It wasn’t always easy to conceive, and as I approached my 40th year, I was sad, thinking my fertility years were gone.

But then we conceived our sixth — our youngest son.

JIM: When Maureen was premenopausal, we just thought for sure that we wouldn’t get pregnant again. But then we had our seventh and youngest one, Mary.

MAUREEN: I was 44 at the time. It was a surprise, but a happy surprise. ✼✼✼ JIM: Being a member of the Knights of Columbus has been a very positive experience. Maureen and I got involved early on in the pro-life movement, and my council was very supportive. They were also very understanding that you have to spend time with your kids and often can’t make it to monthly meetings. I’m an honorary lifetime member now and a Fourth Degree Knight as well.

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COLLEEN ROULEAU: Growing up with six siblings was a very positive experience, and I remember being excited every time my parents said they were having another baby.

To me, one of the most important things was the consistency between what my parents said and how they lived their marriage. With my maternal grandparents too, the Church’s teaching was always related to coming to know who Christ was. Seeing an integrated faith, which wasn’t just about “rules,” was very attractive to me.

Though we had formal religious instruction, I was also very impacted by the informal instruction, like going to pro-life events and associating with other families who were living the faith in a really joyful way.

LOUIS ROULEAU: For my parents, it was clear that the faith was the source of life and really the most precious thing, which they also passed on to us.

As a teen, I started to get involved in youth retreats and came to encounter the faith in a more formal way, but certainly the seeds were planted in the family.

Then, when we met at college, we were both studying theology, and Pope John Paul II had been a huge influence on us both. His witness inspired us to embrace the life of faith and the call to marriage as a vocation. He presented family life as something really beautiful, as a path to holiness and happiness, and it corresponded to the desire of our hearts. ✼✼✼ COLLEEN: We were married in June 2004, and Gabrielle was born in October 2005. While we were always open to having children, at times we also used NFP to wait.

LOUIS: There is a four-year gap between our third and our

fourth. That was a period where I was finishing my studies, and Colleen also had a miscarriage.

COLLEEN: I wasn’t feeling well those months and I was quite overwhelmed with the first three, who were fairly close together.

LOUIS: Looking back, I see it as a period when our marriage grew stronger. Practicing NFP really deepened our intimacy and communication.

COLLEEN: Still, we’re both very glad we didn’t wait to have children until we finished school. Though it’s different for everyone, starting our own family soon after our marriage was something neither of us regret. ✼✼✼ LOUIS: It’s very clear that a sibling is a beautiful gift for a child. They don’t always get along, but they do play together and help each other. Those interactions are very dynamic and enrich our everyday experience as a family.

COLLEEN: It’s fun to see the different ways they interact. Our 4-year-old son has a special little friendship with our 9-yearold daughter, for example. There are all of these different relationships that multiply when you have more than two children. ✼✼✼ LOUIS: We’ve had two miscarriages during our marriage. When we did have more children, I was filled with such an abundance of joy. I had so much gratitude for what we have been given.

COLLEEN: I think we gain a greater awareness of fragility as we get older. You realize that your life is being carried by Someone else, and you can’t decide how everything is going to play out. The element of gift definitely becomes very real; these are not things you simply predetermine or plan.

I think the practice of NFP makes you realize that, too, because you see that fertility isn’t something you can just take for granted. Your body and your marriage are not things that you control and manipulate. ✼✼✼ COLLEEN: We are both grateful to be close to our extended families, and it’s encouraging to see our siblings being open to life and raising their children in the Church. We also belong to a homeschool co-op with 10 other Catholic families — almost 60 children! Forming friendships with other families creates a real community. ✼✼✼ LOUIS: After finishing a temporary teaching contract, it seemed we would need to move far away from our families to continue teaching in my field. For the sake of our children, we weren’t prepared to do that.

I had thought about being a Knights of Columbus field agent from the time our first field agent came to see us in 2007. I was still finishing my studies and had recently joined the Knights here in Edmonton.

COLLEEN: And I said we have to get life insurance, because if anything happens to Louis, I would be in big trouble.

LOUIS: So our field agent came over, and there was something about that interaction that impressed me. When my job as a professor and theologian was coming to an end, I saw it as an opportunity to continue to serve the Church.♦ JULY 2018

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1964

2004

The Prophetic Vision of Blessed Paul VI Fifty years ago, the Catholic Church anticipated the consequences of the sexual revolution

by Mary Eberstadt

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Opposite page, from left: Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, holds a copy of her bestselling book Sex and the Single Girl in 1964. • Actress Jennifer O’Neill gives a “Silent No More” testimony in front of the U.S. Supreme Court at the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., Jan. 22, 2004.

ize abortion laws in countries around the world did not begin until the first third of the 20th century, as birth control devices came into wider circulation. The United States and most other countries did not start liberalizing abortion laws until the sexual revolution was underway. Roe v. Wade comes after the pill, not before. The mass use of contraception has plainly called forth the demand for more abort is no exaggeration to say that Humanae Vitae was — tion, the worst “lowering” of standards of all. and remains — one of the most globally rejected docIn addition, Humanae Vitae warned of “the danger of uments of the modern age. In reiterating 2,000 years of this power [contraception] passing into the hands of pubChurch teaching about human life, including the pro- lic authorities.” This is exactly what happened subsescription against artificial contraception, the encyclical quently in China via its long-standing, barbaric confronted a world where many men and women had al- “one-child policy” between 1979 and 2016, replete with ready embraced “the pill,” which had been approved by forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations. Another the FDA eight years earlier. example is the Indian government’s foray into coercive use Yet to contemplate the Church’s “controversial” stand of contraception in 1976 and 1977. A softer kind of coon birth control 50 years after Humanae Vitae’s publica- ercion has also appeared in Western nations. In the 1990s tion is to encounter a great irony. The document’s sig- and beyond, for example, some U.S. judges backed statenature predictions have been imposed implantation of long-term vindicated as few predictions contraceptives for women convicted ever are: in ways that its author, of crimes.

Pope Paul VI, could not possiAnother proof of the encyclical’s bly have foreseen, including by prescience could not have been foreHE DOCUMENT’S information that did not exist seen 50 years ago, though it is wellwhen the document was written documented in social science today.

SIGNATURE PREDICTIONS and by scholars and others with That is the explosion of “loneliness HAVE BEEN VINDICATED no interest whatsoever in its studies” in all the advanced nations teaching.

— empirical studies showing how AS FEW PREDICTIONS Consider Humanae Vitae’s the shrinkage of the family has led specific apprehensions about to epidemic isolation and loss of EVER ARE. what the world would look like human contact, especially among if artificial contraception bethe elderly. Without doubt, what came widespread. Articulated in unites these tragic portraits is what section 17 of the document, Humanae Vitae so prophetically rethese include a “general lowering of moral standards” and sisted: the sexual revolution which has been operating at a loss of respect for women. full throttle in Western nations for half a century now — Fifty years later, pornography is ubiquitous; divorce, co- driving up divorce rates, driving down marriage rates and habitation, and fatherless homes are too; and the public emptying cradles. square at this very moment is convulsed with sex scandals Many well-intentioned people, including many involving one prominent man after another — all of Catholics, have joined the contraceptive culture with the whom fell from grace because they took the sexual avail- idea that their decisions are merely private. But with ability of women for granted. What is the #MeToo move- every passing year, perfectly secular social science shows ment but proof that contraception has emboldened the massive and deleterious public consequences of the predatory men? sexual revolution itself. Rejected though it may be by It is also plain that the predicted “lowering of moral stan- many, Humanae Vitae and its uncanny warnings are the dards” would come to include disrespect not only for single best explanatory model of our contemporary landwomen but for the human fetus, too. Legal reasoning jus- scape. And the teachings that it affirms remain, in the tifying freedom to contracept would go on to be used as words of the document’s prophetic author, “a sign of conjustification for freedom to abort, most notably in the tradiction” (cf. Lk 2:34) and a path to creating “a truly United States. It was only eight short years from Griswold human civilization” (18).♦ v. Connecticut to Roe v. Wade — and the logic used to justify abortion on demand depended entirely on the “right to pri- MARY EBERSTADT is a senior fellow at the Faith and vacy” established earlier regarding contraception.

Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of sevHistory also connects the causal dots between contra- eral books, including Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paraception and abortion in another way. The push to liberal- doxes of the Sexual Revolution (Ignatius, 2013).

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OPPOSITE PAGE, LEfT: Photo by Walker/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images — RIGhT: Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

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Contraception and the Law: A Brief History March 3, 1873 The U.S. Congress passes the Comstock Laws, criminalizing the publication and distribution of information promoting abortion or contraception.

States soon enact their own versions of the laws.

June 14, 1914 Margaret Sanger is indicted in New York for distributing information on contraceptives. She flees to England rather than face a possible five-year jail sentence. Two years later, she illegally opens the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Planned Parenthood traces its origins to this event. A Canadian physician, Dr. Elizabeth Bagshaw, similarly establishes an illegal family planning clinic in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1932.

decision relies on a “right to privacy,” which the court reads into the Constitution.

argument in the Griswold and Eisenstadt cases.

March 22, 1972 In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Supreme Court declares a Massachusetts law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to unmarried persons unconstitutional.

June 29, 1992 In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirms the central holding of Roe v. Wade, citing “the fact that for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”

June 27, 1969 Canada decriminalizes the sale of contraceptives. A month earlier, a related bill decriminalized homosexual acts and allowed abortion under certain conditions.

March 17, 1937 Six months after being arrested and charged for disseminating information about contraception in a poor area of Ottawa, Ontario, Dorothea Palmer is acquitted on the grounds that her actions were done in the interest of the public good. Dissemination of birth control information remains illegal in Canada, but it is no longer prosecuted.

June 23, 1960 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the birth control pill as an oral contraceptive.

June 7, 1965 In Griswold v. Connecticut — a case prompted by Planned Parenthood opening a clinic in New Haven, Conn. — the U.S. Supreme Court rules that married couples have the right to use contraception. The

The first March for Life in Washington, D.C., passes the U.S. Supreme Court building on the one-year anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Jan. 22, 1973 In Roe v. Wade, the court strikes down state laws criminalizing abortion, citing the “right to privacy”

Jan. 28, 1988 The Supreme Court of Canada, ruling in R. v. Morgentaler, overturns abortion provisions in the Criminal Code, thereby allowing abortion in all circumstances.

July 28, 1999 The FDA approves the Plan B emergency contraception “morning-after pill” as a prescription drug. In August 2006, it is made available over the counter for consumers 18 and older. In June 2013, age restrictions for over-the-counter sale are lifted.

Aug. 1, 2011 The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services mandates contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court later rules in favor of religious liberty exemptions for Hobby Lobby Stores (June 2014), the Little Sisters of the Poor and others (May 2016). A May 2017 executive order broadens exemptions to the mandate.

#MeToo and Humanae Vitae Revelations of sexual assault invite our culture to take a second look at how we got here and how the Catholic Church can show us the way out

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hat do present-day Hollywood sex scandals have to do with a 50-year-old papal encyclical? In Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI clearly recognized that the gift of sex, by its nature, can easily devolve into self-interested mutual use, or even unilateral imposition, if it is not ordered to a good held in common: in particular, children. “A man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods,” he wrote, “may forget the 12 ♦ C O L U M B I A ♦

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reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires” (HV, 17).

This is more than a little relevant to the current #MeToo moment. Without descending into the detailed accusations of so many women, we can summarize #MeToo sex as a set of words and acts of a sexual nature done to project power or

Thinkstock

by Helen Alvaré

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CNS photo/Bob Roller

to gain pleasure for one person. It is the understatement of the year to say that these words and actions “lack mutuality” or a common — let alone good — end.

When people ask us, therefore, what Catholics are so concerned about when it Helen Alvaré comes to contraception, it is precisely this: the breaking apart of what should be held together, with the result that sex loses its beautiful mutuality and becomes something else. When even the very thought of children is far removed from sexual intimacy, sex struggles to serve the man and woman together. Why? Because the man and woman’s possible future — i.e., a child, a family, a marriage, extended kin, even love — is cut off from their present.

In this way — in the words of renowned sociologist Anthony Giddens in his book The Transformation of Intimacy — sex becomes “plastic.” Once sex is severed from reproduction, kinship and “the generations,” Giddens explains, it takes on a subjectively malleable meaning and is reduced to pure pleasure.

Sexuality then becomes “a property of the individual” and “internally referential,” a tool for forging one’s self-identity.

Ironies abound in all of this, especially when we recall that the primary arguments for contraception involved improving marital love and freeing women.

Instead, the marriage rate has plummeted, and scholars write about the “paradox of women’s declining happiness.” But we are way past irony by the time we get to #MeToo. We are all the way to a place where sex — untethered from the meanings naturally associated with man and woman jointly building a family and a future — can mean whatever individual men decide it means to them, even violence and power.

On the flip side, Paul VI observed that when a married couple’s sexual relationship “fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood” (HV, 12), their union can thereby grow stronger.

Most people can understand that when it is severed from a joint future, sex becomes something less than it is meant to be. Perhaps our current #MeToo crisis has the potential to provoke greater sympathy for Humanae Vitae’s holistic vision of human sexuality and a second look at the Church’s age-old wisdom.♦ HELEN M. ALVARÉ is professor of law at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, and cofounder of the movement Women Speak for Themselves (womenspeakforthemselves.com).

What Ever Happened to the Population Bomb?

by Steven W. Mosher FiFty years ago, the population controllers were in full cry, warning that humanity was breeding itself off the face of the planet.

Leading the pack was stanford University professor Paul ehrlich, bestselling author of The Population Bomb, published within weeks of Humanae Vitae in 1968. ehrlich was famous for wanting to put contraceptives in the water supply. He argued that only a limited number of couples should be allowed to conceive a child each year; these lucky few would be issued an antidote to the sterilizing agent by the government.

China didn’t go quite this far, but it did launch its infamous one-child policy in 1980. tens of millions of pregnant women were rounded up, charged with the “crime” of being pregnant without permission, and dragged off to hospitals, where their unborn children were forcibly aborted.

Pope Paul Vi had warned that this would happen. He wrote in Humanae Vitae that governments might be prompted by the fear of overpopulation to “take even harsher measures to avert this danger” (2). other governments, including in india, Vietnam and North Korea, also launched coercive campaigns to drive down the birth rate in the decades that followed, although none matched China’s in its sheer brutality. a half-century later, it is clear that the much-hyped “population bomb” is a bust. Most of the nations of the world are now facing what we could call a “birth deficit,” and the latest numbers paint a picture of a world on the brink of demographic freefall: • according to the World Bank, worldwide fertility has been cut in half, dropping from 5.0 children per women in 1960 to only 2.4 today.

World population will peak in a decade or two and then start spiraling downward.

• the Centers for Disease Control reports that U.s. fertility rate in 2017 was the lowest on record. american women are now averaging only 1.76 children, a sharp drop from 2.08 only a decade ago.

• Canada is in even worse shape, with statistics Canada stating that the fertility rate in 2016 was only 1.54. this is on par with aging europe, where falling birthrates are causing a demographic crisis.

• the Japanese government says that its shrinking population is the “biggest challenge” for economic growth.

• even China, the poster child of forced-pace population control, has announced plans to lift its restrictions on childbearing. Why? Because it faces a nationwide labor shortage.

• if the entire population of the world were squeezed into an area the size of arizona, the population density would still be less than that of Manhattan. the war on people that the overpopulation scare prompted is a human tragedy of historic proportions. if overpopulation was one of the great myths of the 20th century, then underpopulation is the stark reality of the 21st.♦

steVeN W. MosHer is president of the Virginia-based Population research institute and the author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order (2017).

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NFP: TRULY A GODSEND Natural family planning helped us to both avoid and achieve pregnancy, and it saved my wife’s life

by James Cueva

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s we sat on our living room couch two years ago, my wife, Whitney, said with tears in her eyes, “I’m not ready to die.” She was 33 with an 18-month-old and had just been diagnosed with aggressive ovarian cancer. Thank God we had a preemptive line of defense that many couples aren’t even aware of: natural family planning.

When we got married in 2010, I couldn’t have imagined the impact that using and teaching NFP would have on our lives. Whitney, a convert, and I, a “cradle Catholic,” wholeheartedly accepted the Church’s teaching on birth control. For us, fertility was not something to control but to understand and navigate. We effectively used NFP to avoid pregnancy for the first few years of our marriage.

When we did try for a child, we conceived on our first attempt — but shortly after, we miscarried our little John Paul. It was a very sad time for us, and Whitney’s anxiety from the miscarriage affected our attempts to conceive again. I finally offered to do the NFP charting myself, which helped ease her worries.

In December 2013, Whitney was sick and stressed from her work as a teacher, and I noticed that she ovulated later than

usual. Little did she know, when she returned from visiting her mom over Christmas break, that she was just entering the fertile phase of her cycle. Two weeks later, when I came home from work and saw her drinking a beer, I said, “You might want to let me finish that.” Her eyes looked like they might pop out of her head when I explained why. Nine months later, we were holding Elijah in our arms.

Whitney’s fertility returned about a year later, but after two full cycles, things got really weird. Knowing that a radical and unexplained change in charting often signals a medical problem, I suggested she see a doctor. That’s when she received the cancer diagnosis. A large tumor was then removed from her left ovary together with part of the fallopian tube.

After months of recovery, Whitney told me she wanted to try for our second child. Her fertility signs had returned, and knowing how to navigate the fertility cycle, we got pregnant on our first try, again. With one ovary and fallopian tube, we conceived Lucy — our miracle baby.

During marriage preparation, I thought NFP was just a way to know when we could make love without getting pregnant.

Natural Family Planning vs. Contraception: What’s the Difference?

by Janet E. Smith

Moral Differences Contraception: Those who use contraception treat fertility as a defect. They act to prevent a potential life-giving act from being life-giving. Moreover, contraception greatly reduces the meaning of the marital act, which by its very nature is meant to 14 ♦ C O L U M B I A ♦

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Since 2004, Dr. Janet Smith has held the Father Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, a position largely funded by the Knights of Columbus Michigan State Council.

express complete self-giving and commitment.

What expresses this better than saying, “I am willing to be a parent with you”?

Natural Family Planning: The nature of married love calls couples to give themselves wholly to one another in an intimate language that says, “I make a complete gift of myself to you. I want only what is good for you. I am willing to be a parent with you.”

Couples using NFP acknowledge the gift of fertility and do not contradict the intimate language of the body, thereby respecting God’s plan for sexuality.

Relationship Effects Contraception: The availability of contraception encourages promiscuity. It leads many men and women to engage in sexual relationships with persons they

Courtesy photo

SOME PEOPLE claim contraception and natural family planning are essentially the same: Both can be used by couples who want to have sexual intercourse but who don’t want to have a baby. There is more to an action, however, than the motivation behind it. Intentionally preventing the life-giving potential of sexual intimacy is not the same as the prudent reliance on periodic abstinence to avoid conception. Below are four ways they are different:

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James Cueva, a member of Houston (Texas) Council 803, and his wife, Whitney, spend time with their two young children in their Houston home.

Photo by Ricardo Merendoni

I’ve come to understand it as something much more. Christ has given all of himself as a gift on the cross and in the Eucharist, and my wife and I give all of ourselves to each other in marriage. In accepting Whitney’s fertility, I am accepting all of her, for her fertility is an essential part of what makes her a woman, my wife and the mother of our children. And

may not know well and have no intention of marrying, and sometimes with persons they don’t even like. Even when they have contraceptive sex with those whom they believe they love, the use of contraception can seem to make unnecessary such conversations as: “What happens if our contraception fails?” That question alone can put a relationship in danger! Contraception also facilitates cohabitation, which generally is bad preparation for marriage.

Natural Family Planning: NFP fosters chastity and requires commitment. Those who have practiced abstinence before marriage find NFP easier than those who have been sexually active. They know abstinence can be an expression of love rather than a deprivation, and they generally have a larger “tool kit” for showing love and affection — e.g., going for walks, dancing, cooking together and cuddling. NFP also facilitates strong communication skills, which is one of the important glues for a relationship.

thanks in part to an early warning NFP gave us, she is now cancer free.♦ JAMES CUEVA lives with his wife, Whitney, and their two children in Houston, Texas. He is a member of Houston Council 803.

Social Consequences Contraception: Among the many negative consequences of widespread contraception are a great increase in unwed pregnancy, single parenthood, abortion and divorce. Singleparent families are more likely to suffer poverty and hardship, and the children have many more difficulties achieving success in life and relationships.

Natural Family Planning: Studies show that couples who use NFP almost never divorce. Let that sink in. Marriages are strengthened by what it takes to use NFP successfully: self-discipline, commitment, communication, mutual agreement on goals, generosity, and a love for God’s gift of sexuality.

Health Effects Contraception: The various forms of hormonal contraception have a multitude of bad physical side effects, including an increased risk of breast cancer and strokes. (EdiTor’S NoTE:

See additional risks on page 25.) This is unsurprising, since these forms of contraception fill a woman’s body with synthetic hormones that suppress her natural hormones and fertility.

Natural Family Planning: NFP has no bad physical side effects. None. To the contrary, a woman who knows how to chart her cycles has a treasure trove of information that helps her and her physician understand any problems she may have with fertility and health concerns that come with hormonal imbalance, most of which can be treated by changes in diet and by vitamin and mineral supplements.♦

JANET E. SMiTH holds the Father Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in detroit. She has authored and edited several books on the topic of Humanae Vitae, most recently Self-Gift: Humanae Vitae and the Thought of John Paul II (2018).

More than 2 million copies of her talk “Contraception: Why Not” have been distributed.

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OUR CROSS AND OUR BLESSINGS Suffering from infertility expanded our understanding of fruitfulness in marriage

by Elizabeth Kirk

y husband, Bill, and I married a bit later in life, and in preparation we discussed just about every possible source of conflict: money, work commitments, communication styles — even who would get which side of the bed! We considered carefully the ways in which we would share responsibilities and balance our interests. We both came from families with seven children and had a realistic understanding of the blessings and burdens associated with large families. However, we never once talked about — or even thought about — the possibility that we might face infertility. The most painful cross in our married lives is one that we never anticipated.

Facing infertility was devastating, for it goes to the very heart of what it means to be married and to one’s identity as a woman and as a man. After all, children are the visible sign of spousal union and love (in a child, the two are literally made one). St. John Paul II spoke about how the ability to conceive and bear children gives rise to woman’s particular “feminine genius” — that is, her special ability to give and receive the human person in love. A woman unable to conceive and give birth may therefore question her worth as a woman.

According to some studies, women struggling with infertility report equivalent levels of anxiety and depression as women with cancer or heart disease. For the man who suffers from infertility, the inability to actually provide a family may be as stressful as being unable to provide for his family.

Accepting this burden is difficult and, in the end, requires the willing embrace of the cross. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Spe Salvi, “It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love” (37).

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NaProTechnology and reproductive immunology. With the help of that treatment and a miracle from Our Lady of Good Help in Wisconsin, after seven years of marriage, we did conceive a little one whom I then miscarried late in the first trimester. Despite the outcome, we were so grateful to have been given the gift of that little life, to see the heartbeat on the ultrasound and to look forward to meeting one day in heaven.

Very early in our journey, our conversations about building our family developed into a more expansive concept of what it meant to be fruitful in marriage. Through prayer and conversation, we understood that what we desired most was to

Photo by Ryan Nicholson

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Bill and Elizabeth Kirk relax with their four children, all of whom were adopted, in the backyard of their home in Overland Park, Kan.

be a mother and father together to a child who needed parents. This was our motivation to pursue adoption as a way to build our family.

We are now parents of four beautiful children. We were thrilled when we were chosen to be their parents and honored that we were trusted to be “Mama” and “Papa” to them.

Whether biological or adopted, a child is not a possession or a right, but rather a gift. We know what an enormous, selfless decision adoption was for their birth families, and we are so grateful as we strive to be worthy of their sacrifice.

In Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis observed, “The choice of

adoption and foster care expresses a particular kind of fruitfulness in the marriage experience” (180). For me and my husband, our struggle with infertility helped us to understand that at the root of what it means to have a “fruitful” marriage is the same basic vocation of every follower of Christ — to be truly open to God’s call to reflect his creative love.♦ ELIZABETH KIRK is a lawyer, independent scholar and public speaker who lives with her family in Overland Park, Kansas. Her husband, Bill, is a member of Ascension Council 10932 in Overland Park.

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A HUSBAND AND A HEALER An OB-GYN Knight seeks ethical fertility treatments for his wife and patients

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orothy Yeung felt as if God had passed her over.

Finding herself unable to get pregnant, she couldn’t understand how this could be part of her vocation.

She had met her husband, Dr. Patrick Yeung, in 2004 at an Advent party in Washington, D.C. Dorothy was working as a lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee at the time, and Patrick was a resident physician 18 ♦ C O L U M B I A ♦

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in obstetrics and gynecology at Georgetown University.

As an RCIA candidate, Dorothy had recently been introduced to St. John Paul II’s teachings on the theology of the body.

“That’s what really drew us together,” she said. “We discovered we had a common vision for being open to life in marriage and upholding the dignity of life.”

Photo by Lisa Johnston

by Jennifer Brinker

Photo by Lisa Johnston/Courtesy of St. Louis Review

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But when they had trouble conceiving after marrying in 2006, their shared vision was turned upside down.

“It was crushing,” Dorothy said. “I assumed that I was going to have a ton of babies. Infertility is a very heavy cross for anyone to carry, and we did not feel prepared for that.”

For the Yeungs, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) was out of the question.

“The frozen embryos, the reduction of embryos — those are moral issues, but ancillary to the main reason why IVF is wrong,” explained Patrick, 46, a member of Divine Mercy Council 13823 in Sunset Hills, Mo. “The Church’s teaching is that you cannot divide the two ends of marriage. The Catechism talks about how every child has the right to be born directly out of the marital embrace. How a baby is created is important.”

During his medical training, Patrick had become familiar with the work of Thomas Hilgers, the pioneering medical doctor behind the Church-approved Creighton Model FertilityCare System as well as NaPro (Natural Procreative) Technology, a companion medicine-based health science that monitors and maintains a woman’s reproductive health.

Hilgers, a member of St. John Vianney Council 7740 in Omaha, Neb., founded the Pope Paul VI Institute for Human Reproduction in Omaha in 1985 as a direct response to the pope’s call for medical doctors to “continue constant in their resolution always to support those lines of action which accord with faith and with right reason” (Humanae Vitae, 27).

As Patrick was becoming more familiar with NaPro Technology, Dorothy was diagnosed with stage-four endometriosis, which happened to be the area that Patrick specialized in post residency.

“It was a struggle throughout my life,” Dorothy recalled. “I was in pain. I just wanted to get the disease out of my body.”

In 2008, Dorothy underwent the first of several surgeries with Dr. Ken Sinervo, a renowned endometriosis specialist in Atlanta with whom Patrick trained. Later that year, Patrick founded Duke University’s Center for Endometriosis Research and Treatment.

Still unable to conceive, the couple sought the adoption of their first child, Lucy, who is now 8 years old.

“It turned out to be an amazing, beautiful path” to parenthood, Patrick said. “To be chosen as someone’s mother and father by another human being is such a humbling grace and blessing.”

Six months after the adoption of Lucy, Dorothy became pregnant with Cecilia, now 7 years old.

In 2011, the Yeungs moved to St. Louis, where Patrick established the SLUCare Center for Endometriosis at SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital — the same hospital where Dr. Hilgers and his team in the 1970s began developing what would become the Creighton Model.

Above: Dr. Patrick Yeung stands in an operating room at St. Mary’s Hospital in St. Louis. He is holding a laser used with a technique he developed to surgically treat endometriosis. • Opposite page: Dr. Yeung, who is a member of Divine Mercy Council 13823 in Sunset Hills, Mo., and his wife, Dorothy, are pictured with their four children outside their home.

In 2015, Patrick began the SLUCare Restorative Fertility Clinic at St. Mary’s to offer comprehensive NaPro Technology services. He often gives talks to groups about alternatives to IVF and continues to advance the science of natural fertility care.

Patrick is now among a growing number of OB-GYNs around the world who are using medical and surgical techniques to address the root causes of gynecologic problems, which commonly include menstrual irregularities, pain and infertility. These treatments have also been shown to be more effective than IVF in helping couples have children.

“The CDC (Centers for Disease Control) shows the success rate of IVF is about 32 percent,” Patrick noted.

“NaPro’s success has been shown to be more than double that in 1-2 years of treatment, and this includes many patients who have already tried IVF.” Thanks to effective, ethical treatment, the Yeungs have since had two more children: Josephine, 2, and Max, 4 months.

“Having gone through this personally with my wife, I really feel like I can better relate to my patients,” Patrick said. “I tell them that we’re all in this together. Nothing is guaranteed, and it takes time to find the underlying problems, but in the process, patients get answers and feel better. Good ethics is good medicine.”♦ JENNIFER BRINKER is a reporter for the St. Louis Review and Catholic St. Louis, publications of the Archdiocese of St. Louis.

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The Science and Methods of Fertility Awareness Scientific advances have provided healthy, effective ways to monitor a woman’s natural cycle

◉ Billings Ovulation Method Dr. John Billings, a Catholic physician in Melbourne, Australia, began work in 1953 on a method of nFP based on observing changes in sensation of cervical mucus. he was joined by his wife, Dr. evelyn Billings, in developing the Billings Ovulation Method (billings.life) and teaching it throughout the world. It was found to be highly effective by the World health Organization, and it continues to be used in more than 100 countries today. ◉ Symptothermal Method Another method of nFP was developed in the 1960s based on combined observations of basal body temperature, cervical mucus and cervical position. the Couple to Couple League (ccli.org), founded in 1971 by John and Sheila Kippley; Serena Canada (serena.ca), founded in 1955 by Gilles and Rita Breault; and SymptoPro (symptopro.org), founded in 1983 by Rose and Mike Fuller, all rely on the symptothermal method today. ◉ Creighton Model In the late 1970s, Dr. thomas W. hilgers developed the Creighton Model FertilityCare System (creightonmodel.com). through tracking and charting observations of cervical mucus in a standardized manner, the model generates detailed information about a woman’s reproductive health.

An OB-GYn in Omaha, neb., Dr. hilgers also founded the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of human Reproduction (popepaulvi.com) in 1984 and later developed naPro (natural Procreative) technology (naprotechnology.com) in 2004 — providing medical and surgical treatments that maintain women’s health and cooperate with the reproductive system. ◉ Marquette Model Developed in the 1990s at Marquette University’s Institute for natural Family Planning, the Marquette Model (nfp.marquette.edu) teaches women to identify their fertile window and their periods of infertility by using two key biomarkers, cervical fluid and urinary hormone levels, using an electronic fertility monitor.

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Natural family planning pioneers Drs. John and Evelyn Billings, Catholic physicians from Australia who traveled the world teaching and promoting the method that bears their name, are pictured in their home in the late 1980s. ◉ Standard Days and TwoDay Methods In 2001, researchers at Georgetown University developed the Standard Days Method (cyclebeads.com), a calendar-based method that relies on tracking a woman’s cycle and estimating her fertile period based on her cycle length. the Georgetown researchers also developed the twoDay Method (twodaymethod.com), based on daily monitoring of cervical secretions. ◉ Fertility Education and Medical Management FeMM (femmhealth.org) was developed in 2010 by Anna halpine, founder of World Youth Alliance, to teach women to track the signs of their cycle to better understand their bodies and reproductive health. the goal is to empower women to identify signs of health or potential problems so they may seek treatment early. the method may also be used by couples for family planning. ◉ Fertility Tracking Apps In early 2017, the first government-certified fertility app was approved for use in europe. today, there are more than 100 easy-to-use, downloadable apps that offer women a convenient way to track their fertility and menstrual cycles with a high degree of accuracy. Although some do not use evidence-based methods, such apps are growing in popularity and playing a revolutionary role in introducing natural family planning to a broader population.

More information about evidence-based fertility awareness and fertility tracking apps can be found at FACTSaboutFertility.org, the website for FACtS — Fertility Appreciation Collaborative to teach the Science.

FACtS was founded in 2010 by two family physicians, Dr. Marguerite Duane and Dr. Bob Motley, to help educate future health care professionals about FABMs. this growing medical community, in turn, is now empowering patients to better care for their reproductive health.♦

TOP: Photo by John Casamento — BOTTOM: Thinkstock

In the 1920s, two independent fertility researchers, Dr. Kyusaku Ogino in Japan and Dr. hermann Knaus in Austria, discovered that ovulation consistently occurs about 12-16 days prior to a woman’s next period.

Several years later, Drs. John Smulders and Leo Latz, Catholic physicians in the netherlands and Chicago, each used this data to develop formulas by which couples could predict their fertile window based on previous cycle lengths. this became known as the Rhythm Method. eventually, physicians and researchers developed modern fertility awareness based methods (FABMs), which monitor biological markers as signs of fertility. When used to avoid pregnancy, these evidence-based methods have been shown to have very high rates of effectiveness, comparable to hormonal birth control. Unlike contraception, however, various FABMs are also used to help couples achieve conception and to monitor women’s overall reproductive health. here is a historical overview of common methods of fertility awareness used today:

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THE ‘YES’ OF CHASTITY A young, single Knight shares how virtue and sexual integrity can help build a culture of life and love

by Chad Etzel

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s an exercise and sports science major at Oregon State University, Chad Etzel dreamed of becoming an NBA scout or athletic director. Instead, he signed up to share the message of chastity with youth across North America.

Etzel, who is 27 and unmarried, has spent the last four years as a missionary with the Culture Project (restoreculture.com), a Philadelphia-based initiative that began in 2014 with the goal of educating fellow young people about the dignity of the human person and sexual integrity. A member of St. Thomas More Council 10205 in Centennial, Colo., Etzel spoke with Columbia about his experience.

When I speak to young people, I try to convey three key ideas about chastity.

First, chastity is something positive. It is not a “no” to sex; that’s abstinence. Chastity involves saying no and making sacrifices, but it’s for a greater “yes.” I use the analogy of sports: If an athlete truly wants to be a champion, he has to say no to things like lying on the couch, playing video games all day, and eating wrong types of foods. Well, it’s the same with love. You say no to using people, to pornography and to sex outside of marriage because you want to say yes to a love that lasts and yes to the love of God. Part of what attracted me to this Second, chastity is a virtue. And a mission stems from my personal virtue is like a spiritual strength. Just as background. My parents got dicourage is the strength to be brave in vorced when I was 7, which left a big the time of battle, chastity is the wound. Growing up, I watched as strength to say no to sexual temptaother relationships fell apart around tions — such as when we are tempted me, and the media portrayed sex as to use someone or view pornography if men and women are just objects to — because we want to say yes to the be used. love we are made for.

At Oregon State, where I joined Third, chastity is integrity. We are the Knights of Columbus and got inwhole persons, and our mind, heart and volved with the Newman Center, I desires should all be directed toward was introduced to Pope John Paul II’s what is good. Secular culture says, “FolFor the past four years, Chad Etzel, a member of theology of the body, and its message low your desires and just go wherever St. Thomas More Council 10205 in Centennial, really resonated with me. I also stumthey lead you.” It’s true that we don’t Colo., has spoken to young audiences about human bled upon a book titled Sex and the want to be at war with our desires, but dignity and the virtue of chastity.

Soul by Donna Freitas, a researcher if we just allow our passions to rule us who interviewed college students — without using our intellect and will across America about sex and discovered a disturbing pattern — it can easily lead to destructive places. Chastity as integrity of pain and brokenness. I remember wanting to be able to helps us go in the right direction. This can be difficult to do share what I had learned about chastity with these students. at first, but by building and exercising these spiritual muscles, Now, with the Culture Project, I’m part of a team of young so to speak, good decisions become easier over time. people that travels all over the United States, as well as to To young people discerning their vocation or struggling with Canada and Mexico. It’s an incredible community. In the first chastity, I give the following advice. Number one: Pray, and trust year, we do a dating fast that is very helpful for taking a step in God. He has a plan for you. Finding a good, intentional comback from romantic relationships and seeing others for the munity is also very important. Join a men’s or women’s group or good of who they are and not necessarily a potential spouse. maybe a Bible study. Finally, personal formation and learning This helps us grow as brothers and sisters with our fellow more about what the Church teaches is key. Study the Bible, read missionaries. the Catechism and tap into the rich wisdom of the Church.♦ JULY 2018

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GOOD NEWS ABOUT HARD TEACHINGS An interview with Msgr. David Toups about accompanying those who struggle with the Church’s teachings about sex and marriage

by Columbia staff

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hen even the pews are filled with people who don’t follow Catholic teachings about sex, what’s a priest to do?

Is there any hope of evangelizing a new generation?

To answer questions such as these, Columbia recently spoke with Msgr. David L. Toups, 47. A priest of the Diocese of St. Petersburg for 21 years, Msgr. Toups was named rector and president of St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach, Fla., in 2012. He previously served in parish ministry and as associate director of the Secretariat of Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Msgr. Toups is also a longtime Knight of Columbus and member of St. Jude Council 6383 in Spring Hill, Fla. He noted that nearly all of his seminarians are proud members of the Knights as well.

COLUMBIA: How have you faced the challenge that the majority of Catholics do not embrace the Church’s teachings about sexuality and procreation?

MSGR. DAVID TOUPS: We always have to focus on the lifegiving, positive nature of the Good News. Too often, people understand the Gospel as a matter of what we should do and shouldn’t do, as opposed to focusing on the goodness that God has planned for us when we live in his ways. The teachings reaffirmed in Humanae Vitae are very countercultural, but also so incredibly life-giving and positive. We need to share this with them, and help them understand that it’s good for them — it’s truly good news.

All we can do is present the truth, beauty and goodness of the Church’s vision and hope that in their private lives, people respond to it. And generally, I have found that couples are intellectually open. When the Church’s vision for marriage and family is presented reasonably, clearly and with love, there’s not much you can do to refute it. To put it into practice is the uphill battle.

The Evil One wants people to believe that it is impossible to be faithful — and we really have to call that out as a lie.

People also say that celibacy is impossible to live, yet the vast majority of our priests live holy lives in chaste celibacy.

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COLUMBIA: Do you have any memorable experiences of serving as a pastor and helping married couples to accept and live the Church’s teachings?

MSGR. TOUPS: Two images stand out. One is of a young couple — I was giving my pitch about natural family planning, really doing my best to get them on track. Finally, I asked if they would consider NFP, and they said “No.” Then they added, “Well, Father, we really don’t feel that we need to. We want to be open to life all of the time.” It was a very humbling experience for them to respond in that way. Another is a married couple who had never known the Church’s teaching.

When they heard it, they realized they had made mistakes in their marriage and experienced a conversion. They decided to reverse a vasectomy and had two more beautiful children, whom I had the privilege of baptizing.

COLUMBIA: What role do teachings on marriage and openness to life play in the formation of future priests?

MSGR. TOUPS: In their courses in moral theology and sexual morality, seminarians today are exposed to topics like the theology of the body and natural family planning so that they can help couples wrestle with these very real moral questions in their lives. At the two seminaries here in Florida, the bishops have also requested that we bring in an outside speaker every year, such as a doctor or a married couple who teaches NFP. I see as very hopeful the fact that seminarians today have no preconceived bias against the Church’s teaching. There is a great openness among our future priests to know what the Church teaches and the desire to hand it on. Certainly, our men here have amazing pastoral hearts and want to present this teaching with great love and gentleness, which is how all teachings of the Church must be presented.

COLUMBIA: What advice would you give to fellow priests who did not receive this formation and are reluctant to talk about these hard teachings?

MSGR. TOUPS: I would say, first off, we have to be convinced ourselves. You’re not ever going to teach it if you’re not sold

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Photo by Tim Ludvigsen/Courtesy of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee

Joined by Bishop William A. Wack of Pensacola-Tallahassee (center), Msgr. David L. Toups (left) visits with seminarians following an ordination Mass at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Pensacola, Fla. on this reality. A good place to start is Dr. Janet Smith’s talk titled “Contraception: Why Not.” It was a major turning point for me when I was a college seminarian. I first heard it 25 years ago, and it helped me to fall in love with the beauty of the Church’s teaching.

So, knowledge is extremely important. Until we have that intellectual conversion, it will never come up in counseling or in a homily. Obviously, preaching on this topic at a Sunday Mass is very delicate, since we’re preaching to everybody, but we can use it as an example among other things.

Part of being convinced is going back and looking at the actual text of Humanae Vitae itself and what it taught.

COLUMBIA: Have these teachings played a role in inspiring your own vocation as a priest?

MSGR. TOUPS: In the encyclical, Paul VI speaks about married love that is free, total, faithful and fruitful. This is also the way we are called to live our priesthood. This is what I tell my seminarians: free, total, faithful and fruitful love for the people of God. We are called to be fruitful in our ministry, to really experience the generative power that God wants for us as spiritual fathers.

The most recent Vatican document on the formation of priests, which is very much in the mind and heart of Pope Francis, specifically states that seminarians should have greater

exposure to families. We can really learn from the self-sacrifice of parents and spouses.

For almost 20 years, in fact, I have participated in a “Teams of Our Lady” group with five married couples. When I, as a priest, see couples striving to live their faith, it inspires me to be a better priest. When they see me striving to be the best priest I can be, it increases their faith. It’s the beauty of the Body of Christ when we encourage each other to be faithful to our callings.

COLUMBIA: What else can the Church do better to meet the challenges of the culture?

MSGR. TOUPS: I think in most dioceses today, the guidelines for couples preparing for marriage include at least one natural family planning class or some other exposure to NFP. This is during the immediate preparation for marriage.

Now, what’s also very important is what we call the remote preparation, which begins much earlier in life. Our families and parishes have to introduce to young people the beauty of the Church’s teachings on human sexuality. It is easier for couples to face challenges and practice NFP when the seeds are planted in their families and through active involvement in the parish. It really has to begin here. What we’re talking about is the formation of a future generation of missionary disciples.

If their hearts are formed as disciples, then they will go wherever Jesus invites them.♦ JULY 2018

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Four OUR THREE SONS A couple shares how trading contraception for natural family planning allowed their marriage to thrive

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om and Kathy Nuttle had three boys with no plans for more.

Making the switch from contraception to natural family planning, however, unexpectedly gave them a fresh perspective. A decade after their third son was born, Kathy gave birth to their youngest child, Andrew, in August 2005. Tom, who is member of Christ the King of East Aurora (N.Y.) Council 12829, and Kathy celebrated their 30th anniversary in June. They recently spoke with Columbia about how NFP opened up their marriage to new love and their family to new life.

TOM: We were cradle Catholics who came of age during the sexual revolution. We got married in our mid-20s in 1988 and our pastor asked us later if we’d like to get involved in the parish. We had a wonderful Pre-Cana experience, so we declared ourselves the experts right out of the gate and decided to help with marriage prep.

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In those days, the program was intense and couples met oneon-one. One of the sections was on natural family planning.

KATHY: Because we weren’t educated in NFP, we would just pop in the video and say, “This is what the Church teaches.”

During this time, we were on the pill to control our family size, even though I knew it wasn’t good for my body.

TOM: The topic of contraception was easy for me to ignore.

I knew something wasn’t right, but I convinced myself it was Kathy’s problem.

KATHY: At a certain point, we said to each other, “Wow, we’re not doing a good job with this and need to find out more.”

After our third son was born, we made the appointment with an NFP practitioner.

TOM: I’m a numbers guy, and I remember our nurse practitioner going over the figures about how NFP when properly

Photo by Shaw Photography Co.

by Tom and Kathy Nuttle

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practiced works better statistically than the pill; and the divorce rate for couples who practice NFP is 5 percent or less. I also learned that the pill could act as an abortifacient, which I didn’t know at the time.

All these things were sort of our last hurdle to accepting everything the Catholic Church taught. I would then present this when we did the NFP section in Pre-Cana.

Teaching and practicing NFP meant freedom for my conscience.

KATHY: I can remember going to confession and actually confessing the use of birth control. I can’t tell you the weight that was lifted off my shoulders — it was just such an amazing feeling.

In the Pre-Cana presentations I would often say, “You think the pill gives you freedom? It’s totally the opposite for me because going off the pill is what’s given me freedom.” I couldn’t stress that enough.

TOM: The elimination of contraceptives in our relationship resulted in a very real transformation — a true gift of self I had never experienced before. I soon came to a realization that I needed to aspire to Kathy’s worthiness. I slowly began to interact and speak to her in a more caring and loving manner.

KATHY: We truly experienced a higher level of intimacy. We planned more for those special dinners, getaways and so on.

The real key was allowing God to open up our hearts and to put our trust in him.

Our prayer life got better and we learned more about our Catholic faith.

We had initially started using NFP to avoid pregnancy. Then, at a certain point, it was like, “Maybe it was a fertile day. Oh well, let’s put it in God’s hands and see what happens.” After a miscarriage, we thought, “OK, this really isn’t meant to be.” But we remained open to it, and lo and behold, here comes Andrew.

TOM: Since Andrew was born, he’s provided so much to our family it’s ridiculous.

I don’t regret for a second having four kids.

Having another child can present challenges, but God always provides.♦ EDITOR’S NOTE: Tom and Kathy’s story is also included in a 2006 book titled Natural Family Planning Blessed Our Marriage: 19 True Stories by Fletcher Doyle, a member of Bishop Joseph A. Burke Council 5284 in Orchard Park, N.Y.

Dangers of Hormonal Birth Control

by Kathleen M. Raviele, M.D. In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptive (OC), which would become known simply as “the pill.” Consisting of synthetic estrogen and progestin, it suppressed the woman’s pituitary hormones and inhibited ovulation, preventing pregnancy with a high degree of effectiveness. The pill was marketed in 1963 as a treatment for irregular bleeding and quickly became the most widely used contraceptive, including by Catholics.

Oral contraceptives (OCs) have often been prescribed as a cure-all for any female problem — irregular bleeding, no bleeding at all, cramps with a period, acne, headaches, cancer prevention. At any given time, approximately 10 million women in the United States and 100 million women worldwide are on the pill today. Millions more use other hormonal contraception, in the form of an intrauterine device (IUDs), an injectable, patch, ring or implant.

Hormonal contraceptive use, however, has resulted in both physical and sociological consequences. Here are some potential side effects you may not be aware of:

• Depression: A study published in 2016 found a 70 percent increased risk of depression in women who start OCs. Researchers in Denmark following nearly a half million young women over eight years found that OC users were approximately two to three times more likely to attempt or commit suicide. The risk was even higher with other hormonal contraceptives such as the patch and ring.

• Blood clots and stroke: Since they first came on the market, OCs have been shown to cause blood clots. These clots can block leg veins with a venous thrombosis (VT) and travel to the lungs to cause life-threatening pulmonary emboli. A 2014 review of the world’s literature found that the risk of venous thrombosis for women on OCs is 3.5 times the risk of non-users. Another very large study, published in 2012, found an eightfold increased risk for women with the contraceptive patch and a 6.5 times increased risk with the vaginal ring.

• Cancer: The World Health Organization declared OCs Group I carcinogens in 2005 after the International Agency for Research on Cancer found an increased risk of breast cancer, liver cancer and cervical cancer in users of OCs. Current users of OCs have a 24 percent increased risk of breast cancer, and a 16 percent increased risk remains in the first five years after stopping them; the risk is higher among African-American women. A 2009 study further found that women on OCs are at 4 times greater risk of triple negative breast cancer, a particularly difficult cancer to treat.

• Abortifacient effects: In approximately 10 percent of cycles of women on the pill, ovulation occurs during the week they take the placebo pills. The backup mechanism to prevent pregnancy is thinning of the lining of the uterus so a new life cannot implant, thus causing an early abortion.

Many women come off the pill when they realize this.

• Effects on weight, libido and attraction: Hormonal contraception places the woman in a state of pseudopregnancy, resulting in weight gain. As hormone levels stay constant on the pill (lacking high levels of estrogen. normally seen during the fertile period), many women experience decreased libido.

Research has shown that the hormones also affect a woman’s sense of smell, causing her to be attracted to a man similar to her rather than one who is dissimilar — potentially causing attraction problems when she comes off the pill.

If more young women and teens were aware of these serious side effects, they might stop taking these drugs and seek a better way. After all, there is almost always a way to manage a woman’s health issues without the use of OCs, and the modern methods of natural family planning are just as effective in preventing pregnancy when taught and used correctly.♦

KATHLEEn M. RAVIELE, M.D., is an obstetrician/gynecologist in Decatur, Ga., and served as president of the Catholic Medical Association from 2007-08.

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FROM BROKENNESS TO BLISS Sterile and seeking divorce, my wife and I thought our days of faithful, fruitful marriage were over

by Greg Alexander

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he 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae might not mean a lot to you, but it means the world to me. Twenty years ago, this encyclical helped lead me and my wife from the brink of divorce with two children to a vasectomy reversal and five more beautiful gifts from God. Though my wife, Julie, and I were both born and raised Catholic, we had slowly succumbed to the many wiles of the world. We went to Mass, but we were Catholics in name only.

After the birth of our second child in 1989, Julie’s OB-GYN suggested that one of us should consider a sterilization procedure. “After all, you have the perfect family with a boy and a girl,” he said. Ignorant of what the Church taught on this matter and filled with a lot of selfishness, I underwent a vasectomy.

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Years later, after a failed, last-ditch effort at marriage therapy, Julie and I announced to our 7- and 9-year-olds that we were getting a divorce. Our children were huddled in the corner crying their eyes out, but we had become so numb that we simply ignored their pain.

Somehow, we still attended Mass, and that particular summer there was a visiting priest whose homilies really spoke to us. We soon learned that he was the tribunal vicar for the diocese, and though we knew little about our Catholic faith, we knew that this was the person who oversaw annulments. So, we scheduled an appointment and spent the first 45 minutes telling him our reasons to no longer stay married. The priest patiently listened, and as we finished, he leaned forward and

Photo by Josh Huskin

Greg Alexander, a member of Shrine of St. Padre Pio Council 13704 in San Antonio, Texas, and his wife, Julie, are pictured with their five youngest children. All five children were born after Greg’s vasectomy reversal in 1999.

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asked us to consider a series of questions: What is God’s plan for marriage? What does the Church teach about the sacrament of matrimony? What does the New Testament say about marriage?

By the grace of God, I went home and decided to find answers to those questions. I started with Scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Before long, I discovered the Church’s teachings in Humanae Vitae and the writings of Pope John Paul II on the family. I began to see our situation, and life itself, in a whole new way. When I shared with Julie what I had learned, she wanted nothing more than to rebuild our marriage with God’s help.

I sought the guidance of a priest who explained that because I did not know what the Church taught when I got the va-

sectomy, I was not culpable of sin. Also, the Church does not require sterilization reversal. Intellectually, I understood, but in my heart I felt a deeper calling. I went to God in prayer and eventually had the vasectomy reversed. Through his grace, Julie and I went on to have five more children, and this month, we celebrate 31 years of marriage.

So on this anniversary of Humanae Vitae, all I can say is thanks be to God for his beautiful plan for married love and the transmission of life.♦ GREG ALEXANDER lives in San Antonio, where he is a member of Shrine of St. Padre Pio Council 13704. He and his wife, Julie, direct a marriage apostolate called The Alexander House (thealexanderhouse.com).

5 Ways the Order Has Carried on the Legacy of Humanae Vitae Soon after Humanae Vitae was published in 1968, the Knights of Columbus began promoting the encyclical and its teachings through the order’s Catholic Information Service, which published and distributed tens of thousands of booklets. the Supreme Council has also sponsored international congresses devoted to natural family planning and the urgency of Humanae Vitae’s message, and Supreme Convention resolutions have consistently reaffirmed the Knights’ commitment to the teaching. one of the most enduring ways that the Knights of Columbus has honored Blessed Paul VI’s prophetic vision has been through financial assistance to a variety of institutions advancing the causes of life and family. Below are five institutions that the order has assisted or helped establish.

Photo by John Whitman

1 the U.S. bishops launched the Diocesan Development Program for natural family Planning with financial sponsorship from the Knights of Columbus in 1980. the order continues to provide support for the USCCB’s natural family Planning Program and related initiatives to this day.

2 In 1981, the order co-founded the Catholic organization for Life and family (CoLf) with the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. this organization continues to promote a wide array of initiatives promoting respect for human life and dignity and the essential role of the family.

3 for decades, the Supreme Council has funded bioethics workshops in Dallas, to which all the bishops of north america are invited.

The 2018 class of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family is pictured May 7 at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C. Archbishop Bernard Hebda (center) of St. Paul-Minneapolis served as the main celebrant and homilist for the graduation Mass, after which Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson, the institute’s vice president, delivered remarks.

They are also joined by the institute’s dean, Father Antonio Lopez (left). the workshops are conducted every two years by the Philadelphia-based national Catholic Bioethics Center to review and address pressing issues and developments.

4 the Board of Directors approved a grant of $250,000 in 1986 to support the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human reproduction, which was established the previous year in omaha, neb.

5 In 1988, the order funded the establishment of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies

on Marriage and family in Washington, D.C. Carl a. anderson, then-vice president for public policy of the Knights, became the vice president and founding dean of the institute’s north american campus. the original John Paul II Institute was founded in rome in 1981 following the 1980 synod of bishops’ call to found centers of theological study devoted to the Church’s teachings on marriage and family. the Washington session, which for the past 10 years has been based at McGivney Hall at the Catholic University of america, counts more than 550 graduates.♦ JULY 2018

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The Integrity of Human Love (Why Marriage, Sex and Babies Belong Together) The Church, as a loving Mother, seeks to articulate and preserve the meaning of marriage

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s a convert, I am sometimes asked what brought me into the Catholic faith. Conversion cannot be reduced to a simple formula, but the answer for me, at least in part, was being deeply struck and attracted by the truth and beauty of the Church’s understanding of marriage. We often hear that the Church’s teachings on marriage and sex drive people away, but this certainly not my own response as a husband and father.

When it comes to such topics, it is easy for people to reject the Church’s teachings out of hand. This is certainly the case with Blessed Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, which for 50 years has been much maligned but seldom read.

Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church is not opposed to sex. Rather, an examination of some of Humanae Vitae’s key teachings — including the four characteristics of married love and the inseparable connection of the meanings of sex — reveals the Church’s high regard for sex, viewed in its proper context.

FOUR CHARACTERISTICS OF MARRIED LOVE Section 9 of Humanae Vitae speaks of four foundational “characteristics” of marriage.

1. Married love is fully human and involves free will. It is not the love of angels (who lack bodies), nor the instinct of animals (who lack spiritual souls). Rather, it unites husband and wife in both body and spirit. It is lived out in bodily form in the day-in and day-out lives they share together. This love is uniquely expressed and made possible in the bodily act of the marital embrace.

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2. Married love is total. It is a unique kind of love that results in bodily and spiritual oneness and mutual belonging.

Given to each other by God, husband and wife are called to share everything with the other and to put the other first.

Most especially, the oneness to which husband and wife are called is made visible in the very flesh of their children.

3. The third characteristic — faithfulness for life — is implied by the previous two. If married love is spiritual, embodied and total, it cannot be partial or limited. If husband and wife belong mutually each to the other, they cannot bestow themselves to another. Likewise, they cannot give themselves “only for a time.” Married love implies the gift of one’s whole life.

4. Finally, married love is fruitful. It is the very nature of married love to be directed toward children and the family.

When we stop and think about it, the male body makes no sense if considered separately from the female body, and vice versa. The complementarity of man and woman just as obviously rests on the possibility of having children together.

Without this ordination to bearing and raising children, the love of husband and wife risks closing in on itself. Scripture therefore relates the creation of man and woman directly and immediately to the first commandment of the Bible: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28).

THE TWO MEANINGS OF THE MARITAL ACT With this background, we can now better understand Humanae Vitae’s central teaching: that each and every conjugal act must be “open” to new life.

CNS file photo/Jon L. Hendricks

by David S. Crawford

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Photo by Servizio Fotografico Vaticano

This teaching does not mean that spouses must always have the express purpose of conceiving a child when they come together. Nor does it imply a lack of “openness” when, through no action of their own, conception cannot occur, such as during an infertile period of a woman’s cycle. Nor does it mean that spouses cannot, for serious reasons, consciously limit their marital acts to such times of infertility, as through natural family planning.

If openness to life does not mean any of these things, what does it mean? The answer becomes clear when we consider what Paul VI writes in section 12 of his encyclical: The conjugal act possesses two meanings — the unitive meaning and procreative meaning — which must never be separated.

In teaching that these two meanings must never be separated, he is telling us that we must never purposefully do anything that would break apart the wholeness of the marital act.

In our day and age, the relationship between married love and children has become uncertain. Modern contraceptives suggest that sex may be had without children, just as new reproductive technologies suggest that children may be had without sex. In this way, contemporary society tends to fragment the full meaning of married love into pieces.

But just as a living, breathing organism cannot survive dissection and dismemberment, love cannot fully live and breathe when its inner meanings are separated.

AN EXPRESSION OF LIFE-GIVING LOVE Finally, we can better see how the marital act is an embodiment and expression of marital love, and must therefore embody and express all of the characteristics of marital love.

First, it must embody and express the oneness and total, exclusive mutual belonging of the spouses. This is the unitive meaning. But it must also embody and express openness — an openness that turns the spouses’ love outward and beyond themselves. This is the procreative meaning.

For love to be genuine, it must also be whole. We cannot pick and choose among the parts or aspects of love and continue to call it love. If the spouses attempt to suppress one of the inner meanings of the marital act, then they are also suppressing that act’s ability to embody and express the full meaning of conjugal love. In other words, by suppressing either of the unitive or procreative meanings, they alter and deform the act itself. They deprive it of its ability to express their marital love. They take away its life and breath.

Far from being a negative pronouncement on sexuality, the Church’s teaching is her response to Christ’s demand that love be protected and nurtured in its wholeness and integrity. This is also what makes the teaching so attractive.♦ DAVID S. CRAWFORD is associate dean and associate professor of moral theology and family law at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He is a member of Potomac Council 433 in Washington.

Unchanged Truth: The Church’s Consistent Teaching

Though PoPe Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae in the wake of new questions and challenges posed by the birth control pill, the teachings he reaffirmed in his encyclical were not novel.

Since the first century, the Church has consistently condemned the use of contraception because it violates the purpose and nature of the marital act. The first break in Christian tradition on this point occurred aug. 15, 1930, when the lambeth Conference of anglican bishops voted to allow contraception in certain cases. other Protestant denominations soon followed suit. however, four months after the lambeth Conference, Pope Pius XI reiterated the traditional Catholic teaching in the encyclical Casti Connubii: “any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of god and of nature” (56).

Since that time, the Church has continually reaffirmed and deepened her understanding of this perennial teaching. like Blessed Paul VI in 1968, recent popes have reflected on the meaning of human sexuality in light of contemporary challenges. ◉ More than any other pope in history, St. John Paul II developed and articulated the Church’s vision for married love. In Familiaris Consortio, he observed that “the difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle ... is much wider and deeper than is usually thought, one which involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality” (32).

(See page 28 for more on St. John Paul II’s legacy.) ◉ In 2008, reflecting on the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, Pope Benedict XVI stated: “The Magisterium of the Church cannot be exonerated from reflecting in an ever new and deeper way on the fundamental principles that concern marriage and procreation. What was true yesterday is true also today. The truth expressed in Humanae Vitae does not change; on the contrary, precisely in the light of the new scientific discoveries, its teaching becomes more timely.”

The following year, in his third and final encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Benedict wrote that the inseparable connection between the unitive and procreative meaning of sexuality “is not a question of purely individual morality: Humanae Vitae indicates the strong links between life ethics and social ethics, ushering in a new area of magisterial teaching” (15). ◉ In January 2015, months after beatifying Paul VI, Pope Francis spoke at a meeting with families in Manila, Philippines. “The family is threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life,” he said. “Blessed Paul VI,” he added, “had a broader vision: he looked at the peoples of the earth and he saw the threat of families being destroyed for lack of children. Paul VI was courageous; he was a good pastor and he warned his flock of the wolves who were coming.”

In his encyclical Laudato Si’ several months later, Francis underscored the importance of the family and observed that the moral law is “inscribed in our nature.” a genuine “human ecology,” he stated, requires that a person accept his or her body as a gift and respect “its fullest meaning.” Conversely, “Thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation” (155).♦ JULY 2018

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St. John Paul II: Missionary of Love and Life John Paul II’s revolutionary vision of marriage and family, which reinforced the teaching of Humanae Vitae, grew out of his pastoral work

I

n the early 1950s, during Poland’s worst period of communist repression, Father Karol Wojtyła made an interesting discovery while building a campus ministry in Kraków. As he coaxed young men and women out of their shells of reticence and into conversation with him and each other, he found that their most urgent questions didn’t have to do with the existence of God or the relevance of the Church; despite relentless communist propaganda and bullying, they were believers. Their most urgent questions involved love, marriage and family.

What did it mean to love someone else, and for a lifetime?

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system that tried to fragment the bonds between husband and wife, parents and children? What did all of this have to do with sex, treated by the communists as a kind of value-free contact sport — free love, Stalinist style?

As he helped his young friends build friendships, and as those first “Wojtyła kids” fell in love, married and began families, the young Polish priest and nascent philosophy professor found grist for his literary and academic reflections. One of Wojtyła’s plays, The Jeweler’s Shop, grew out of his spiritual direction of young men and women, his pastoral work in preparing his friends for marriage, and his accompaniment of

Photo by Liam White / Alamy Stock Photo

by George Weigel

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Opposite page: Pope John Paul II greets a family at Cardiff Castle, Wales, during his apostolic visit to Great Britain in June 1982.

women trying to live love with integrity, and 30 years of reflection on those encounters, Pope John Paul II embarked in September 1979 on a four-year series of general audience addresses aimed at putting the Church’s discussion of sexual love, the young couples whose babies he baptized and homes he marriage and family on a thoroughly humanistic foundation. visited. (Some of those young friends later said they had Creatively re-reading the Old and New Testaments, drawing “heard” their spouse’s voice in the words of the characters in on insights from contemporary philosophy, and borrowing the play.) themes from classic and modern literature, John Paul II develAnd then there was Wojtyła’s 1960 book, Love and Respon- oped what came to be known as his “theology of the body” — sibility, another by-product of the author’s pastoral work — an extensive reflection on the integrity of human love that has in this case a philosophical and theological meditation on the had a profound effect on both the Church and the world over integrity of human love and its bodily expression. There, he the past three decades. proposed an ethic of “responsible love,” in which husband and Here, John Paul II, who would later be called the “Pope of wife each makes a gift of self to the other, and each receives the Family,” wove together insights he had been developing that gift of self in “an encounter of two freedoms.” This, since his early ministry as a university chaplain: Marriage is a Wojtyła proposed, was an icon of the entire moral life — for covenant of love, not a mere contract. In that covenant, husa truly human life is one lived as a gift of self to others, not band and wife should exercise responsible parenthood, buildan assertion of self against others, or a use of another for one’s ing a family according to the virtue of prudence. The sexual own satisfaction. expression of married love is the fullest embodiment of marKnowing all of this about the man he riage as a covenant of faithful and had appointed archbishop of Kraków in fruitful mutual donation — the offer December 1963, Pope Paul VI asked and reception of another’s freedom, in Karol Wojtyła to participate in the a bond from which new life is born. work of the commission he had apWhat is “natural” in family planOHN PAUL II SAID TO pointed to study contemporary probning, the Holy Father proposed, is lems of marriage and the family, what best mirrors the dignity of the THE SEXUAL REVOLUincluding the question of contracephuman person — and that is the famtion. Wojtyła responded by forming a ily planning that respects the natural TION, IN SO MANY commission of Krakovian theologians patterns of fertility. So the real quesWORDS, “I’LL SEE YOU to examine these questions and analyze tion for marital chastity is not so much an initial draft of a papal encyclical re“What are we forbidden to do in marAND RAISE YOU.” iterating the Church’s moral objection riage?” but “How can we live a life of to artificial means of birth control. sexual love that conforms to our digThe Kraków commission’s report nity as human persons?” urged that the classic Catholic teaching From his catechesis on the theology be explained in a more humanistic way: The responsibility of of the body and his 1981 exhortation on the family, Familiaris family planning should be emphasized, for the Church did not Consortio, to various teachings later in his pontificate, John teach an ethic of reproduction at all costs; the possibility of Paul II said to the sexual revolution, in so many words, “I’ll exercising responsible family planning through the natural see you and raise you.” rhythms of fertility should be discussed; and the rejection of Blessed Paul VI had been right: Widespread artificial conchemical or mechanical contraceptives should be presented as traception led to a culture in which men used women and a matter of the integrity of love — sexual love artificially sun- children were reduced to a mere lifestyle choice. The Catholic dered from procreation violated the truth about love-as-free- Church has continued to proclaim, with St. John Paul II, that gift that had been built into humanity at creation. the sexual gift of self, freely offered and freely received within Contraception reduced loving to using. the covenant of marriage, is an icon of the inner life of the Elements of the Kraków commission report influenced the Trinity, for God is a community of self-giving love and recepdrafting of Humanae Vitae, which, as written by Paul VI, lifted tivity. And by being that icon, faithful, chaste and fruitful up married love as a great good and emphasized the honest ex- married love is a way to sanctify the world.♦ change of self-gift as the moral and spiritual essence of sexual expression within marriage. But in the cultural meltdown of GEORGE WEIGEL is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Wash1968, very few people were willing to hear, much less seriously ington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the consider, what Paul VI had to say — even within the Church. William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. Further discusSo when Cardinal Karol Wojtyła was elected bishop of Rome sion of Love and Responsibility, Humanae Vitae and the theolon Oct. 16, 1978, he knew he had work to do. ogy of the body can be found in his book Witness to Hope, the Drawing on his extensive pastoral experience with men and first volume of his biography of St. John Paul II.

J

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P RO M OT I O NA L & G I F T I T E M S

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K N I G H T S O F C O LU MBU S

Knights of Charity Every day, Knights all over the world are given opportunities to make a difference — whether through community service, raising money or prayer. We celebrate each and every Knight for his strength, his compassion and his dedication to building a better world.

Two members of St. Bernadette Council 16376 in Westlake, Ohio, construct a portable crib with the help of another volunteer. The council partnered with Southeast Cleveland Kiwanis and the Cleveland Clinic to construct 250 portable baby cribs to help stem the high rate of sleep-related infant death in Cleveland. Parents of newborns living in poverty, upon leaving the hospital, are now given a crib, mattress and baby supplies.

TO BE FEATURED HERE , SEND YOUR COUNCIL’ S “K NIGHTS IN A CTION ” PHOTO AS WELL AS ITS DESCRIPTION TO : C OLUMBIA , 1 C OLUMBUS P LAZA , N EW H AVEN , CT 06510-3326 OR EMAIL : KNIGHTSINACTION @ KOFC . ORG .

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PLEASE, DO ALL YOU CAN TO ENCOURAGE PRIESTLY AND RELIGIOUS VOCATIONS. YOUR PRAYERS AND SUPPORT MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

K E E P T H E FA I T H A L I V E

I was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, the home state of St. Pedro Maldonado, a martyr and Knight of Columbus. Almost every parish had a portrait of St. Pedro. His serene countenance and Padre “Chalio,” our local parish priest, together became the face of the priesthood for me as a boy. When I first reflected on being a priest, around age 8, it was because I wanted to be as happy as Padre Chalio.

When I was 11, my family immigrated to the United States. I still wanted to be a priest, but I later put this desire aside to pursue my version of the American dream. I went to college and planned for a successful career in industrial engineering. Upon graduating, however, I came to a moment of honesty and clarity: I was not the happy man I had once dreamed of being.

I then decided to put everything aside and try seminary. The rest is history. I found a joy and peace that has only grown since my ordination in 2012. If I had to do it all over again, I’d still choose to be a priest — only sooner.

FATHER MAURICIO CARRASCO Diocese of Little Rock Father Joe Lauro Council 6398 in Russellville, Ark.

Photo by Caitlin Whorton Photography

‘I FOUND A JOY THAT HAS ONLY GROWN.’