YOUR FACE IS MARKED UPON THE CLOCKFACE: An anonyreader brings up a very pertinent criticism of my liturgy/nfp post. I’m not on board with the sharp separation at the end between pragmatic discipline and spiritual discipline (it seems clear that people can make the latter also the former, and in fact, lots of people who write about nfp take exactly that approach so as to avoid the “contraceptive mentality” my correspondent notes), but otherwise, this is a good riposte to an experimental and perhaps not-so-well-considered post:

Hi Eve,

I’m not sure I follow the parallel you’re trying to make in your 7/19 post. An observant Orthodox Jewish couple will I suppose ceteris paribus have a fast/feast sort of rhythm as you suggest. But an observant RC couple will generally have that only if they are self-consciously and intentionally trying to avoid having a baby, right? Which is sort of permissible but definitely not mandatory? An RC husband and wife who have sex on a haphazard and arhythmic schedule, sublimely indifferent to the odds of conception on any particular occasion, are not, I take it, being Bad Catholics. If anything, isn’t there supposed to be some risk that couples who use NFP can fall prey to the negativity of the “Contraceptive Mentality” ™ even if they act out that worldview by licit Humanae-Vitae-compliant means?

I think there from time to time in Christian history have been those who advised married couples to abstain from sex on what were otherwise fasting days or periods, I don’t know with what degree of practical success. I vaguely recall some historian claiming to have determined from a review of birth records in medieval France (?) that the timing of births (minus nine months) suggested a nontrivial percentage of couples were, in fact, abstaining during Lent, but I don’t know how reliable the records were and how good the methodology was (e.g. whether it controlled for the fact that marriages were not typically celebrated during Lent, meaning one would expect an uptick in first children born to newlyweds at Eastertide plus nine months and change). Taking that sort of temporal-rhythmic approach w/o focusing on the practical impact on fertility could, I suppose, have some sort of liturgical / sanctification of time benefit. But periodically abstaining from sex just to avoid conception seems rather like periodically abstaining from meat to get your cholesterol down. Maybe it’s fine as a pragmatic exercise, but treating it as a spiritual discipline seems to miss (IMHO) the whole point about how fasting and ascesis is supposed to be beneficial for Christians.

(I totally almost included the thing about no weddings in Lent! If I throw enough pasta at this wall, won’t some of it stick??)