Family advice: Well intentioned, misguided

		A Culture  of Life  Kimberly Hahn

Sometimes parents urge their children not to have a lot of children due to the hardships they themselves have experienced.

One newlywed couple from Wilmington, Del., felt this kind of pressure: "Family and doctors all said, 'You don't want to get pregnant now; you just got married!'"

Inaccurate advice of friends or family members has often encouraged errant thinking and practice in their loved ones' marriages.

As one young mother recounted, "My mother taught me that the Church was wrong in her teaching about contraception and I believed my mother. There is so much misinformation about both Natural Family Planning and contraception."

Scriptural direction

Though friends and family intend to be helpful, in reality, they sometimes mistake worldly wisdom for godly wisdom. A mother from Washington commented:

"What we really needed was good scriptural encouragement and direction for God's best for us, which was to let God be God and let him plan our family. It's amazing how the world's standards have filtered into Church people today and so many Christians aren't even aware of it."

Brenda, from a small town in Ohio, said she and her husband were influenced to contracept through pressure from "parents and middle-class values of having to be prepared financially, career-wise, etc., before having children. [We reevaluated our use of contraception when we] came to desire God to control the timing rather than us."

Understood, not willed

Sometimes people are not aware of the Church's teaching, while others do know and yet are unwilling to submit to the Church's authority, such as Leila:

"I came of age in the 1980s, and contraception was a given - as normal and necessary as brushing your teeth. I had even heard some of the Church's arguments against artificial contraception, and they made sense to me.

"I thought the Church was probably right on this issue (how magnanimous of me!), but of course I could never be expected to actually go along with this teaching. I did plan to learn Natural Family Planning one day, sure, but certainly not now, in my young married years. After all, God understands!

"Later, I began to study my faith (Catholicism) and realized that the Church spoke for Christ. I fell in love with the One True Church. [NFP] renewed our marriage and deepened our attraction to one another.

"As I tell people now, God rewards faithfulness! [My husband] was an agnostic Jew who was awestruck to find his Messiah! He knew that Orthodox Jews oppose artificial birth control, and the Church's teaching made perfect sense to both of us.

Overflowing love

"The most amazing consequence of submitting to Church teaching is the desire - wholly unexpected - to have more children! We had a fourth child in February whom we consider our miracle "Catholic baby." (We were done after three kids and had plans for my husband to get a vasectomy eventually.)

"We are so grateful to God for our new baby, Paul Joseph, and we have a strong desire for more! We have been blessed by the Church's teaching, and our entire world view has changed."

For this couple, the beauty of the Church's teaching has not only brought them new life in their son but also new spiritual life in the conversion of a spouse.

This column is syndicated by www.OneMoreSoul.com and is reprinted from Kimberly Hahn's book, Life-Giving Love (St. Anthony Messenger Press).