All eyes are on six dioceses to see if a policy on having natural family planning a part of marriage-prep programs can really work on a large scale, said Theresa Notare of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' pro-life office.

“Every bishop is watching this,” she said. “I told them, ‘You better document this, and document it well.’”

In Baton Rouge, La., six of the diocese's 70 parishes have joined a pilot program of incorporating a natural family planning course in marriage preparation. The reaction of priests and couples will be gathered and reported to Bishop Robert Muench along with a possible recommendation of expanding the program to more parishes.

So far the priest surveys have been all very positive, and so have nearly all the couple responses, said diocesan family life director Warren Dazzio. One priest reported there were couples who told him they would go to another parish to be married, but another said the marriages at his parish tripled.

“It may not have been a direct result of the natural family planning program, but that tells me it certainly didn't turn couples away,” Dazzio said.

There are several reasons more priests and bishops have hesitated to ask all marrying couples to take a natural family planning course, said John Grabowski, a moral theologian at the Catholic University of America.

Some may be reluctant to ask couples to do too much, making it seem like the Church was placing a hurdle in the way of the right to marry that, according to canon law, all baptized persons have. Others are concerned they would not have the resources and instructors for every engaged couple to take the classes, he said.

Still others believe that in a culture in which most Catholic couples preparing for marriage are sexually intimate and where, according to pastors and diocesan family life directors, 50% or more are already living together, couples would not be prepared to receive such a “foreign” teaching as natural family planning, which stresses openness to God's direction for family size and requires periodic abstinence.

“I really believe that marriage prep is just that sowing-seeds time. We live in such a society of contraceptive mentality, it's hard for people to break away from that,” said Stella Kitchen, a natural family planning director in Harrisburg, Pa., who works to incorporate the Church's sexual teaching into religious education and instruction for those entering the Church so that engaged couples are not hearing about natural family planning for the first time.

“Every diocese does what they think is right. For my part, I think it is very hard to teach someone who doesn't want to be taught,” she said.

Catholic University's Grab-owski argued that the widespread acceptance of contraception, even 35 years after Pope Paul VI reiterated the Church's condemnation of it in Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), is all the more reason to require a full natural family planning course.

“I think Denver got it right. Unless you really learn what natural family planning is and what it can do for a marriage, no couple is going to be motivated to” take the classes on their own, he said. “A one-hour commercial is not going to get it done. All you can do in one hour is to introduce the concept. You can't give them the tools to use it.”

Thanks to years of teaching experience and new insights drawn from Pope John Paul II's theology of the body, natural family planning instruction is as good today as it has ever been, promoters say.

“We do a better job now of explaining why natural family planning enriches a marriage,” said Deacon Tim Sullivan, family life director in Tulsa, Okla. “Couples are much more receptive now than they were 10 years ago. They've always been respectful, but now we see more enthusiasm. Engaged couples know something's wrong” with modern marriage, “so they're more open to what the Church offers.”

Father Randy Moreau, a priest in Lafayette, La., said that while he has long been a supporter of natural family planning, it took time—and nerve—for him to be ready to make a natural family planning course part of his parish's marriage preparation. He used to wonder if couples would leave the parish to marry elsewhere, he said.

“I've been lucky. I've been successful. I haven't received all this opposition,” he said. “Most of them have not been exposed to this, and when they hear it, they see this is extremely beautiful.”

To be sure his couples are not caught too much off-guard, Father Moreau said he incorporates the Church's teaching on marriage and family into his homilies and the intercessions at Mass. He challenges other priests to follow suit.

“If we love our people, we want them to have the fullness of the truth; we want them to have a deep relationship with Christ; and therefore we want to give them what they need, not what will make us popular,” he said. “We're going to put their own salvation, their holiness above our own needs, our desires for popularity or comfort, whatever it might be.”

— Ellen Rossini