It is a great pleasure to introduce the new DVD and accompanying materials on Natural Fertility Awareness. Indeed, I would say that Luton Good Counsel has done a very good service to the Church in providing us with this resource and I want to talk about why this is a good, timely and appropriate source to offer not only to the Church but also to the wider community.

Last year Iain Duncan Smith chaired a group which made recommendations about the family for the Conservative party. Now I don’t, of course, want to get into party politics. Sadly, politicians are preparing and passing legislation which prescinds altogether from the basic moral principles on which the well-being of our society depends. What interested me about this report was the way in which it unequivocally insisted on the importance of the family for the well-being of society. Now, of course, it would be naïve to hope that we will have a government that legislates on the basis of true Christian values and principles but, nonetheless, the evidence of the damage done to our society and to people by the amnesia about, or rejection of, moral principles is becoming more and more compelling: the tragedy of families broken by divorce and the effect that has on both parents and children. The struggle of one-parent families. The attitude to life itself, evidenced by the appalling abortion statistics underpinned as they are by rhetoric about rights and choice which puts the focus on the self: on me, my needs, expectations. The same kind of rhetoric shapes attitudes towards sexuality: a focus on self, on what St Paul calls the self life which cannot but foster a situation in which people manipulate and exploit one another for sexual purposes. The moral climate that we live and breathe is an unhealthy one but it is the one in which our children grow up that affects us all. None of this, of course, is news to any of you but I mention it because it may be that the time is ripe for people to be more receptive to a different understanding of life, love and sexuality. The problems with the road we have been travelling are becoming more and more plain. And yet it remains very much the case that people are highly resistant to being told what to do in the private and intimate areas of life. It is taboo in our society to criticize any kind of sexual life style except ones that involve people who are under age.

Now I mention this because it seems to me that natural fertility awareness is an integral and necessary part of a true and wholesome understanding of human sexuality and of a rediscovery of the importance of family life. The whole business of family planning is regarded very much as a private matter in much the same way that religion is relegated to the private sphere. But it cannot be so. The way we behave sexually affects us, our families, and the whole of society in which we live. We don’t live in isolation, we live in community. And the Church’s teaching about sexuality is teaching about the well-being of society. Moreover, the Church’s teaching about sexuality is inextricably bound up with its teaching on marriage because – as Fr Barrett very lucidly explains in the DVD, sex is for marriage. That is the context, the framework in which sexual relations are able to be what they are intended to be, an expression of a life-long, faithful partnership between a man and a woman which is open to new life and is publicly recognised as a marriage. Sex in any other context is a falsification of the true meaning and potential of human sexuality. Of course - and this is something people who are not Catholics find it difficult to understand - the Church is very understanding and forgiving of the weakness and struggle that many people experience in living with full integrity in this area, whether in the bond of marriage, or living our sexuality in the single state in which sexuality can find full expression but not of a physical kind. That expression only finds its true home in marriage. And the Sacrament of Reconciliation is there to help people in their journey to maturity and integrity in this area of their lives. And here I come back to the DVD.

Human sexuality is an aspect of human flourishing. Sexual relations within marriage are one of the key ways by which a couple seek to live in unselfish love of one another and so reciprocate the love of God for each of them. In the DVD the couples explain how this happens from the vantage point of their own lived experience. They’re not quoting documentation; they are bearing witness to their own lives. Just note some of the things they say. Natural Fertility Awareness (NFA) creates a new kind of freedom; it enables couples to understand what that love is all about. It makes clear to the couple that married love requires and is all about complementarity, joint responsibility, taking shared ownership of their life together. It engenders a real mutual respect; it breaks down the potential for manipulation and exploitation that can so easily shape the way people relate to one another sexually. It means giving yourself completely, holding nothing back and it involves an element of discipline that is undertaken together and becomes an integral part of the relationship.

The DVD does not focus on moral norms or rules, and I think this is important in terms of helping people to understand the reason for the Church’s teaching on contraception which, we must admit, is for many people very difficult to understand. What the DVD does is to open up the values, the goods, which moral norms exist to safeguard and promote. The prohibition on killing exists to safeguard and promote the value of human life. The DVD promotes the values that Catholic teaching on contraception seeks to promote. I mention this because we may be moving into a time when people are more open and more susceptible to the values and the culture of family life that the Church upholds as integral to human well-being and human goodness. If you are teaching morality you have to make sure that what you say will make sense within the culture and ways of thinking of those to whom you are speaking. I suggest this DVD does that and may provide as well a tool and a springboard for more confident and lucid teaching about this aspect of the sanctity of marriage. And, I’ve said, the fact that people are beginning to appreciate the value and unique significance of marriage for a good and stable society makes this material especially timely.