200—Moral Questions about NFP w/ Eamonn Clark

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 21, 2025 | In The Catholic Culture Podcast

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The way Natural Family Planning is commonly taught does not adequately reflect the Church’s perennial teachings on the purpose of marital relations, on sexual asceticism, and the good of continence. To be sure, critics of NFP are wrong when they say it is the same as contraception. The Church has deemed it legitimate to use under certain circumstances. Yet its typical presentation in marriage prep programs and by popular Catholic speakers has ended up, in practice, encouraging couples toward habitual venial sin.

Discussions of NFP often end up in confusion because they fail to distinguish two separate moral issues: that of avoiding marital relations during fertile periods, and that of engaging in them specifically during infertile periods. As to the first issue, the Church has said we need sufficient reason to deliberately avoid procreating for a long period of time. But the second issue involves a moral doctrine that is virtually never heard of today: that there are particular ends which must be intended in any act of marital relations, and in particular, that it is a venial sin for married couples to have relations purely for pleasure (solam voluptatem, in Pope Innocent XI’s phrase). The latter is the teaching of all Fathers and Doctors of the Church without exception.

Given this moral doctrine, and given the Church’s (and St. Paul’s) traditional encouragement of asceticism within marriage, the question arises: may married couples engage in recreational relations specifically while trying to avoid conception? Answering this question involves questions about the intrinsic ends of sexual intercourse, questions about what “purely for pleasure” even means, etc.

The stakes of the question are low in the sense that this would generally be a matter of venial sin, but high in the sense that it bears on our understanding of the very purpose of marriage and sex, and because habitual, deliberate venial sin is incompatible with a marriage’s growth in holiness.

Moral theologian Eamonn Clark joins the podcast to discuss his groundbreaking book (the first on this topic since the 1940s), New Questions, Old Answers: Catholic Morals and Natural Family Planning. His conclusions occupy a middle ground between the extremely strict position of some great Catholic authorities of the past, and the laxity and sensualism presented by some well-regarded and well-meaning popular speakers today.

This discussion will be spiritually and perhaps emotionally challenging to many listeners, but I urge you to listen with an open heart, because even if you end up disagreeing with some of the specific conclusions, you will come away better informed about Church teaching, and equipped to consider for yourself how you can seek greater holiness in marriage. In particular, I highly recommend Eamonn’s book to anyone who is involved in running marriage preparation programs.

Eamonn Clark is a licensed moral theologian of the Catholic Church. He has an STB and STL from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, where he is currently a lay doctoral student researching the social teaching of Pope Pius XI.

Links

Get free PDF of New Questions, Old Answers: Catholic Morals and Natural Family Planning https://profide.io/nfp/

Article on the marital debt https://christianrenaissancemovement.com/2023/02/23/thoughts-on-the-marital-debt/

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