…is exercised both by those who raise a numerous family with prudent and generous deliberation, and by those who, for weighty reasons and with due respect to moral precepts, decide to avoid a new birth for a defined period of time and even indefinitely."
Great piece in Homiletic & Pastoral Review about how (among English-speaking Catholics) the misconception arose that using natural family planning to avoid pregnancy is only licit in extremely dangerous situations. As Greg put it over at HMS Blog, "It’s time to bury the phrase grave reasons."
I have been fairly active on NFP mailing lists, and moderated a few, and I’ve always been impressed by the persistence of this myth. The author of the piece, Angela Bonilla, not only puts it decisively to rest (the encyclical Humanae Vitae says, essentially, that the decision to avoid pregnancy carries moral weight and must be seriously considered) but also helpfully explains how a hasty, early translation gained dominance over the official Latin version and over other, more correct translations in the English-speaking world.
Interesting not only to fans of HVand moral theology, but also to anyone who likes translation and language, as it goes into great detail about the linguistic variations among Latin, English, and Italian versions of the document.
I was particularly struck by Ms. Bonilla’s argument that words meaning "either…or" really need to be rendered in English as "both…and" in order to capture the correct shade of meaning. I immediately recognized this dilemma as a problem of the intersection of Boolean logic with meanings in common use. "Either…or," mathematically speaking, can mean "both…and," or to be more precise, if not more clear, "either…or" means either "both…and" or "either…or."
bearing blog 