Pope Paul VI (now Saint Pope Paul VI) made a special appeal relative to the Church’s teaching
with regard to contraception, abortion and natural methods in his encyclical letter, Humanae
Vitae. This document was met with severe criticism within three days after the document
was issued! A large group of theologians met in a Catholic church in Baltimore, Maryland
and voiced their dissent. Frankly, ever since then, the Catholic world has been involved in the
middle of a struggle between what the responses should or should not be. My concern about
this struggle is that I am not entirely sure this was not a series of strategies set out by a group
of theologians who were basically against the teachings of the Church from the very beginning.
I cannot actually prove that yet, but I continue to be in the search for answers.

I do want to mention to you the picture was presented that the theologians had adopted a
hopeless approach to the questions relative to family planning, abortion, contraception of
various forms, sterilization, etc. As a young obstetrician-gynecologist and a Catholic, this
was very important to me!

The approach the theologians took was presented as a classic struggle between hope and
despair! There has been an ongoing conflict in that area for decades now and while the Church
has never changed its position; it has been restricted in its ability to be an effective leader and teacher.

As I read Humanae Vitae at the time and in the years since, I have felt that the document itself
is the “HOPE” everybody was looking for and yet that hopeful approach was retrofitted with
huge elements of despair; the major criticism was one that viewed the Church as completely
wrong in their approach and their discernment of these important moral issues. If that were
the case, of course, the work of the Saint Paul VI Institute would not be very helpful or even
needed. But what we have found over these many years is that we continue to identify and
reveal the ongoing and practical functioning of the human fertility system so it can be used not only for practical things such as family planning, but also, as we have learned now, this
incredible opportunity to provide an approach to medical care for women of procreative age
that does not suppress, destroy, or harm their fertility, or other things. As an obstetrician gynecologist, those are basically the only tools I ever learned during my training at the Mayo
Graduate School of Medicine in the 1970s (and this has persisted at this level of advanced
medical education in women’s health ever since).

Nonetheless, in 1978, we made a commitment to build the Saint Paul VI Institute for the
Study of Human Reproduction and it opened its doors in 1985. This was a huge struggle
for us to be able to accomplish and a huge commitment because nobody had ever done this
before and, I might add, nobody has ever done it since. And yet, what has been accomplished
in all of this has been virtually one of the most extraordinary things science has ever been
able to uncover. We now have a system of family planning completely compatible with a
woman’s procreative system, works at a very high rate of success, and has ultimately become
a “life-affirming women’s procreative health system (NaProTECHNOLOGY).” We are really, really proud of all of this and we feel blessed to have been involved in this work effort.

This summer, on July 24, 2024, I will be giving a six-hour seminar under the title of “What the Science of Human Fertility Can Teach Us About the Existence of a Super- Intelligent Creator.” This presentation will eventually be published into a book but will also be a verbal presentation where I can explain all of this. Frankly, it is not too complicated and yet, in some ways, it is extremely complicated. By that I mean this summer’s presentation will be an in-depth look at the historical evolution or development of the science of human fertility over the past 12,000+ years and will reveal why, when Humanae Vitae came out, it was not only, on the one hand extraordinarily revolutionary, and provocative, but required a lot of work to get to the understanding of it!

With that in mind, I am not going to go into too much more right now. I will tell you, though,
we have definitely developed, in the midst of an anti-life “revolution” in women’s “healthcare”
that has included and been built on abortion, contraception, sterilization, IVF and other
extraordinarily destructive approaches in which we have contributed literally hundreds of
millions of dollars to its growth and development. When, in the meantime, there has been
virtually no contribution to the development of natural methods! That, by itself, is an issue
all of its own I will deal with in my next letter to you, but it is an important letter because you
can find very distinct religious discrimination in what has happened in all of those years. But
I will go into greater detail on all of that in my 1st of June letter!

So, after Humanae Vitae came out, there has been nothing but struggle; struggle has been
between “hope and despair.” (Incidentally, the word “despair” means “the absence of hope.”)
Everybody has thought an obfuscation by the Church of modern technologies exists, and
this is without any particular foundation or reason. And yet, at the same time, while modern
medicine has developed a good deal of this, it has all been done within the context of an anti-child mentality. It has fostered the widespread use of human abortion and so many other
things really contrary to women’s health and respect for human life.

So, in this letter, I have mentioned Humanae Vitae expressing hope, and I want to just go
into that briefly. At the very end of the Pope’s letter written by St. Pope Paul VI, there was a
Part III section entitled, “Pastoral Directives.” In this section, he identified seven different
groups within the culture and challenged them all to do something and definitely find
solutions. I think he knew there were not a lot of solutions available at that time, but he did
not give up on it. He challenged the culture to produce solutions! That is the same as saying
there is hope; we do need to investigate those areas of hope, and we need to develop them in a way allowing us to rescue what is going to happen to the family, the children, pregnancy, and women’s health. In all of that time, and after reading about these Pastoral Directives, I personally took up the challenge! This occurred in 1968 when I was still in medical school. I began my first research into the natural human procreative system at that time.

In the meantime, we have developed this incredible system currently called the CREIGHTON
MODEL FertilityCare™ System, and it may go through a few additional name changes
in the future, but it is an incredible system. It is highly reliable, and it gives a woman and her
husband the knowledge of their fertility where the married couple can make good choices,
positive decisions and work in a way consistent with and, in a way, collaborative with their
own procreative system.

We now have programs on six continents. We have hundreds of Centers throughout the United States where you can see an allied health professional who has been trained specifically in providing this service; there are now doctors available who are trained in the new women’s health science of NaProTECHNOLOGY.® (Incidentally, first copy of the medical textbook was more than 1,200 pages long, and so we have made an enormous amount of progress.) With regard to that, we are in the process of putting together the 2nd Edition of that textbook and have written a number of other books and trained thousands of teachers, educators and medical consultants, and we have done all of this without any substantial outside funding. So, I make this appeal to you to be especially generous at this Easter Season, so we can really, really respond to the hope that it is Humanae Vitae and move beyond the struggle led by despair.

I pray that God will continue to be with you in a very special way!

Thanks so much for being a part of this program. It is extremely meaningful to us and I am
honored, along with the staff that we have here at the Institute and throughout the world to
be able to present this to you.

While the term “Super-Intelligent Creator” is used in the title of this six-hour seminar,
such terms are accepted to mean “God” in those who are writing from the perspective of
a non-theologian (usually a scientist).

Easter Appeal 2024

By Saint Paul VI Institute

Easter Appeal 2024

"The Struggle Between Hope and Despair Continues to Challenge Us!