Embracing Motherhood - Donna-Marie Cooper O'Boyle

Embracing Motherhood (eBook)

Donna-Marie Cooper O'Boyle (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Servant (Verlag)
978-1-63582-485-8 (ISBN)

Popular author Donna-Marie Cooper O'Boyle is back, this time with a book that addresses the vocation of motherhood, with all its joys and challenges. Using personal recollections, stories, Scripture, papal writings, and quotes from the saints, Donna-Marie encourages women to fully embrace their calling as mothers. The book takes an honest look at family planning, raising sons and daughters in our media age, overcoming perfectionism, single parenting, and dealing with the tough issues today's families face.

CHAPTER ONE

Blessed With Little Souls

You formed my innermost being.

—Psalm 139:13, NAB

GOD GIVES MOTHERS AN AMAZING gift when he blesses them with a unique and unrepeatable new life. Nothing can compare to the exhilaration in a hopeful new mother’s heart at the sight of a positive pregnancy test when she has been praying and waiting for that moment. Or to the excitement of a mother who has been eagerly awaiting a new life in her arms through adoption when she receives the news of approval! Mothers all over the world share this common bond of joy about life.

Mothers may consider a pregnancy as a nine-month series of events—a bit (or a lot!) of morning sickness, fatigue, a protruding abdomen, flutters and movements within, and little feet jabbing them in the rib cage. And then, just a little while later, come the sweet baby coos, peach-fuzz hair, and chubby, dimpled arms and legs that fill the new mother’s world.

Bl. John Paul II has said, “In the newborn child is realized the common good of the family.” And Bishop Amphilochius, whom Bl. John Paul II quotes in Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), considered the great sacrament of holy matrimony, in which all of what I just described occurs, as “chosen and elevated above all other earthly gifts” and as “the begetter of humanity, the creator of images of God.”1

We may not think of our babies as “images of God” while we are feeding them, changing their diapers, and totally immersed in their care, but they, in fact, are! Bl. John Paul II reminds us: “Thus, a man and woman joined in matrimony become partners in a divine undertaking: through the act of procreation, God’s gift is accepted and a new life opens to the future.”2

I have often expressed that there is no greater gift than to be able to cooperate with God to bring life into the world. Babies are an incredible gift of God’s love coming to us within the loving marital embrace, or through the gift of adoption. Sometimes I think that women forget that it’s never our right to have a child. A child is God’s gift to us.

What does the Church teach us about our responsibility as Catholics to be open to new life? I’ll cite just a few examples here, but there are plenty more. Let’s start at the beginning. In Genesis we are told, “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’ ” (Genesis 1:28). As well, we learn from Genesis, “When God created humankind, he made them in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them ‘Humankind’ when they were created” (Genesis 5:1–2, NRSV).

Not every Pre-Cana conference or marriage-preparation class gives the accurate teaching of the Church in this regard. I remember vividly that at the Pre-Cana conference I attended, we were all told that “family planning is between your doctor and you.” Even though I was a young twentysomething at the time, it didn’t take long before I figured out that the conference people were in error. But not everyone may realize this. After all, when we participate in a Church-sponsored teaching event, we expect, well, Church teaching, which sadly is not always the case.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (which I’ll later refer to as “CCC” or “the Catechism”) instructs us:

So the Church, which “is on the side of life” teaches that “each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.” This particular doctrine, expounded upon on numerous occasions by the Magisterium, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.3

The Church has forever been in favor of defending life against all attacks, in “whatever condition or state of development it is found.”4 I highly recommend that you get your hands on a copy of Familiaris Consortio, this apostolic exhortation by Bl. John Paul II, and read it in its entirety. Many essential teachings about the transmission of human life and the husband and wife’s cooperation are covered in it. You can find it at Catholic bookstores or on the Vatican website at http://www.vatican.va.

My mother told me that she was teased quite a bit by her peers because she had eight children. “Haven’t you heard of birth control?” some would heartlessly ask, while slinging other opinions about procreation her way. Her doctor even advised her not to have so many children. I, for one, baby number seven, am happy my mother didn’t listen to the culture dictating to her what she should or should not do in terms of welcoming new life. God bless my mother and mothers everywhere!

I too have heard from many who offered—or perhaps I should say “pushed”—their personal opinions on me regarding what size my family should be. My own Catholic doctor recommended that I get my tubes tied. If I had listened to him, Mary-Catherine wouldn’t be here today. If I had listened to the opinions of others, I may have had only one child (since my first was an emergency C-section) and I would have never experienced a rich family life filled with everything motherhood entails. In addition, my children would have missed the experience of growing up in a larger family.

If we still need more concrete instruction concerning our responsibility to be open to life, Mother Church in the Catechism tells us: “Called to give life, spouses share in the creative power and fatherhood of God (cf. Ephesians 3:14; Matthew 23:9). ‘Married couples should regard it as their proper mission to transmit human life and to educate their children; they should realize that they are thereby cooperating with the love of God the Creator and are, in a certain sense, its interpreters. They will fulfill this duty with a sense of human and Christian responsibility.’ ”5

Recognizing and understanding that, through the sacrament of marriage, spouses “share in the creative power and fatherhood of God” should actually make us ecstatically joyful! Taking time to ponder and pray about that important and inseparable spiritual element of the marital embrace will enrich and bless our lives and marriages incredibly. We should always endeavor to call on the graces of the sacrament of marriage whenever we can. God is forever present to us in our vocation as a mother and wife.

Birth Control

One of the biggest issues that separate Catholics from our Protestant brothers and sisters is artificial birth control, which the Catholic Church does not permit and considers intrinsically evil. What is wrong with artificial birth control? Why shouldn’t couples be allowed to hold off having children or be able to space them out?

Couples may think that using birth control merely prevents a conception. In reality, it actually harms the marriage because the couple is not totally opening themselves up to one another. It may even terminate a new human life, as is the case with certain birth-control methods and certain types of birth-control pills. Several types of pills and methods act as abortifacients, making the woman’s body uninhabitable for the newly fertilized egg. It is designed to make the body sick, in a sense. Some types cause the body to do something abnormal: prevent ovulation, so that an egg is never released to be fertilized. The pill also subjects some high-risk women to many serious side effects, including stroke and heart attack.

We live, as Bl. John Paul wrote in Familiaris Consortio, in a “culture which seriously distorts or entirely misinterprets the true meaning of human sexuality because it separates it from its essential reference to the person.”6 The Church teaches that the conjugal act (the marital embrace) holds two meanings: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning. If the two meanings are separated by contraception, then the couple has manipulated and degraded human sexuality—“and with it themselves and their married partner—by altering its value of ‘total’ self-giving.”7 Using contraception, then, is not only a couple’s refusal to be open to human life, but it is also a refusal to totally give oneself to one’s spouse.

Our culture suggests that it is completely fine and even advisable to use contraception, conveying the idea that procreation is merely a biological act. The Church, on the other hand, sees the marital act as something that involves the whole person—body, mind, and soul. Our culture even advocates that we have a responsibility to our planet to limit our offspring because the world is supposedly becoming overpopulated. Some ecologists and futurologists have caused a kind of panic with their exaggerations, and a couple’s fears about bringing children into a cruel, heartless world are then increased. Another reason couples put off starting families is that they are preoccupied with acquiring material goods and fail to open their hearts to the spiritually rich gift of human life.

Many couples also fear the ongoing struggle they may face financially in raising several children in our world...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	24.1.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
ISBN-10	1-63582-485-0 / 1635824850
ISBN-13	978-1-63582-485-8 / 9781635824858

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