With over 20 years of walking closely with couples who use NFP I too have conclusions I have drawn based on that experience. However, I would not make all or nothing comments about them. Part of my reason for posting here is that my conscience is bothered by my inability to be honest in the church I find my home. I have no issue with my transparency with Almighty God who knows our deepest motivations and sins. I feel a lack of authenticity and I am seeking out as to how this is going to unfold for me as I continue along in the church. Commenting anonymously tests the waters. At present, it has reminded me to stick with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. As honesty does not really bring about anything productive. In some communities in brings about blacklisting, shunning and gossip. Who wants to deal with that? Not to mention all the judgment. This particular issue has become the identifying mark for who is a true Catholic or not. I find that remarkable given the depth of all the other things the church teaches like taking the plank out of your own eye before casting judgement, the beatitudes and all the parables of the gospels.
It sounds like you’ve got genuine conditions perhaps, if you’ve practiced nfp for over 20 years with that kind of difficulty, but could you be approaching your situation in the wrong way?
One of the things that I have always been aware of though is that there are genuine medical reasons for some people to need contraception and that will affect their culpability on judgement day but that, like all treatises on human behaviour is addressed in a different category pertaining to conscience decisions. It isn’t addressed as an alternative to the prohibition on contraception relating to personal decision.
I remember a show on telly about 25 or 30 years ago after I was married but before I had children that had stimulated great debate in Catholic circles here. It was called LA Law about a law firm and the cases it defended. This one episode was about a woman who was using contraception and she had gone to a Priest to get absolution so that she could keep using it with a free conscience and the Priest had denied absolution. She took him to court to force him to do it. If I remember rightly, the court ordered him to give her absolution because he was deemed to have no right to refuse his services to his customer so to speak. The last shot was of them entering into the confessional. The episode highlighted a real misconception that Catholics can have about the role of the Church and the nature of the sacraments.
The Church animated by the Holy Spirit, teaches us a way through the deceptions and illusions that the fallen world perpetrates. Life is like walking through the laneways of a crazy fairground with vendors on either side of you pulling for your loyalty and money. It gives you a shining beacon of truth to walk towards and she, apart from all other denominations, is uncompromising on that truth.
There is always hardship in everyone’s life and it’s not appropriate for any of us to assume and judge what’s going on for another person, but it’s a worse case scenario that to resolve issues for another we are called to water down the Church teaching and make her irrelevant to a person. That’s the way the Protestant conferences went in the 1930s and made themselves completely irrelevant on the subject of artificial birth control to their parishners. Most Protestants believe their Church accepts ABC as neutrally moral. That isn’t actually true, but they watered down the theology and chose to evangelise without reference to many sexual related issues.
The answer is to guide that person to the people that can help with expertise (confessors/nfp instructors or Catholic family orgs) in whatever the problem he/she is facing. That’s the safest road to true discernment. All the NFP instructors I met in my NFP journey were always so involved and passionate about helping. There never seemed to be a problem they didn’t have an answer for. When I first began charting 26 years ago my husband was involved and interested but we decided to stick with the 4 children we had had about 20 years ago and after a while of charting, I just became so familiar with my body, my cycle and our routine, that I did it all without charting. After getting to know your body, its ups and downs, signs and messages… your fertility becomes a strong part of your identity. An odd month here and there I didn’t ovulate at all and that made for a long wait, but it was doable. If I had got pregnant meh… that would have been a pain because I’m not the lovely natural earth mothers some of my friends were… but that’s Gods call. I’m up for a challenge. Once you have a child, other concerns seems to fade in importance anyway.
One of my friends was always saying that nfp was not natural. That not having sexual freedom was not natural. But I genuinely didn’t see it that way. I’ve always seen the fertility cycle as the natural state… not the sexual frequency. When God made Adam and Eve on that 6th day, He said to them “Go forth and multiply”, so I figure He had endowed them with fertility in their perfect state. It was only after they had sinned that He condemned Eve with a “desire for her husband” and painful childbirth. So that seems to suggest the whole desire for sex is a curse of our sinful natures, not an aspect of our perfect state of fertility. Different people perceive natural in different ways, but the Church conforms to the fundamentals of natural law and divine revelation. She can’t compromise on that without leading her flock astray from the path.
(and nor should they!)