Catholics and "Providentialism"

A friend of mine recently encountered a Catholic who is critical of Natural Family Planning.  His complaint was:

“Why bother trying to take control of family planning?    No child comes into existence without God's agency.  Why don’t you just trust in the will of God?”

The man was espousing a philosophy known as “Providentialism”.  And today I want to discuss why it ought to be avoided.


The Providentialist’s Complaint:

For background, the Catholic Church teaches that the sexual act has an integrity which is ordained by God and built into our human nature.  For this reason we are not permitted to sterilize it through our own interventions.  The upshot of this is a ban on the use of contraception.

However, this does not mean married couples are without recourse for spacing pregnancies.  We are permitted to utilize the natural cycles of fertility and infertility built into a woman’s monthly cycle.  The modern form of this, which uses biometric indicators to measure fertility, is called Natural Family Planning.

Now, there is a certain strain of Catholics who assert that even NFP should be considered illicit – or at best a concession to the weakness of the less pious - because it expresses a lack of trust in God’s providence.  After all, no child comes into the world without God’s permitting it, so why not just leave everything in His hands?


Not a Stamp of Approval:

Regarding God’s providence, it is true that God is ultimately in charge of everything.  This is particularly true in the realm of human life, about which we find the following affirmations in Scripture:

"Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be." - Psalm 139:16

"The days of humans are determined; you have decreed the number of their months and have set limits they cannot exceed." - Job 14:5

So we see that God is ultimately in control of when people live and die.  And in that sense the Providentialist philosophy is correct.

But consider this; Not every child is born in a valid marriage.  Some children are born through acts of adultery, fornication, rape, and science experiments.  In those instances we are bound to say two things:

• Babies should not be made in that way.
• God still cooperates in creating babies in those instances.

All this is to say we cannot treat successful procreation as a kind of divine stamp of approval.  God is willing to make children even in circumstances where people OUGHT NOT  have been making babies.


Enter, Seatbelts:

However, a bigger flaw in his thinking emerges as soon as he takes one of his children to the doctor for some immunization shots. 

As soon as he gets in the car… I’d bet he fastens his seat belt.   But why do that?

After all, God is ultimately in control of when we die.  If you get into a wreck and die, doesn’t that just mean it was your time?  Why not just stay unbuckled and trust in the providence of God?

And why take you kid for immunizations?  If your kid dies of some treatable disease… isn’t that the will of God?  Why not go without medicine and trust in divine providence?

Here we find another tension between three truths:

• God’s providence orders the date of our death
• And yet we buckle up and see the doctor.
• But buckling up and seeing a doctor does not constitute a lack of trust in God’s providence

How do we resolve this?

As Catholics we believe God’s providence makes use of secondary human causes.  The Catechism states that God makes use of our decisions when providentially ordering history:

“God is the sovereign master of his plan. But to carry it out he also makes use of his creatures' co-operation. God grants his creatures the dignity of acting on their own, of being causes and principles for each other, and thus of co-operating in the accomplishment of his plan.  […] God thus enables men to be intelligent and free causes in order to complete the work of creation, to perfect its harmony for their own good and that of their neighbors.” - CCC 306-307

Thus, while we’re assured that God has providentially ordered things – this happens in a way which is invisible to us.  We cannot brute force our way into God’s plan by abandoning all discretion, because our exercise of discretion can be just as much a part of God’s plan as our recklessness.

And if that is true at the end of life … its true at the beginning of life.


Responsible Parenthood:

The couple that uses Natural Family Planning isn’t displaying a lack of trust in God.  Rather, they are just recognizing that sex makes babies and there can be better or worse times to do that*.  In other words, they are practicing prudence and discernment regarding baby-making.  This is something which Humanae Vitae refers to as “Responsible Parenthood”:

“With regard to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised by those who prudently and generously decide to have more children, and by those who, for serious reasons and with due respect to moral precepts, decide not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time. […]  In a word, the exercise of responsible parenthood requires that husband and wife - keeping a right order of priorities - recognize their own duties toward God, themselves, their families and human society." - Humanae Vitae, 10

So while no Catholic is required to use NFP… it would seem the Church expects us practice some discernment as to when we make kids.  The Providentialist, who says we ought not practice discernment, is actually the person in the wrong.

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*(And if a person retorts, “But God made the baby, so obviously it was the right time for a baby”, I’d refer that person to the aforementioned fact that God makes babies even in cases of rape and adultery.  In other words, God makes babies even at times when humans shouldn’t be making them.)