By U.S. bishops released resources including posters, homily notes, social media files, and ideas for celebrating and promoting natural family planning.
“Designed by God, Guided by Love, Open to Life” is the theme of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) 2026 Natural Family Planning (NFP) Awareness Week campaign.
The bishops’ annual NFP campaign, taking place July 19-25, highlights God’s design for married love, the gift of life, and the Church’s teaching on NFP methods.
To educate people on the matter, the NFP Program of the USCCB develops a poster each year with supportive materials to be displayed in parishes, hospitals, NFP classrooms, marriage preparation sites, doctors’ offices, family life centers, and campus ministry centers.
In 1981, the Catholic Church in the U.S. worked to strengthen efforts to make NFP and Church teaching more widely known and used. To further the mission, the bishops’ conference established the NFP Program.
The program, which is a part of the USCCB’s Secretariat for Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth, releases resources for dioceses and organizations to use including the posters, homily notes, social media files, and ideas for celebrating and promoting NFP.
The campaign encourages parishes to provide introductory sessions on the science and ethics of NFP and host retreats for married couples.
The USCCB also suggests that parishes offer opportunities for prayer, including Masses, rosaries, Eucharistic adoration for marriage and NFP intentions, and novenas for strengthening marriage, such as those to St. Anne, St. Joachim, and the Blessed Mother under the title of the Annunciation.
The dates of the annual campaign highlight the anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on the regulation of birth, Humanae Vitae, which was published on July 25, 1968.
Natural Family Planning
NFP invites couples to cooperate with God’s plan for married love, which the USCCB says, “is a ‘great mystery,’ a sign of the love between Christ and his Church (Eph 5:32).”
NFP relies on observing and measuring a woman’s natural signs of fertility, such as basal body temperature and hormone levels, in order to identify fertile and infertile phases of her menstrual cycle.
Unlike chemical or mechanical contraceptives that suppress or block fertility, NFP works with the body’s natural rhythms in keeping with Church teaching.
As the U.S. bishops have previously said, “NFP respects the God-given power to love a new human life into being even when we are not actively seeking to exercise that power.”
Published research has also revealed that married couples who practice a method of NFP experience improved couple communication, more openness to life, and have lower divorce rates.
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This has been going since 1981?
Yes, and with this understatement: “Unlike chemical or mechanical contraceptives that suppress or block fertility, NFP works with the body’s natural rhythms in keeping with Church teaching.”
That is, NFP is NOT a “contraceptive,” and instead is inseparable from “Humanae Vitae” (1968), “Veritatis Splendor” (1993), and Pope St. John Paul II’s Wednesday Audiences of 1979-85 consolidated into the “Theology of the Body”(e.g., Pauline Books and Media, 1997).
If you are using NFP to have marital relations while intentionally avoiding conception you are contracepting and therefore sinning.
Effectivity?
A foolish question. God is not an idiot and does not abandon us to plumbing solutions in which we necessarily abandon Him from our lives.
Not a foolish question,but a practical one. Most people that I have met who are big on NFP have 8 or 10 children. How effective is it really? Your response is illogical and emotional. Please answer the question of effectivity with some facts. Cold, hard facts, not emotion.
“Most people that I have met who are big on NFP have 8 or 10 children. How effective is it really?”
And if they are welcoming to eight or ten? You assume “family planning” means some arbitrary avoiding birth rather than producing children.
Yeah, I know who you are, the effete snob that runs into a large family in some store and rolls your eyes, exhales and audibly smacks your lips in contempt. Who are you to judge? When you’re not mumbling under your breath “geez, let her stop bleeding before you resume breeding” or quotes the 70’s TV show title “Eight is enough”.
I once worked for a man who by his mid 30’s had eight, and among his staff was a gaggle of immature twenty-somethings, most unmarried, and I think only one had children. One day at a holiday lunch, one asked, barely concealing contempt, “don’t you and your wife ever want to be away from the kids?” His response was perfect “I love my wife and my children, why would I want to be away from them” and may have added something about them growing and perhaps moving far away.
last I heard before he relocated was that they had two more-although he was a devoted Protestant in a community that only used the 1611 KJV, he understood contraception was against God’s plan and was the only person in that work place I could commiserate with about the murder of Terri Schiavo.
“Your response is illogical and emotional.”
My late grandmother had a great injunction against hypocrisy. “Don’t throw stones from glass houses” and she wasn’t talking about Bill Joel’s 1980 album.
An “effete snob.” That’s a good one. What’s your definition of an effete snob? Perhaps anybody who has attended a ballet performance? Well, I’ve been to many ballet performances as my daughter was an accomplished ballerina. I was also an officer of Marines in my younger days. Did you ever wear the uniform? Get in dangerous situations? You’re an obnoxious bean counter. Nothing more. Does that make you bitter?
FYI not everybody wants 8 or 10 kids. For those who do, fine and dandy, but don’t force others into this scenario. Nobody has answered my question. Just responded with emotional drivel. No facts.
William: Of what “practicality” is there in accepting and honoring the will of God?
Of what “practicality” is there in being honorable and respectful of humanity sufficiently to not trivialize perceptions about people into sociological caricatures?
Of what “practicality” is there in resisting the murderous forces of the sex revolution, inevitably enabled and promoted by a contraceptive culture, to generate the mountains of corpses and rivers of blood of the unborn?
And you do not honor the uniform you wore to use it as a bludgeon of credibility when you do not know of the life situations of debating strangers and what sacrifices they have made for others, including noble actions in life threatening situations.
NFP’s very effective in either achieving or postponing conception. Today it’s something more couples are looking to for help conceiving a child.
You can go online & find statistics but basically NFP’s about becoming familiar with cycles & signs of fertility & taking responsible for one’s own health.As opposed to treating fertility as a pathology.
William above (7:33 p.m.)
Define effectively.
The contraception/abortion mandate works on the utilitarian principle of effectiveness i.e. non-production of offspring.
If you choose to eschew contraception fine and dandy. Do not try to prevent others from employing it. The US is not a theocracy.
Re Mrs. Cracker above (7:06 a.m.)
“As opposed to treating fertility as a pathology.”
Bingo. The fruit of the contraception/abortion mandate.
I think also it’s affected our understanding of the purpose of NFP which can be to either *achieve* conception, or postpone it for serious reasons. People immediately assumes a couple with 8+ children “failed” at NFP. Where in fact, they may have used that knowledge to help them conceive.
One of my children taught NFP to non-Catholic couples who were interested because of health & fertility troubles. Fertility’s a sometimes thing. Especially today when more women are postponing marriage & childbearing into their 30’s.
For some couples yes, for some no.
The will and desire of God is not incoherent. God will not be mocked.