catholicsphere

Newsweek has this article online, How Full Is Your Quiver? In a new movement, Christians ‘open their wombs to God.’.

The Bortel’s of San Antonio, Texas have 11 children, ranging from 13 months to 15 (the 20-year-old married and moved away).

The Bortels form part of the “quiverfull” movement, a small but growing conservative Protestant group that eschews all forms of birth control and believes that family planning is exclusively God’s domain. The term derives from Psalm 127:

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
The fruit of the womb is a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
So are the children of one’s youth.
Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.

In case you were thinking that this is a group of Protestants that have embraced the Catholic view, that’s not entirely true — although the article tries to make that association.

Quiverfull beliefs are absolutist. Purists don’t permit even natural family planning methods, such as tracking fertility cycles (the only form of birth control condoned by the Roman Catholic Church).

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, explains the reasoning behind the group, citing society’s growing aversion to children. You should have one or two so that people don’t ask, but if you have too many, people begin to wonder if you’re some sort of religious nut.

“If a couple sees children as an imposition, as something to be vaccinated against, like an illness, that betrays a deeply erroneous understanding of marriage and children,” says Mohler. “Children should be seen as good by default.”

Unfortunately, the former Catholic stereotype is cited and critiqued here:

“What quiverfull looks like is a group of Protestants who are more Catholic than the Catholics,” says John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

That comment bugs me, because “quiverfull” doesn’t ascribe to a truly Catholic position, and they almost seem to exhibit a “blind faith” that can do just as much a disservice to the Catholic/Christian position as do those who advocate birth control.

For the record, the Catholic position holds that married couples should not introduce any unnatural process or item into marital act. As opposed to the position of “quiverfull” though, the Catholic Church allows that there may be good reasons for deciding not to have more children, or not having children at a given time. God does expect us to use the gifts of intelligence, common sense and responsibility in addition to our physical gifts. In doing so, we can use a combination of abstinence, which is mastery of self, and the natural cycle of fertility. This should be pursued with prayer as well. In this way, we are remaining open to God’s will, and not using sex merely as an instrument of pleasure, nor introducing something foreign into the marital union which interferes with the intimacy of the relationship of a man and woman.

While there is certainly nothing wrong or sinful in any married couple choosing to have children whenever God sees fit to bless the family, “Quiverfull” takes this to an extreme, making it seem almost sinful to cooperate with God in the name of prudence and responsibility.

Unfortunately, many couples go the other way and do not seek God’s will for their family, and force their will on God (not that this is really possible, hence the “failure rate” of contraception) by using artificial birth control.

In the culture of death, however, families would do well to embrace many of the examples that “Quiverfull” families exemplify. They represent a wonderful testimony to becoming a culture of life.

[tags]family, contraception, birth control, christian, news, faith, God, catholic, protestant, children, life[/tags]