Refilling the Empty Pews: NFP and Evangelization

Refilling the Empty Pews: Can an NFP course be an agent of evangelization? | John F. Kippley | Homiletic & Pastoral Review

The problem of the rare use of NFP is not a lack of information. The basic problem is a two-fold lack of faith, and faith-based love. Catholics may never hear this teaching from the pulpit, or see it in the parish bulletin. But the main issue is that most Catholics today simply don’t believe the teaching.

While visiting the Twin Cities in June 2011, I learned that my home parish is slated for closure in mid-2012.  The Church of the Visitation in southwestMinneapoliswas created in 1946 because married couples were having babies.  It was carved out of Annunciation Parish, our former home, and Incarnation Parish, each about a half mile from the new church.  Fortuitously, in that June visit, I met a former pastor who agreed with me on the root cause for the closure: contraception.  To be sure, in the last 65 years there have been some changes in demographics, but the area is still middle-class, with the homes well-kept.

In the spring of 2009, Father Timothy Sauppe, pastor of St. Mary’s Church in Westville, Illinois, a rural parish in the far west of the Diocese of Peoria, was forced by economics—too few children—to close the parish school.  He wrote to Bishop Daniel R. Jenky, C.S.C., to his parishioners, and posted on the parish website, that the root cause of the closure was the practice of contraception, including sterilization.

Over the last decade, I have read several articles accusing the users of natural family planning for the empty pews, but that is simply not the case.  The 2010 statistics make it clear that less than 2 percent of church-going Catholics are practicing any form of systematic NFP. But, those numbers do not take into account couples at the time of the survey, who were already pregnant, breastfeeding, or just accepting babies as they came. 1  With appropriate adjustments, it appears that the statistics are really saying that at least 90 percent of fertile-age, church-going, Catholics are using unnatural forms of birth control.  Statistics from once-Catholic countries in Europe indicate birth rates well below replacement levels, except among Muslim immigrants.  The Catholic Church in the West is closing its schools and churches.  In short, it is contracepting itself, either out of existence, or into a minor sect.

No one who cares about the Church, as the visible body instituted by Christ for the salvation of the world, can be happy about this.  In fact, no one who appreciates the great contribution to the public square made by well-formed Catholics can by pleased by this self-destructive diminution of its influence.

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