Title: Heroic Love and Family Planning


Narrator: When Sergio and Juanita Lopez went through marriage prep in 2003, and learned about Natural Family Planning — the Church’s recommended method of naturally postponing or achieving pregnancy within marriage — they quickly came to the same conclusion. NFP wasn’t for them. 


Sergio: My wife and I tried a lot of things. We tried the patch, we tried the ring. We tried, of course, the birth control. She would just try to take care of herself as much as — ‘cause back then we would say, I’m being responsible by taking care of myself or ourselves, by taking all this birth control. 


Narrator: Juanita got off birth control twice when they decided they were ready to start having kids. They gave birth to a boy and girl, and that seemed like enough for them. 


Sergio: We decided not to have any kids anymore, that we were done. We were done, we were done. We were like, no more.


Narrator: At the time Sergio’s attitude about sex came less from a place of gratitude, and more a place of entitlement. He had an attitude he sees in a lot of the men he counsels now, that he should get to have sex whenever he wanted it. 


Sergio: Birth control makes you think that she's never going to get pregnant. Well, most of the time, of course, but in your mind as she's taking birth control, so we can have sex any time, even if it's — even if there's — she's not wants, she doesn't want to, she feels more of a force to have sex, just to be happy or have that false peace if you call it.


Narrator: But Sergio and Juanita’s marriage was anything but happy and peaceful. As the years went by, things became extremely rocky. They tried everything to make their marriage work but nothing softened the daily combat they were in. They needed an extreme rescue, and that’s when Juanita had a wild idea — What about NFP?
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Sergio and Juanita Lopez were married eight years with two kids when they decided it might be time to call it quits. 


Sergio: So my wife and I start thinking about getting a divorce. We were fighting a lot and for no reason. We were just fighting, fighting, 


Narrator: They went to a marriage encounter retreat — a faith-based marriage enrichment program. Then they went to another one. They went to a Retrouvaille weekend retreat, a program specifically designed for couples who are on the brink of divorce. 


Sergio: We still didn't find a solution. We were still having issues. And I didn't know what was what. We were fighting. And I kept telling her, I was like, we've been through everything. What else do you want? 


Narrator: They stopped talking to each other and were just coexisting with mutual animosity. Juanita, eager to get away, went on a personal retreat where she wandered into a booth where two men were talking about the benefits of NFP and signing up couples for classes. NFP is the practice of avoiding or achieving pregnancy without the use of contraceptive drugs or devices. This, she decided, was their last dodge effort. It was the one thing they hadn’t tried. 


Sergio: She brought it up with us, and I was very, very not into it. And he said that if this didn't work, we should just call it quits. But so in my mind, I've been like, okay, I'll go so she can say that we tried, and that was not because of me. 


Narrator: They went to a class at St. Steven’s in Detroit where Sergio came with a game-face ready to ridicule whatever was presented. 


Sergio: So we went to this class, I remember clearly it was starting fall, and we would fight every time before each class, we were just fighting. I didn't want to be there. I realized that that class was going to take my sexuality away. It was going to be controlled. 


Narrator: But something happened in the midst of the 6-week-long course. Somewhere in the stubborn wall of resistance Sergio had built, he started listening. 


Sergio: And as the class went on, I guess you can say, like the wall kept falling. Every brick kept falling. And I started realizing that that's what our marriage was missing. We tried everything, but it was that she wasn't feeling loved enough or respected enough as a woman. So I didn't know. I didn't know that that was a big issue and our side, I guess she couldn't tell me and I wasn't hearing. So it was deaf on both ears and mouths on both sides that the problem — we didn't know what the problem was until we went there. So after living that class, it was like a hit in our marriage that we fell in love with it. 


Narrator: They decided to stick together, to keep working on the marriage. Eventually their marriage was strong enough they decided to have another child — a little boy named Alejandro. This last month, ten years later, they celebrated their 18th wedding anniversary. Their marriage today is unrecognizable to the hostile people they were before. 


Sergio: She feels more respected. She knows that I respect her sexuality. When the time comes, we are both now grateful that that time comes to do it, to have that time, that magical time if you call it and it's not like it used to. So she feels respected and in every way, I guess.


Narrator: Today, the former adversary of NFP is now one of the dioceses’ most passionate teachers. Just a few years after taking their class, Sergio and Juanita decided to become teachers so they could offer the NFP courses to their Spanish-speaking community. At the time there weren’t Spanish-speaking teachers of the Creighton model of NFP. They fundraised to send themselves through the 7-week course to become practitioners who could walk with people through the process. Since then, they have been working with the Archdiocese of Detroit’s NFP Office to bring awareness to the Spanish-speaking community throughout the diocese and remove language and cultural barriers to NFP. This last March, Sergio and Juanita recorded an online course on NFP. They share their testimony on the regular. Today Sergio is renowned for being a fierce advocate of the women in his classes, calling men to be avid participants in the method. And while he credits NFP with bringing him to his wife Juanita, he also credits it with bringing him back to God. 


Sergio: I started to pray more. I fell in love with God. I would try to please him because I know he's watching me every second, every second of my life. Even if I'm faithful to my wife and she's not seeing it doesn't mean that God is not looking at me. So my faith to God is first, then my wife, which if you love God first, that's the one of the commandments. Then everything's going to fall in place. If you think about it, if you love God first, everything else will fall in place because that's what God wants. So he will guide — I feel like he's guiding me to what he wants out of me in my life, from my plan, whatever the plan is going, you know?


Narrator: This right here — this falling in love with your spouse and God thing — is the whole goal of NFP in Nicole Joyce’s eyes. Nicole is the Natural Family Planning Coordinator for the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the only way she believes NFP can truly work, is if the attitude around sex and responsibility can shift. 


Nicole: I think historically it goes back to contraception because we've always historically put the responsibility of contraception on women too, right? Like it's a woman's problem. She's the one who's going to have a baby. She's the one who will get pregnant. So it's always been a responsibility that we've shown to the women and said, you know, if you don't want this consequence — and we make it out like it's a bad thing to have a baby — if you don't want this consequence that you, as a woman have to be responsible. And the responsible thing to do is to contracept. And we've carried that idea over into so many areas of living now, you know, when we see culturally about the roles of men and women, even now in 2021, you know, you're seeing research and articles about women who are working from home and caring for their children, especially during the pandemic, and how their workload has doubled. And we're still expecting them to produce the same outcome that they were producing before. You know, where the men are still, even if they're working from home, they're not feeling like they need to be as responsible in the roles childcare or remote learning or whatever else might be happening at home during the pandemic. I think it goes all the way back to the idea that women were responsible for whether or not they got pregnant, and that has stayed with us. And that's how we built up this idea that contraception is a woman's responsibility and now NFP too, right? 


Narrator: Studies show a gender bias regarding feelings towards NFP, with women feeling more positive about it than men. And this is something Nicole and a small band of men within the archdiocese are focused on changing by redefining what sexual responsibility really means, and “whose” it really is. One of the men trying to fight this is Giovanni Vitale, who co-founded Whole Mission with his wife Lauren. Whole Mission is a web service that connects couples with Marquette model instructors, classes and information as well as resources for teachers through a web portal. Since its founding in 2019 it's served students in countries all over the world. Here’s Giovanni.


Giovanni: It starts with having a shared responsibility, understanding that this area of your marriage is a shared responsibility. It's not you know, just to kind of throw another added from family life. It's you know — I don't babysit my kids when my wife's not around, you know? We have that shared responsibility of taking care of our kids. Like, I'm not helping out around the housework, we're working together when chores are being done. And I think a lot of people start with that mindset where, okay, this is my wife's domain. This is her job. This is my job. We each have our separate individual things. It's a shared responsibility — you should because it's your marriage. It's not just one of you. You and your wife need to be coming together regularly and praying about what is the Lord's plan for our marriage and for our family? Iis it to receive more children into our family at this time? And do we have just reasons for avoiding pregnancy at this time? You can't be answering those questions if you don't have a well formed conscience, and you're not bringing that to prayer. That's key. And you can't do that by yourself. You can't, you know, even the husband. The husband can't do that by himself. He can't come in and say, well, this is what we're doing, because that's what I've decided. No, it needs to be a, it needs to be a conversation. Then we really need to be listening to what our wives are saying so that we can serve them as Christ serves the Church, we need to imitate them. 


Narrator: When it comes to ideas for how men can get involved Giovanni has no shortage of ideas. 


Giovanni: You can monitor traditional fertility signs like the woman's temperature, cervical mucus, but one of the great things is — that Marquette includes for those who want include it — is hormonal monitoring. So you can track the woman's hormones. Which means that, with the Marquette method, if you're doing that, the man can run all the tests, you know, all you need is a sample from your wife and the husband can take the initiative, do the charting, if they desire to do that. In our marriage, my wife would never allow me to touch any of the stuff, just because she's the expert, but I've talked to many men who kind of take the role and they handle almost every aspect of the fertility management in that area. 


And I would say the biggest thing that I encourage men to do, that my wife encourages men to do, is really to develop discipline in your life in other areas, especially in the areas of prayer and fasting. Having specific days during the month where you are fasting for your wife, that you are going to give up, you know, however you want to fast, if you want to do a bread and water fast from your wife that day, if you want to do the two small meals, one big meal, fast whatever it might be, or maybe fast from social media — whatever you desire to do, building those disciplines and areas and other areas of self-control can really be a great benefit to your marriage and will pour over into into this area.


Narrator: In helping form couples Nicole, Giovanni and Sergio see the sharing of this responsibility as an absolutely crucial element of a successful marriage. And Nicole believes these foundations of respect can be built in the earliest days of sex education. 


Nicole: In a perfect world, I'd love to see our young men in, you know, even middle school and high school, learning more about the health and wellness of their female counterparts. And I'd love to see the young women learn about the young men too. And, and that's a separate project that I'm working on with the middle school and the high schoolers in Catholic schools and in parishes. But I'd love to see even at a younger age for them to not just get sex education, but to get a really more complex understanding of the challenges that come with reproductive development, with sexual development, and have a sense of empathy for each other from the time they're old enough to realize that there are differences. 


You know, I'd love to see that cultural shift from boys making fun of girls and snapping bras and making jokes like, “Oh, she must be on her period.” And for girls giggling about boys. I'd love to see that shift into something where they really have to empathy for each other, even before they're even old enough to talk about discerning marriage or vocation. And then from there, I think our goal would be for the men to really embrace the idea that their fertility is shared with their spouse and that the practice of NFP goes beyond just who's going to write it down on the chart and are we going to have sex today? Yes or no? Right? There's so much more to that. Are we really praying together and discerning, are we listening for God's voice? And are we asking him to reveal his will for our family, for our lives so that we can be obedient to that so that we can live out our vocation of marriage as joyful missionary disciples?


Narrator: Pope Paul VI, the writer of Humane Vitae, the encyclical on married love that is the source of much of the Church’s teaching on birth control once wrote, “Love, when it is genuine, is all-embracing, stable, and lasting, an irresistible spur to all forms of heroism.” Nicole, Sergio, and Giovanni, may be presenting couples with lofty goals, but they are undaunted. They’re in the business of supporting heroic love. 
Detroit Stories is a production of Detroit Catholic and the communications department of the Archdiocese of Detroit. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is sponsored by Alliance Catholic Credit Union. Learn how “you belong here” at www.AllianceCatholic.com.