Posted: March 14 2006 at 3:49pm | IP Logged

Martha wrote: Lisbet wrote: So this leads me to the questions of why, since all the scientific information about NFP became available, do so many couples all of a sudden have to limit their family size to be 'responsible parents'. Why are we all of a sudden so much weaker than those married couples before that had no knowledge of child spacing? Why are our breaking points so much more fragile? I second that question!

Children and the standard of life

Since about 1960, the choice of many couples to limit their family to two or three children has corresponded less and less to any exceptional difficulty offered by the prospect of a large family, and more and more to the simple desire to avoid the normal difficulties that such a family involves. All of this has tended to bring about a radical change in the way that marriage and the family are understood. Values have become less human and more materialistic.

People sacrifice themselves for the things they think worthwhile. The point is that fewer and fewer couples seem to feel that children--beyond one or two at the most--are worthwhile. Motor cars, country cottages, overseas holidays--these are all now part of one's standard of life and considered worth working for. The more one can have of these, the better off one is. Children are not part of one's standard of life: a family is not "better off" if it has more children. The materialistic, non-Christian standard operating here should be evident.

Until a generation ago, most Catholics would have had little difficulty in grasping the deep human truth behind the words that Pope John Paul II addressed to parents in Washington, D.C., in October 1979: "It is certainly less serious to deny their children certain comforts of material advantages than to deprive them of the presence of brothers and sisters, who could help them to grow in human ity and to realize the beauty of life at all its ages and in all its variety." Married couples today seem to find it harder to recognize that children are values of a totally unique order, that to deprive their presnet children, or themselves, of further members within the family marks a serious limitation or reducation in one's standard of living, and that one only devalues human effort and sacrifice if one works for comfort, prestige, or possessions rather than for one's children.

A family over-geared to material comfort is certainly not the best seedbed for a religious vocation. Youth always retains a natural idealism; but a soft atmosphere in the upbringing of children does not favor the serious flowering of ideals. It is almost impossible for a teenager to acquire a spirit of sacrifice unless he or she comes from a family where it has been present. And it will not be present in a family unless it has been lived first by the parents, who then inculcate it in their children.

The consumer mentality, with its emphasis on possessions and money and calculation, does not favor vocations to religious life. Where the blessing of poverty of spirit is less present, people's hearts are less drawn to the service of the Kingdom of God.