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| Couple describes their path to natural family planning
By Tanya Watterud
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Frank and Sally Casey used natural family planning to space their children, from left, Vincent, Mary and Joseph.
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The Catholic priest agreed to be present at Frank and Sally Casey’s wedding in a Lutheran church if they would meet with him for marriage preparation. In that meeting, they learned about natural family planning. Although the elderly priest fumbled a bit with explaining how it works, the idea became a challenge to Frank and Sally. Frank’s first reaction to the Catholic Church’s teaching that artificial contraception is morally unacceptable was strong. “I thought the church just needed to get with the ’90s.”
So did Sally, who was trying to find things that were wrong with the Catholic Church, hoping Frank would embrace her Lutheran faith.
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“We had both had divorce in our background and marriage is pretty serious for both of us,” Sally said. “I thought, ‘If Frank can’t be true to his church, how can he be true to me?'" Her challenging me on the things I believed as a Catholic really encouraged me to dig deeper,” Frank said. “My folks were divorced, and there was a difficult custody battle for us children. So when I was getting married, I wanted to give it the best chance. Involving God in this was a no-brainer. It was necessary to make sure this thing survived, so Sally and I started praying.”“Once I started going and receiving the sacraments and the graces that come from them, then the battle was over for me,” Frank said. “Then when we started understanding the history and the natural law and the reason for this thing, then it was over for Sally.” Sally and Frank met in Ames, Iowa, where they were both in graduate school. It was there that they fell in love and, in 1999, learned about natural family planning. “It wasn’t that difficult to learn,” Sally said. “We actually knew that I was fertile on our wedding night, but we took a chance anyway. [God] knew we definitely weren’t ready.” Sally, a geologist, said she was raised as a feminist and was pushed to excel in her education and career. She has set her career aside for now, choosing to stay home. Frank and Sally, who serve as a teaching couple for natural family planning in the Fargo Diocese, learned the method offered through the Couple to Couple League. They found that they could determine whether Sally was in a fertile stage in her menstrual cycle by checking body temperature, cervical mucus and making cervix observations. “You can choose what works best, or cross check,” Sally said. Since cross checking made her feel more certain of her findings, they decided to check all three indicators initially. If they did not feel ready for a pregnancy, they avoided sexual contact during the seven or so days a month when Sally was fertile. “For the first six months of our marriage, we did use all three signs and we used them very meticulously,” Sally said. When they moved to Fargo for Frank’s job, they decided to no longer abstain on fertile days and Sally became pregnant. She joined the Catholic Church after Vincent was born.The Caseys have three children: Vincent, 4; Mary, 2, and Joseph, 9 months. “Among our friends,” Sally said, “the spacing of our children is about the same as for those using contraception.” Frank said being a volunteer teaching couple is not easy. “It’s a challenge for me. In a way, I treat it as reparation,” he said with a smile. “You’re just laying yourself out there. You’re talking about personal things you don’t want to talk to your best friend about. But there are a lot of benefits. You are converting the culture. This culture’s a culture of death and we really need to discover a culture of life.”When he talks with the men, “what I try to do is be personable and use a sense of humor and say, ‘I was in your shoes’ and try to relate to them in that way. . . . I tell them the reasons, the history, the natural law, the church’s understanding of sex and marriage, and try to get them to laugh.”Sally said natural family planning has been good for their marriage. “It keeps us honest with each other and it forces us, even sometimes against our will, to be realistic about what size our family should be and when we should have our children in terms of God’s will, not our culturally formed will.” “There are some times when it can be more difficult than others,” she said of using natural family planning. “But the benefits," she said, "are well worth it.The Caseys have taught natural family planning to about 65 couples so far. About six of those couples chose to learn about natural family planning after being married and using artificial birth control. About half the engaged couples they teach use artificial birth control. “Some of them are (at class) just for the requirement,” Sally said, “but some of them do have a conversion. A lot of them will have a conversion to chastity before marriage. That’s what my husband and I did, as well.” Frank said people have to be open to God’s graces. “My generation has grown up in divorced families. My generation has seen sex everywhere; people who escaped being aborted. Particularly, our generation has been exposed to relativism. Once you start seeing that there are absolutes . . . there are foundations we can base our lives on, there’s hope in this world.”
Sally added, “You really don’t realize how corrupted you are by the culture — until you start looking into how God really designed us to be. I think the truth is down there in everybody’s heart. If you just read a couple of things, it confirms in your heart what you know is true.”
Reprinted with permission from the author and the Diocese of Fargo.
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