Association Of Catholic Bloggers

This month's Natural Family Planning poster couple (so-to-speak) are Ben & Tina Butera from Bloomingdale, Illinois. They've used NFP for all of their 14-year marriage, and they have three children -- Antonio, age 12, Francesca, age 10, and Marianna, age 7. Although their main reason for using NFP is "doing what God wants," Tina and Ben also received an immense medical benefit when NFP helped them recognize warning signs early in Tina's last pregnancy, leading them to take steps to avoid possible miscarriage. To learn more about Ben and his faith, you can visit his Faith & Reason blog called   Two Catholic Men & a Blog . 1. Why do you use NFP? Aside from the obvious of wanting to live as God wants, we’ve always been uncomfortable with hypocrisy with ourselves or in others. We’re either in or out when doing something important, hot or cold. We live by either all Church teaching or none, and NFP certainly offers better family planning than no ...

Dear Friend, You are pregnant. Married just over a year and working steadily at your career, you were hoping to wait a while longer before this day arrived. But here it is. You wish this pregnancy felt more like a deliberate choice rather than a shock. But let me propose something, something you already know, which is worth considering now in a new way: with this pregnancy, God is visiting you. You might quickly object--and rightly so--that God was  already  a frequent visitor in your newlywed home; there was no rush for God to send a baby at this particular moment. In truth, God has been your constant companion, accompanying you in your first year of marriage, in your engagement, in your courtship, in your college years, in high school, in your childhood . . . in your own mother's womb. Read more at Praying with Grace .

Part mommy memoir and part single woman's lament,  Accidentally on Purpose: The True Tale of a Happy Single Mother  is an intimate look at one woman's choice to keep the baby she conceived on a one-night stand. Written by journalist Mary Pols and published by HarperCollins, the book did so well that it spawned a one-season CBS series starring Jenna Elfman. What is the source of the book's appeal? At 39 years old, the author Mary faced the all-too-common question of why she stayed single while her friends and siblings made it to the altar. When Mary became unexpectedly pregnant, her reaction was to keep the baby, but not the father. The father, despite his washboard abs, lacked ambition and, as he quietly confided, had no "J-O-B." Scarred by his parents' divorce, he had little hope in his own future. Nonetheless, he badly wanted Mary to keep the baby and was willing to help her as much as he could. They ultimately stumbled their way to a co-parenting arran...

I’ve begun writing the third and final installment for my Women’s Christian Inspirational Fiction series. The first title is Elizabeth: A Holy Land Pilgrimage , the second is Miriam: Repentance and Redemption in Rome and the third is Sophia: Wife, Mother, Daughter, Sister, Friend . I’m winding back to the United States with this book. The first takes place in Israel and the second in Rome. The reason I share all this with you is that in this last book, the main character Sophia (who is Elizabeth’s daughter and Miriam’s goddaughter) suffers from post partum depression—a topic that is very personal to me and one that I want to approach as honestly as possible in the book. My hope is to gather some feedback from different women who have suffered through any of the symptoms of this illness, regardless of the degree. I want to offer Sophia’s experience with PPMD as a ray of hope to women everywhere; the questions for which I am asking feedback on are designed for me to draw knowl...

Sometimes pregnancy makes us glowingly happy and sometimes it makes us miserable. But no matter how it makes us feel, it will change us and the world around us irrevocably. If you want to know more about the physical and spiritual changes that pregnancy can bring, if you're looking for deeper meaning in the little aches and pains, read Sarah Reinhard's book  A Catholic Mother's Companion to Pregnancy: Walking with Mary from Conception to Baptism . Sarah's book offers pregnant moms a week-by-week journey in prayer with Our Lady through pregnancy, labor, birth, and beyond. Each chapter of the opening section on pregnancy details the amazing physical developments the baby is undergoing. The chapters also lead us into meditation on the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, helping us to imagine how Mary coped with the dizzying changes from the moment her motherhood was announced until the day she lost Jesus in the Temple and heard his radical declaration of departure from chi...

Pregnant with my seventh child, I was bedridden in the high-risk, neo-natal wing of the maternity ward for a week while waiting for a housekeeper to come to run my home and help tend my six children. I faced 6 months of bed rest but that one week gave me perspective and kept me from sinking into self-pity. The other two women in my room were desperate to keep their babies in uteri and finally become mothers. One of the two had suffered five miscarriages. She was stuck in a ward room for months, only going home after the birth of her baby. Secretly we all feared that we would lose our babies. Suddenly our fears materialized as a high-risk woman’s baby died in her womb. That poor woman had to endure an induction and labour for hours, only to push out a dead baby. The pain in that wing of the hospital was tangible. Tears ran down women’s’ faces as they grieved with their neighbour. It did not matter that none of us had even glimpsed her face. Nurses as well as pa...