GREENSBORO — Father Daniel McCaffrey of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City has a message for married couples about Natural Family Planning and the importance of having a chaste marriage in accord with Catholic teaching. He presented that message in homilies at Masses at Our Lady of Grace Church on Oct. 16-17.
A spry and quick-witted 90-year-old, Father McCaffrey has a doctorate from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. Soon after his ordination in 1958, he volunteered as a missionary to Pakistan.
As a pastor in there in 1960, he realized quickly that the artificial birth control pill would be a problem for the Church. Many theologians were already saying the Church would soon approve it for use, but Father McCaffrey knew Catholicism could never do so as it is an offense against the sixth and ninth commandments.
A commission recommended that Pope Paul VI “adapt to the modern world” and approve birth control. But after much study and consulting earlier Church teaching, he surprised many in 1968 by continuing the Church’s prohibition on artificial contraceptives in his encyclical “Humanae Vitae” (“on Human Life”).
In his homily, Father McCaffrey said marriage was not created by Congress or the president, but by God Himself, who said, “Let the man and woman become one flesh,” and told them to be fruitful and multiply.
Marriage is a holy life, Father McCaffrey said, and it requires grace and patience to raise a family. He referred to St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, which states that marriage is the closest image on Earth to the Blessed Trinity: as the Father generates the Son, the intense love between them is called the Holy Spirit. In analogy, the physical union between man and wife is so intense and full of love that it generates a child.
So many people today, however, are denigrating marriage, particularly through artificial contraception, he continued. A contraceptive breaks the natural union of the marital embrace and shows a lack of trust in God.
When the pill was legalized in 1960, women were promised all kinds of liberties and freedom, but they are more in bondage than ever, he argued. Half of all marriages now end in divorce, creating greater financial and emotional stress for women with children. Women who are using contraceptives sense they are being used for their bodies. Married women wonder why the romance is gone from their marriage, but this simply follows from the lack of total self-giving in contraception.
Father McCaffrey reassured parishioners he did not come to give these talks because he was judging anyone, but only because he loved them and wanted genuine freedom for them. To continue with these sins is to jeopardize one’s salvation, he said.
Also, he noted that Natural Family Planning is not about having the maximum number of children possible, but rather about spouses trusting in God and cooperating with each other to help space children based on the body’s natural cycle.
— Glenn Lanham, Special to the Catholic News Herald. Glenn Lanham lives in High Point.