By Rev. Eric Nielsen
Following the closing Mass of World Youth Day in Cologne, my pilgrimage group and I had a very long walk to locate our tour bus. After walking some three hours we came to a crossroads. Our map instructed us to keep going straight, but to our left about a half mile away we could see a group of parked buses. Fearful of making the wrong turn, we sat doing nothing while waves of pilgrims walked past us. As it turned out, it didn’t matter which path we took, they both led in equal distance to our bus. The only thing that would have really mattered was that we kept walking. Likewise, while we sometimes become confused on our path towards God, what is most important is that we keep walking, and this walk requires a life of purity.
Without the struggle for purity one of two things will cause our spiritual walk towards Christ to stop. We will either slowly turn from an authentic search for the face of Christ and an encounter with his cross to an earthly desire to spiritually gratify our emotions and feel good about ourselves — a sort of spiritual hedonism. Or, secondly, we will abandon the spiritual life completely in exchange for a respectable, or not so respectable, pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself.
For many married couples this struggle for purity will require some type of natural family planning. And with this the objections begin. “But Father!” they tell me, “Practicing natural family planning is easier said than done! It’s hard to periodically abstain.” And my response to that is, “I know, isn’t it great? Welcome to the spiritual life!”
We are all born with original sin. With this fallen condition comes the loss of integrity that would have made following the moral code easy. Now we all have to struggle. Even the saints found it difficult to be good. Furthermore, for couples that had the misfortune of being unchaste prior to marriage, acquiring the necessary self-control to lovingly practice natural family planning after marriage will be even more difficult.
Still, using natural family planning, while perhaps at first difficult, becomes easier as the married couple gradually acquires the virtues that it requires. These virtues will in turn lead to a deeper bond of love between the spouses which in itself makes using natural family planning easier and more rewarding. The end result is the joy and peace that is gained by any noble human struggle undertaken with the help of God’s grace.
If a young man came to you and said, “I want to become strong, but please, don’t ask me to lift any weights, exercise, or do any hard labor,” you would dismiss him as lacking the serious commitment necessary to achieve his goal. The same can be said of a couple who wish to grow in love but do not desire to follow God’s plan for them in their conjugal life. We would suspect that their desire for a deep marital love is not as serious as it could be, perhaps in some cases not even as strong as their desire for personal pleasure.
It would be a mistake to see natural family planning as simply a means to avoid pregnancy. It is also the means by which a couple can grow in the virtues necessary for true marital love as well as a simple practice to help one reach the joy of spiritual perfection to which Christ calls us.
Fr. Eric Nielsen is a priest residing in Wisconsin.
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A life of purity
By Rev. Eric Nielsen
Following the closing Mass of World Youth Day in Cologne, my pilgrimage group and I had a very long walk to locate our tour bus. After walking some three hours we came to a crossroads. Our map instructed us to keep going straight, but to our left about a half mile away we could see a group of parked buses. Fearful of making the wrong turn, we sat doing nothing while waves of pilgrims walked past us. As it turned out, it didn’t matter which path we took, they both led in equal distance to our bus. The only thing that would have really mattered was that we kept walking. Likewise, while we sometimes become confused on our path towards God, what is most important is that we keep walking, and this walk requires a life of purity.
Without the struggle for purity one of two things will cause our spiritual walk towards Christ to stop. We will either slowly turn from an authentic search for the face of Christ and an encounter with his cross to an earthly desire to spiritually gratify our emotions and feel good about ourselves — a sort of spiritual hedonism. Or, secondly, we will abandon the spiritual life completely in exchange for a respectable, or not so respectable, pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself.
For many married couples this struggle for purity will require some type of natural family planning. And with this the objections begin. “But Father!” they tell me, “Practicing natural family planning is easier said than done! It’s hard to periodically abstain.” And my response to that is, “I know, isn’t it great? Welcome to the spiritual life!”
We are all born with original sin. With this fallen condition comes the loss of integrity that would have made following the moral code easy. Now we all have to struggle. Even the saints found it difficult to be good. Furthermore, for couples that had the misfortune of being unchaste prior to marriage, acquiring the necessary self-control to lovingly practice natural family planning after marriage will be even more difficult.
Still, using natural family planning, while perhaps at first difficult, becomes easier as the married couple gradually acquires the virtues that it requires. These virtues will in turn lead to a deeper bond of love between the spouses which in itself makes using natural family planning easier and more rewarding. The end result is the joy and peace that is gained by any noble human struggle undertaken with the help of God’s grace.
If a young man came to you and said, “I want to become strong, but please, don’t ask me to lift any weights, exercise, or do any hard labor,” you would dismiss him as lacking the serious commitment necessary to achieve his goal. The same can be said of a couple who wish to grow in love but do not desire to follow God’s plan for them in their conjugal life. We would suspect that their desire for a deep marital love is not as serious as it could be, perhaps in some cases not even as strong as their desire for personal pleasure.
It would be a mistake to see natural family planning as simply a means to avoid pregnancy. It is also the means by which a couple can grow in the virtues necessary for true marital love as well as a simple practice to help one reach the joy of spiritual perfection to which Christ calls us.
Fr. Eric Nielsen is a priest residing in Wisconsin.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2026 at 6:25 pm and is filed under News & Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.