Especially over the next two weekends, please incorporate the USCCB's suggestions for
bulletins,
homilies, and
prayers of the faithful, in proclaiming the USCCB's
Natural Family Planning Awareness Week (July 19 - 25):
"It is clear in the Scriptures that God looks at the world and
human life differently from human beings with their limited vision....He willed to share with women and men a unique role in
his creative generativity which makes human sexuality unique in all
creation. It is this uniqueness revealed to us by God in the gradual
unfolding of his salvific plan, that Pope Paul VI invoked in his
prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae....
"Spouses are called to celebrate their conjugal love by
becoming one flesh in the Lord, and to see their sexual intimacy in the
context of God's creative role and the nature of marriage itself. By
remaining open to life each time they come together in the conjugal
embrace, by preserving 'the two meanings of the conjugal act: the
unitive meaning and the procreative meaning' (HV 12), married couples reverence the presence of God in their union....
"With proper instruction, married couples can readily
understand the cycle of fertility and they are able to plan and space
births in a way that is both consistent with God's law and supportive of
their own intimacy and unity....
"Humanae Vitae represents a call to celebrate and reverence God's vision of human sexuality" (USCCB, Human Sexuality from God's Perspective, 1993)."
