Understanding how openness to life can strengthen a marriage
“Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the Kingdom of Heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” (CCC 1817)
Marriage is a beautiful gift from God. When we come to the altar to promise ourselves to our spouse, we make promises that our union will be faithful, permanent and open to life. We make these promises because they reflect the promises that Christ makes to each of us.
Cultivating Faith, Hope and Love in Marriage
When we begin our marriage, we hope that it will be long and beautiful. In his letter Spes Non Confundit (SNC) “Hope Does Not Disappoint,” Pope Francis writes, “In the heart of each person, hope dwells as the desire and expectation of good things to come.” This reflects the heart of the newly married couple. However, as time goes on, that couple may encounter obstacles that challenge that hope. Couples can struggle with any of the core promises.
How does a couple face these struggles and move toward a holier and more united marriage? Pope Francis states, “…we cannot live without these three dispositions of the soul, namely, to believe, to hope and to love.”
(SNC, 3) Therefore, married couples need to cultivate these three virtues in their marriage to combat forces that threaten faithfulness, permanence and openness to life.
How can a married couple do this? First, through prayer. We are all called to cultivate a prayer life. My parish held a prayer campaign during Lent that challenged parishioners to take 15 minutes—about 1 percent of the day—to pray. Prayer is a powerful weapon. Within marriage, that weapon is super-sized when couples develop a shared prayer life.
Did you just blanch? Praying with your spouse is hard, but the reward is beautiful. Imagine being able to share not just your hopes and dreams with your spouse but also your deepest prayers. That is intimacy! Prayer increases belief, hope and love.
Second, spend time with Scripture regularly. Some suggestions include reading or listening to the daily Gospel, subscribing to the “Bible in a Year” podcast or participating in a seasonal Bible study. Finding a path to bring Scripture into your life regularly will help increase belief, hope and love.
Finally, enter into intentional dialogue with your spouse monthly. This is not a conversation about the weather, your calendar or vacation planning. It is time set aside to dig deeper into your relationship—to ask and share how each of you is doing in your relationship with God, with each other, and with your children. This dialogue is meant to inform your prayer for the month and help you form the ideas that will guide your life.
A daily prayer life, regular time with Scripture and couple dialogue will help you and your spouse grow in belief, hope and love. This, in turn, will help you live out your sacramental promises to have a faithful and permanent relationship that is open to life.
Seeking Support
Couples who want to grow in these areas can ask their parish priest for guidance, seek out marriage movements like Domestic Church or Marriage Encounter, or attend marriage enrichment activities in their area.
Sometimes marriages need additional help to keep these promises. A marriage struggling with faithfulness (e.g., affairs or pornography) or permanence (e.g., communication full of criticism, contempt, defensiveness or stonewalling) should reach out for help. Consulting with your pastor, seeking counseling—marriage and/or individual—or attending a Retrouvaille retreat are ways to restore belief, hope and love in your marriage.
Natural Family Planning: An Openness to Life
The third promise—being open to life—has components that go beyond prayer and communication. These are important, of course, but sometimes couples need other tools. Pope Francis writes, “Openness to life and responsible parenthood is the design that the Creator has implanted in the hearts and bodies of men and women, a mission that the Lord has entrusted to spouses and to their love.” (SNC, 9) He continues, “For the desire of young people to give birth to new sons and daughters as a sign of the fruitfulness of their love ensures a future for every society. This is a matter of hope: it is born of hope and it generates hope.” (SNC, 9)
Some couples may live out this promise to be open to life without difficulty. They may be gifted with children at just the right time and in the right way. But many couples struggle with aspects of this promise.
God has created male and female bodies to be beautifully complementary—and sometimes frustratingly different! That complementarity allows for couple fertility and the use of Natural Family Planning (NFP). (The frustrating part is why we need prayer and dialogue!)
Natural Family Planning is a gift to married couples who, for serious reasons, need to postpone pregnancy for a time. These reasons vary: one couple may have had several children in a row and need to catch their breath; they may be facing anxiety, depression or mental health concerns; they may be caring for a child with special needs. These reasons are as diverse as married couples themselves.
For these couples, Natural Family Planning offers hope. But the more serious the need—and the further removed from your training course—the more essential it is to contact your NFP instructor for guidance.
Other couples struggle with openness to life in a different way. They long for children but suffer from infertility, miscarriage or other reproductive issues. Charting a woman’s cycle and working with a NaPro doctor can help. Red Bird Ministries supports couples who have experienced miscarriage or infant loss. Organic Conceptions helps couples struggling with infertility “reduce anxiety and restore joy while trying to get pregnant.”
A Mission of Hope
Even then, couples can find themselves at the end of hope. In the book, “Interior Freedom,” Father Jacques Philippe writes, “To achieve true interior freedom we must train ourselves to accept, peacefully and willingly, plenty of things that seem to contradict our freedom. This means consenting to our personal limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness, this or that situation that life imposes on us, and so on. We find it difficult to do this, because we feel a natural revulsion for situations we cannot control. But the fact is that the situations that really make us grow are precisely those we do not control.” (“Interior Freedom,” pp. 28–29)
Our response to these circumstances can be rebellion—or resignation. But even resignation is not what God desires. “Resignation doesn’t include hope. Resignation is a declaration of powerlessness that goes no further” (“Interior Freedom,” p. 30). Father Philippe calls us to move beyond resignation to consent. The key to consent is the virtue of hope.
Pope Francis encourages us in SNC: “Christian hope does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one may ever separate us from God’s love: ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or the sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’” (SNC, 3; cf. Rom 8:35, 37–39)
By Christy Kitzhaber, Natural Family Planning Coordinator for the Diocese of La Crosse
Published in the Summer 2025 issue of Catholic Life Magazine