Kayla and Braedon Hoecherl, a young couple expecting their first child, are passionate about Natural Family Planning and all things Catholic family care. As a registered nurse, Kayla has studied fertility awareness extensively and is a recommended local resource. The couple met in 2018 at CrossWoods Adventure Camp, where the Diocese Superior holds some sessions of Extreme Faith Camp. (Photo credit: Christy Janeczko Photography)
Jenny Snarski
Catholic Herald Staff
Natural Family Planning Awareness Week is an annual national education campaign of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. For 2025, it is July 20-26 and is celebrated with the theme “Pursue a lasting love … marriage. Create hope for the future!”
On the yearly calendar, the week encompasses the anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae on July 25 and the July 26 feast of Ss. Anne and Joachim, parents of the Blessed Virgin.
Loree Nauertz, associate director of the Diocese of Superior’s Office of Evangelization and Missionary Discipleship since 2021, has been an NFP instructor for more than two decades. Her ministry experience includes many years of youth work, which has provided Nauertz the opportunity to guide and witness the fruits of faith formation as young people marry and form families.
“Couples who have been exposed to the church’s teaching are embracing it,” she asserted while clarifying that her experiential statistics come from a “small sampling.” That said, the trend she has seen in the region is that well-formed young Catholic couples are not living together, are getting married younger and plan to practice Natural Family Planning. As she trains these couples in NFP methods and offers resources, she doesn’t shy away from the challenges it will entail, but she sees they have the maturity to handle it.
“There’s the ideal and there’s the reality,” Nauertz said. “We live in reality striving for the ideal, knowing we’re never going to reach it this side of heaven, but we don’t give up striving because that is how we grow in holiness.”
It is that context in which she sees the practice of NFP for Catholic couples – the young, newly married as well as couples discovering the church’s teaching farther into their marriage – as the pursuit of holiness and right relationship with God.
Nauertz believes, conscientious of not wanting to be misunderstood, that we need to focus less on the “teachings of the church” and more on “God’s plan for intimacy and relationship.” She is not setting aside the church’s teachings but addressing them in the larger vision of a life who sees that this world is not the end goal and that marital intimacy is one element, albeit very prominent, on the journey to eternal life.
“We are social beings,” she added noting that healthy relationships are built on more than Theology of the Body’s understanding of sexuality. “Pope John Paul II’s teachings are really trying to help people understand intimacy, not just sex. What is it to be a man, what it is to be a woman, and what God desires to reveal through them both in the marital covenant.”
“I always try to present NFP as God’s plan for human sexuality, his understanding of the purpose of sex. Once you change the purpose of sex, everything else unravels,” Nauertz said. She commented on how prophetic Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae was by guarding the marital act from contraception before medical science had even learned of its abortifacient aspects. She sees this as “the Holy Spirit guiding us in truth.”
Nauertz stresses that the important thing, “always is to be in right relationship with Christ, even in our sinfulness, which gives an even deeper understanding of his love, justice and mercy.
“We don’t beat ourselves up for falling short of God’s glory because our redemption is what Jesus came for.” When we couldn’t save ourselves, the Father sent the Son to make us “right” with him: “God knew with the incredible gift of free will, we wouldn’t always use it to come closer to him, and he loved us anyway.”
She spoke of the lives of the saints as ideals held up for Catholics and how, when we look at saints and think they never sinned, our vision is incomplete. While some saints attained holiness along a more arduous path of mortal sin, “from the perspective of a saint, any sin (even the slight imperfections) is falling short of the glory of God.”
Acknowledging her own struggle with scrupulosity earlier in life and marriage, Nauertz noted the important virtue of humility. When the pride of wanting to “be perfect,” not as the heavenly Father is perfect in love but according to our own prideful desires to not make mistakes, she has found that imagining herself and her family at the foot of the cross leads through her sense of sorrow to abundant gratitude.
“The older I get, the more the crucifix shows me the extent of that love. Loving is suffering but also the joy that accompanies it,” she said.
The struggle is going to be there,” Nauertz emphasized. “The choice is to embrace God into that struggle or to try and do it on your own.” She sees the difference defined by who your focus is on, pleasing yourself or striving to please God. If Natural Family Planning methods and the abstinence they require are looked at only in terms of what one has to do without and a couple chooses to contracept as “easier,” there will still be struggles, they will just be different ones.
Nauertz doesn’t mince words. Yes, NFP teaches sacrifice, but with that comes honest and consistent communication, developing relational intimacy beyond sex and a mutual respect in dying to self that result in trusting vulnerability and healthy interdependence.
“It is hard, and we don’t always understand” when cycles aren’t textbook, when desired pregnancies or discerned spacing of births aren’t achieved. “But, when this practice is our only option, we surrender to God’s plan and truly do receive great graces,” Nauertz affirmed.
“I am so encouraged by the openness to look deeper and embrace the church’s teaching when you present the truth of God’s plan for men and women with love.”
She typically gifts each couple with a crucifix when their NFP training is complete and encourages them to look to it as “your example of what true love is.” At first glance, “it doesn’t look so pretty, but this is what we’re called to,” as long as we remember that the cross was not Christ’s end-goal but the means of our salvation with the resurrection and eternal life as the true objective.
“We all fall short,” she iterated and gave her “prescription of rushing to the ER.” Not the emergency room, but to the Eucharist and to Reconciliation. “Grace builds on grace,” Nauertz said and confirmed the importance of daily prayer, but acknowledged that nothing can replace sacramental grace.
In recent years, becoming more and more familiar with Catholic healing ministries, Nauertz acknowledged that no two couples have the same story or circumstances. She has seen couples across the spectrum of openness to NFP – where both spouses are eager to learn, where neither is and where one feels convicted but the other is against the practice.
Nauertz added that it is never God’s will for one spouse to endure the other’s abuse out of a twisted understanding of the cross and suffering. God always wants our good, he allows crosses but only when greater good is the fruit.
Whatever the dynamic, she has seen that there is always room for healing and growth in every relationship, even if in the current stage of life the couple doesn’t see or feel that need. This is why she also always encourages couples to seek out and offer support from and to other Catholic couples and to include a trusted priest to mentor in the path of truth.
Apps and fertility resources
On a practical level, Nauertz is pleased by the development of multiple NFP methods and the growing interest, especially in secular circles, in fertility awareness and wanting to understand female and reproductive biology.
She regularly suggests the following smartphone apps: Read Your Body ($21 annual cost), CycleProGo (official app of the Couple to Couple League’s Sympto-Thermal method), FertilityCare (designed for the Creighton Model), Kindara (not explicity Catholic or linked to an NFP method, it is free and easy to use for tracking with option of syncing with a Bluetooth thermometer) and Tempdrop (works with armband thermometer and any method).
Another free resource she highly recommends is FEMM, an organization dedicated to women’s overall reproductive health and education. Their app tracks hormonal biomarkers and offers classes and well as one-on-one support. Jenna Robach is an RN and certified FEMM instructor and someone Nauertz promotes as a “great resource” for the diocese. Her website – createdonpurposefemm.wordpress.com – includes her personal NFP story, general information and services she offers.
Kayla Hoecherl is another registered nurse Nauertz recommends to anyone wanting more information. She and her husband live in Cable and are expecting their first child, but Hoecherl has done extensive research on women’s health and fertility including labor and delivery. She can be reached at .
