Ecclesia Militans: Natural Family Planning and the Christian Moral Code

WHAT ARE THE FRUITS OF NATURAL FAMILY PLANNING?

In his Epistle, St. James the Apostle tells us that it is by faith, along with good works through the Church, that we work out our salvation. Therefore, having faith, trusting in God's judgment and practicing charity towards God and man by keeping His Laws, are what will bring us to Heaven. We live believing in God's promise - or covenant - that He will guide our lives and give His help (graces through prayer and the Sacraments) to overcome the human drives and weaknesses we encounter because of the effects of Original Sin.

Faith through the practice of the Catholic Religion, is basic to man's peace and eternal happiness. The devil was sent to Hell because he refused to serve God. In retaliation for his damnation, he determined to usurp the adoration from man that man is to give to God. How could this be done? The Bible tells us the devil is a clever liar. God did not take Satan's intelligence away when he was condemned to Hell, and the devil knew that if he could destroy man's faith in God and beguile man to break off cooperating with God's covenant, that man's road to destruction would be made easy How could these objectives be most effectively accomplished? Pride was the devil's downfall, and yes, the devil could get to man in the same way-through pride.

Now holy family life can only survive with the help of faith. So faith must be broken down. But how? Science! Through science, give man solutions to the hardships in life. That would bring man from faith in God, to faith in science, and seemingly make God's covenant with man unnecessary and/or empty. Science could supply the answer to problems-whereas trusting in God did not seem to satisfy. Moreover, God asked for sacrifice with a constant eye to Eternity, whereas science gave instant satisfaction and an "easy way out" that appealed to human weakness. Birth control would break the covenant with God by destroying trust in Him regarding procreation, and that would break down the family - a sure way to society's destruction.

With Catholics trusting the Pope and the Hierarchy, they might easily follow if the devil could ensure the Pope and Hierarchy would be influenced toward a "Catholic form of birth control." In essence, deceive them with semantics: Do not call it birth control, for the Church of God could never accept that. But since the Hierarchy seemed somewhat ignorant concerning the biology of women, fool them by using the word "natural" to name the fertile and infertile times of a woman's cycle. Get the Hierarchy to teach that man can use self-control such as they do in celibacy; incite them to believe that this self-control is supposed virtue for the sacrifice that has to be when limiting the family "naturally."

After all, did not God Himself create the fertile and infertile cycle of a woman? Does He not expect us to use what He created to preserve our world? The devil's scheme in all of this was to get the Pope and theologians so preoccupied with all this "scientific knowledge," that it overshadowed the truth of God's Natural Law. For although God gave man charge over the world, He certainly did not give man charge over His domain. And conception is God's domain.

God is Creator, conversely, we are His creatures. He made us to carry out His Will, and His Will is to fill His Heaven with souls for His own honor and glory and their Eternal happiness. Would God then give man a legitimate way to negate His objective? To believe that God would give to man His own power over life like this is diabolical.

Now God is all knowing, and in creating man He instilled into him one of the greatest gifts man needed for his survival -- parental love. Without this gift, man's propagation would have been self-destructive. Man finds the root of his parental love in the depths of God the Father's paternal love for man.

In marriage, this paternal love comes from nature. If man is faithful to God's Natural Law, man instinctively knows solicitude, tenderness, affection and all the sweet emotions that come from natural parenthood. However, if man dishonors God's Natural Law through contraception, these natural qualities are distorted or lost as God's help is rejected. The dimension of paternal love is thereby restricted, and man starts on the way of self-destruction (birth control, abortion, euthanasia, etc.). So we see paternal love as a kind of basis of the preservation of the human race.

As much as God wants each soul in Heaven, we know that Satan, in his revenge for his own condemnation, wants all souls in Hell. How best to accomplish this goal? The master-stroke would be to break down and do away with parental love -- Fatherhood, Motherhood and the family -- which "keeps the world going" for God and man.

The mentality, which demands a form of birth control, actually fears faith in God's judgment of conception. Even conception among the most destitute and poor is the hand of God-a prospective soul for His honor and glory Now because of the Catholic Faithful's acceptance of NFP, and the other forms of birth control as well, parental love is being destroyed. The devil reigns in the home instead, robbing it of all those sweet emotions and tender affections that are natural to the paternal heart. Consequently the high divorce and separation rate, and untold thousands of emotionally disturbed children, demonstrate the deprivation of that natural love.

We are now entering the fourth generation of the popular use of the Rhythm system. How has society adapted to this? The family is torn, suffering abounds, and man has turned from God to self. What has happened to the bond of mother and child? "Mother" is the day care center, while the woman is out pursuing her own interests, or is out through the need of helping to keep the home financially afloat. Even the mere idea of being a loving wife and mother has been taken from the heart of the "liberated" woman.

What has happened to the child without this love and security of Mother? The child has turned to self. Discipline (that special love) is nil, because parents are not working together to train and discipline the will of the child to be submissive to God's Will. How can they? They themselves have forsaken God's Will. So the child turns to the savage instincts left him by Original Sin, and we are left with the sad statistics of the outrageous homicides, suicides, drug use, alcohol use, sexual perversion, unwed mothers, murders, rape, abortions, abuse of parents, rejection of authority -- all the evils St. Paul tells us would happen when we reject God's Law. And how much the worse it is with the Traditional Mass and Sacraments - those bulwarks of salvation and sanity - under such devastating attacks and disappearance in our times.

When the Blessed Mother came to LaSalette, France, on September 19, 1846, she appeared to two shepherd children there weeping and grieving not only over the sins of laymen, but those of religious and the failures of the Hierarchy. She is Mother and has all the qualities that belong to that name. She saw the terrible suffering toward which her children were headed and the future problems of the Church, so she warned and pleaded. At Fatima, Portugal in 1917, she told that the penance that God now demands is that we live true to our vocation in life. And the first purpose of the vocation of marriage is to leave one's life open to God's Will and to raise and educate the souls God sends for His honor and glory The devil knew then that he must urge man to believe that an creates these souls. He also knew he must change man's heart from believing that the child is a blessing, to believing the child is a burden. For who in this day of "intelligence," "education," and "maturity"-the devil's lexicon of pride-could possibly do a "responsible" job with more than just a few children? With this effort of the devil on all fronts in the past 100 years, man of course would feel he could do all on his own now. Man it seemed, had fully developed his independence from God. This scheme left the devil's ultimate intention hidden-because as man pursued the world, mesmerized by science in the foreground, he was leaving all thought of God in the background.

The devil was challenging the Blessed Mother to crush his head. He felt he had man's mind and heart-and consequently his soul. For he even was able to fool and draw most of the Hierarchy and theologians into use as his tools, and with them, so many souls.

Yet the Blessed Mother preserved her own, for God's promise to preserve the truth prevailed through the Divine Magisterium, which cannot and did not alter itself to suit the modernist clergy. The Catholic Church's moral stand has never changed: Birth control is wrong-is against the Natural Law- and will be for all Eternity And this includes NFP which as we have seen, falls well within the category of birth control despite the modernist's attempt to "canonize" it (and the mixed statements of Pius XII and Paul VI that have confused it-and these in defiance of Pius XI's clear directives as late as 1930, against any family planning whatsoever. Remember, even Popes have to obey the just or permanent laws of Popes before them, they have to be "good Catholics" too, submitting and practicing the faith just as the rest of us. They take a solemn oath, also, that as Pontiff they will protect the well-being of the Church, and keep intact Her body of devotions, dogmas, sacraments, etc. just because a man becomes Pope, does not give him license to change and to do whatever he will. Whatever he enacts must he legal, lawful and in accordance with the faith.)

God, man's Creator, knows the future - and understands man's weakness better than man himself. God told us He would write His Law in man's heart. So a conscience was built into man - a determiner of right or wrong. Even in the marital domain man is alerted to wrong by physical or mental repercussions, as was indicated to us in Dr. Cavanaugh's report.

Chapter VII