Openness to life, openness to God

...Seeing family size as proportional to sanctity is gravely unjust to those with medical or other hardships that place large families – or having children at all – out of reach. The outward faithfulness of these families … lies not in biological fruitfulness but in the fruitfulness of their labor (for one another and for good works), of the service, and above all of their friendships. Ultimately, it lies in docility to God’s will for them, in whatever form that fruitfulness takes.

In fact, this framing completely misses the point of the openness to life that is written into our nature and the nature of marriage. It’s not about making babies with maximal efficiency, like an assembly line. It’s not about demonstrating a tenacious determination to rack up virtue points by bringing as many challenging children into your family as possible. And it’s certainly not about mimicking some model of the ideal traditional household. All of these shift the emphasis from God to ourselves, elevating our own notions of family – and our own willpower to achieve those goals – over meek cooperation with His will.

It’s this docility, not aggressive countercultural signaling or demonstrations of moral tenacity or even the pursuit of calloused fortitude, that is at the heart of the openness to life. Pope St. Paul VI, amid some of the strongest condemnations of contraception in Humanae Vitae, put it this way:
But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. …

… Our openness to life, then, is judged not by the number of lives but by the extent of our openness to God’s life – that is, His grace. Not using artificial contraception is the beginning of this openness, not its endpoint. …

… The family serves its God-ordained purpose as a school of grace, therefore, by a radical openness to grace – only one aspect of which, though a very important one, is openness to life. Joyless procreation for the sake of competition or performance or demographic duty isn’t going to be a credible witness to children, let alone to the wider community, of the deep goodness of Catholic marriage. …

The Catholic family cannot play its part in the renewal of the Church if it is merely acting out God’s law without allowing God’s life to imbue it. It’s about being the place where the life of grace is learned, and specifically where the sacramental grace of the parish is amplified, and its fruits manifested.

Excerpt from The Prodigal Church: Restoring Catholic Tradition in an
Age of Deception, by Brandon McGinley (Sophia Institute Press, 2020),
pp. 128-131. www.SophiaInstitute.com

BRANDON McGINLEY has been writing about faith and politics since college. His career has spanned politics and publishing, from pro-life advocacy to editing EWTN books. His articles have appeared in National Review, The Washington Post, First Things, the Catholic Herald, among many others. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and four children.