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According to the United States Census Bureau and
Wikipedia, the Philippines is the 12th nation in the
world—out of 221—with the highest population.
The
National Statistics Office reports that there are now an
estimated 88 million Filipinos compared with 76.5
million in May 2000. That is an increase of almost 12
million in seven years, or 1.7 million every year.
Many are
clamoring for the government and communities to take
heed of family planning.
The
Church agrees that we need to take this seriously.
However,
Natural Family Planning or NFP is the only method
accepted and endorsed by the Church.
Familiaris Consortio, Pope John Paul II’s apostolic
exhortation, clearly teaches us the Church’s views in
the light of the times. Let us learn from JP II’s
teaching and clarion call.
Signs
are not lacking of a disturbing degradation of some
fundamental values: a mistaken theoretical and practical
concept of the independence of the spouses in relation
to each other; serious misconceptions regarding the
relationship of authority between parents and children;
the concrete difficulties that the family itself
experiences in the transmission of values; the growing
number of divorces; the scourge of abortion; the ever
more frequent recourse to sterilization; the appearance
of a truly contraceptive mentality.
At the
root of these negative phenomena there frequently lies a
corruption of the idea and the experience of freedom,
conceived not as a capacity for realizing the truth of
God’s plan for marriage and the family, but as an
autonomous power of self-affirmation, often against
others, for one’s own selfish well-being.
Worthy
of our attention is the fact that, in the countries of
the so-called Third World, families often lack both the
means necessary for survival, such as food, work,
housing and medicine, and the most elementary freedoms.
In rich countries, on the contrary, excessive prosperity
and the consumer mentality, paradoxically joined to a
certain anguish and uncertainty about the future,
deprive married couples of the generosity and courage
needed for raising up new human life: thus life is often
perceived not as a blessing, but as a danger from which
to defend oneself.
The
historical situation in which the family lives,
therefore, appears as an interplay of light and
darkness.
History
is not simply a fixed progression toward what is better,
but rather an event of freedom, and even a struggle
between freedoms that are in mutual conflict; that is, a
conflict between two loves: the love of God to the point
of disregarding self, and the love of self to the point
of disregarding God.
. . .
Some ask themselves if it is a good thing to be alive or
if it would be better never to have been born; they
doubt therefore if it is right to bring others into life
when perhaps they will curse their existence in a cruel
world with unforeseeable terrors. Others consider
themselves to be the only ones for whom the advantages
of technology are intended and they exclude others by
imposing on them contraceptives or even worse means.
Still others, imprisoned in a consumer mentality and
whose sole concern is to bring about a continual growth
of material goods, finish by ceasing to understand, and
thus by refusing, the spiritual riches of a new human
life. The ultimate reason for these mentalities is the
absence in people’s hearts of God.
Artificial birth-control methods plant a habit of “quick
fix,” a habit of “convenient accommodation”—habits and
ways that encourage man to lose discipline and be
irresponsible. Because we have these “quick fixes,” sex
becomes simply that—sex. This eventually leads to an
actual degradation of how you have sex, with whom you
have sex, and with WHAT you have sex with—a truly
contraceptive mentality.
NFP
teaches us to treat decently, respectfully and
beautifully how to make love and that the act is truly
special. Not an urge thing.
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