Who is God? God is the Creator of Heaven and earth and all things. What is man? Man is a mere creature composed of body and soul and made in the image and likeness of God.

As has been said, man is different from animal because he has an immortal soul endowed with intellect and free will. Man, on his own, cannot produce a human being. It takes God to infuse the intelligent and free-willed soul into each body He has created. This teaches us that God alone causes human life - we merely cooperate with Him. He oversees the conception of each and every one of us individually, and one-by-one. This is unlike animals which He allows to populate "automatically," so to speak. God's plans are made for all eternity, and He has set His Natural Law as His plan of procreation. Therefore, how foolish it is for man to think he conceives, just because God allows man's nature to cooperate with His plan. None of us would be here if God did not decide on an individual basis to let each of us exist. He hovers over our conceptions personally, creating us Himself on the spot, body and soul simultaneously, and wanting each of us in the world for His purpose-for He hopes we will want Him too.

Cardinal Newman wrote: "He is Almighty and might have done all things Himself, but it has been His Will to bring about His purposes by the beings He created" (A Neuman Treasury, pg, 356). This tells us we are not born to tell God when, how and why, but to serve Him as His instrument, to be used by Him in His way - even though we may feel that this cross gets heavy and we are persecuted by the modernists of our day.

St. John tells us in the Gospel, "But to as many as received Him, He gave the power of becoming sons of God, to those who believe in His name; who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:13). There can be no doubt that each conception of a man is truly God's domain. The awesome thought is that God allows us to share in His momentous action of creating us - and not the other way around. How could man possibly choose the time to conceive, when only God knows the future and a man's full potential by the power of His grace? How many parents in their later years, come to realize why this or that one of their children was born at a certain time during their married life, or in a certain spot amid their sequence of children? Who knows which child may help them in their old age - or which may become the religious or saint? Who can calculate the loss when God's certain procreative plan for a family is tampered with or denied? (The story is famous of a woman who told of having confessed to the Venerable Padre Pio that she had an abortion. Not thinking she was contrite enough, he angrily admonished her for the murder, and revealed that the child was to have been a pope.)

I have a friend who had four girls and was in the sixth month of her fifth pregnancy when her husband was killed. The child was a boy, and when a visitor remarked to the mother how sad it was that the husband was not there she replied, "He is right here in my son." What would that mother have wrought by the foolishness of family planning? She would have rejected one of God's greatest blessings in her life. What right has the finite mind of man to make decisions that affect human history and all eternity? Consider as well that there are many large families into which, for years, only boys were born. Finally, at the end, came a girl. Would those parents ever have known the joy of a baby girl at last, if family planning had been in progress and their string of children cut off, so to speak, "in the midst?" And the same can be said of those all-girl families, ending finally in a boy. All of us must remember that we made serious vows at Baptism. As a result and ever since, we have walked about daily under those solemn promises we made to always choose God's Will and renounce the devil and all his works and pomps - of which birth control is one of the cleverest, and NFP the cleverest of that!

Children are the direct inheritance of God, to live for all eternity. Therefore, man should have no fear of God's inheritance. How blest can life be if God so designs to increase our inheritance! Who knows the damage wrought by NFP, as much as by any other form of birth control? Are we to doubt God's judgment about what is most advantageous for us? How can a woman possibly look God straight in the face and tell Him her heart is open to His beautiful inheritance of the gift of life, when she is taking her temperature and observing and counseling her husband to make sure life will not ensue? When man tries to interfere with God's power, man suffers all the ills we see today such as St. Paul describes in his Epistle to the Romans. And Dr. Hemingway from Warrnambool, Australia, gives us this broadening bit of information when he views contraception as a worse moral crime than murder:

Because murder leaves the soul intact, the victim can always be compensated, in eternity for the loss of his natural life. For this reason, while abortion, murder, etc., are very serious matters they remain as finite crime. Their effects are limited to earthly life and the evil associated with them can be undone - if God so wills - in eternity. The same does not apply to contraceptive intercourse. The child denied existence by a contraceptive act is robbed of his immortal soul. He cannot possibly enjoy the bliss of Heaven and not even God can compensate him for his loss. For this reason, the effects of contraceptive intercourse can never be removed and contraception is a crime against life of infinite magnitude.

Contraception blocks the very entrance to life and denies God the love of a new son. Furthermore, contraception prolongs His denial to all eternity, so it is hard, indeed, to imagine any greater evil that man can do. It is hard, also, to imagine any action more pleasing to Satan, the enemy of souls.

Again, God has made man free, with the choice to work with Him or not. The teaching of the Catholic Faith regarding children, which Catholic couples accept on their wedding day, is a Divine Law allowing no tolerance for birth control-for the primary purpose of marriage is children.

Our Blessed Mother also had the freedom to choose, and because of her openness to God she called down many sorrows and sufferings on herself. But did not the blessings God poured out to her and all mankind because of this "yes" affect man's world for the best, both here as well as in eternity? And so it is with all who subject themselves to God's Will. When we teach our young people to limit their families-their inheritance from God-we are also teaching them to limit God's blessings of knowledge and understanding in their own lives. This, in turn, renders them incapable of imparting this knowledge and understanding to their children. In a word, this anti-life spirit undermines the couple's faith-and any teaching that destroys faith can only come from Satan as it accomplishes his work, not God's.

As has been said, Pope Pius XII was the first Pope to actually condone the Rhythm method as the devil incited society to exert pressure for a "Catholic" birth control. This drove the wedge of the contraceptive mentality deeper into the issue of NFP, so as to force the door wide open to its acceptance. A lack of knowledge regarding biology may have been part of this destruction; or maybe the problem was in too much wisdomless knowledge. But the underlying thrust is that the Hierarchy should not have had to know this biology in the first place, as God had already laid down His Rules (the Natural Law)! Man refused God's way although the responsibility o the Hierarchy was to reinforce God's way, and not listen to the cries of the rebellious who looked to science to placate them. But the devil used the blinded Hierarchy and the recent NFP-prone Popes. They were seduced by the distorted words of the advocates of NFP, perhaps somewhat on purpose-perhaps having other, evil intentions in mind. It is of no small interest to know that the Rockefeller Foundation helped fund the commission researching NFP for the Vatican! What could possibly be the intent here in trying to reduce the number of new souls-and new Catholics in particular?

Regarding some of the harmful side-effects of NFP, at least one eminent Catholic spoke out. John R. Cavanaugh, MD. a member of the faculty of the School of Sacred Theology of the Catholic University of American and editor of the Bulletin of the Guild of Catholic Psychiatrists of America, was a member of the Pope's commission which studied the Rhythm method. His conclusions were published in the August 1966 edition of Marriage Magazine:

I write as a clinician, as one who deals with the individual person and not with abstract principles, as a scientist interested in people and basing my opinion in large part on the results of this study. I must conclude that the use of Rhythm is productive of serious psychological harm. I recognize that I disagree with the opinions of some of the philosophers. Further, Vatican Council II has stated that the conjugal love of the husband and wife is an important aspect of marriage. I feel it is an extremely important one. Rhythm is, therefore, harmful to the psychological relationship of the husband and wife because:

1) It deprives a woman of the conjugal act during the time of her greatest desire, during the post-ovulatory and mid-cycle peaks of desire.

2) This deprivation causes severe frustration in many couples.

3) If Rhythm is used, as it is now recommend for safe use, it allows intercourse on relatively few days a month in most cases. This leads frustration.

4) Disagreement over its use and quarrels over its failures cause marital discord.

5) Such marital disharmony with its attending symptoms may cause psychic damage to the offspring.

6) The reputation for high use-failure in Rhythm causes a high degree of anxiety in even well-motivated couples.

The above comments apply to the psychological aspects of the use of Rhythm. They are not meant to imply that Rhythm may not be biologically effective in the control of conception.

Dr. Rock, inventor of the Pill, said that Rhythm is unnatural and therefore should be abolished. (Of course, he would want his Pill used instead.)