July 23, 2014 – Excerpted from “Put Out Into the Deep”, Bishop DiMarzio’s column in The Tablet:

The Church throughout the U.S. has just completed a special week dedicated to promoting the true meaning of Natural Family Planning (NFP). Natural family planning is an umbrella term that refers to modern, scientifically accurate, healthy and reliable methods of birth regulation. The Church teaches that parents must be responsible for bringing new life into the world so that they will be able to properly support and educate the children that God gives them.

Unfortunately, our contemporary society has adopted what we might call a “contraceptive mentality,” whereby couples often choose means other than natural ones to prevent conception from occurring. This attitude, unfortunately, is also evidenced among our own Catholic people. However, for the most part, I believe that many Catholic couples do not understand the various forms of natural family planning that can assist them in achieving the natural and God-given ends of their marriage, namely the loving, unitive and life-giving procreative aspects of sexual intercourse within the sacramental covenant of marriage. For this reason, the Catholic Church teaches that couples must not actively intervene to separate their fertility from their physical union. To do so is to show disrespect for an important gift given to married couples by the Creator.

Read the full text of the Bishop’s column on The Tablet website.