Mary Kenny
“It’s wonderful the way that technology can come to the rescue of good ideas and update the way we look at things,” writes Mary Kenny
Natural Family Planning (NFP) was encouraged by the Catholic Church after the publication of Humanae Vitae in 1968, and many couples who felt they needed to limit their families tried it.
Some used it successfully and liked the way it made marriage more intimate, as couples shared the regulation of fertility together; some criticised it as unreliable and a cause of anxiety – especially for women who had irregular fertility cycles.
And of course it was often jeered at as ‘Vatican roulette’, a deliberate allusion to the perilous ‘Russian roulette’.
Yet it’s wonderful the way that technology can come to the rescue of good ideas and update the way we look at things.
Accuracy
Dr Elina Burglund, along with her husband Dr Raoul Scherwitzl, has now invented an “algorithm method” which, through the biologically calibrated analyses of temperature, pinpoints with remarkable accuracy when a woman is fertile (and when fertility is unlikely to be present).
The system is called “Natural Cycles” and it’s been tested at the famed Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, where it’s been found to have a high degree of reliability. Natural Cycles will soon be available with its own app which will deliver a helpful reading of fertility patterns. Some are hailing this the greatest revolution in birth control since the invention of the contraceptive pill.
Dr Burglund says that she wants to advance the algorithm method so that women can “take control of their own fertility”; and her husband adds that “I like the idea that the man and the woman are involved together”.
I think these were some of the points that the original ‘rhythm method’ was trying to underline, many decades before apps for fertility were ever thought of.
But the advance is surely to be welcomed – it shines a positive light on fertility, as well as on a natural way to control and direct fertility in a way that serves both conjugal and family life.
Monaco royal wedding was first media frenzy
The French and Monagasque media have been marking the 60th anniversary of the wedding of Grace of Monaco – previously the film star Grace Kelly – and Prince Rainier III, which took place in April 1956.
I was a schoolgirl at the time, and we were all fascinated by it. Granted, we had to look up Monaco on the map – everyone had heard of Monte-Carlo, but the principality itself was virtually unknown to us – but its pink palace and toytown soldiers fulfilled every requirement for fairytale nuptials.
It was the first time we had heard, too, of a Catholic royal wedding. And since Grace’s family had originally come from Co. Mayo, it assumed great importance in Ireland.
Later, when I was a young reporter in Fleet Street, I heard from older colleagues that the occasion had been the most terrible media ‘scrum’.
Colleagues on the same paper fought with each other ferociously for priority of place, and for access to telephones (in those days, reports had to be dictated over the phone, and the first thing you had to do, especially in an overseas location, was find a telephone that worked).
Two colleagues I knew who both covered the Monaco wedding fought so savagely to get the front page story first that they never spoke to each another again.
Afterwards, Princess Grace looked back on her wedding day with a shudder – because the publicity had reached such a point of hysteria that it unnerved her. There is a three-minute clip on YouTube (go to “Grace Kelly Royal Wedding 1956”), and it’s evident how nervous she is. Rainier looks pretty solemn, too.
For us schoolgirls, it might have been the first Catholic royal wedding but perhaps it was also the first media wedding of modern times in which the paparazzi effectively created a mood of near frenzied excitement.
Hiding faith among the intelligentsia
Novelist Emma Donoghue mentioned in a radio interview with Miriam O’Callaghan last weekend that she still maintained a private form of faith; but she found it hard to explain, and, mixing with academics as she so often does in North America, she felt she couldn’t talk about it, since the norm is to be an atheist.
I’m not surprised. A group of social psychologists in the US have just released a paper stating that academic life in the US is overwhelmingly dominated by the left. A new book, Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University by Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Snr, describes how conservative academics have to live ‘in the closet’ in university life, cloaking religious or political values.
‘Reactionary thought’ is classified as holding such outrageous beliefs as “the intractability of tribe and culture, the fragility of order, the poverty of modern substitutes for family, patria and religion”.
Anyone who harbours such ideas must be careful to disguise them, should they hope for advancement among the intelligentsia.