John and Sheila Kippley leave faith-filled legacy as they conclude service to CCL
by Tom Bengtson
Looking back over a career, most people are lucky if they can count more than a few people who have benefited from their life’s work. John and Sheila Kippley, the founders of the Couple to Couple League International, can look back over the last 33 years knowing they helped hundreds of thousands of people across the world live their faith and deepen their marital relationship. The Kippleys ended their service on the CCL Board of Directors in December, and leave an unparalleled legacy in the Natural Family Planning movement.
In 1971, just three years after Pope Paul VI issued the landmark encyclical Humanae Vitae, the Kippleys teamed up with University of Minnesota Medical School professor Dr. Konald Prem to teach couples how to practice NFP. From the beginning, the Kippleys taught three concepts that came to be known as the “CCL triple strand”: the Sympto-Thermal Method, ecological breastfeeding, and traditional Christian morality regarding sexuality. The Kippleys taught those first classes at St. Odelia’s Parish in Shoreview, Minn., where John Kippley worked at the time.
Faith and family had long been at the forefront of the Kippleys’ lives. Married in 1963, John earned a masters degree from the Institute of Lay Theology at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, Calif. John was surprised by the negative reaction among theologians to Humanae Vitae so he wrote Christ, Covenant and Contraception in 1968, which defended the Church’s teaching.
“Once it was published, I felt obliged to provide the practical help of NFP,” explained John in a Family Foundations column he wrote in 2001. “The words of Jesus in Luke 11:46 seemed directed right at me. I had affirmed what so many were saying was a great burden. I had to do what I could to help people live out the teaching.”
Sheila, who earned a degree from the University of California at San Francisco, was a full-time mother to the Kippleys’ five children. An interest in research about breastfeeding spurred her to write Breastfeeding and Natural Child Spacing in 1969.
Their background proved fertile for the formation and growth of the Couple to Couple League. After starting to teach NFP in the Twin Cities, they moved to Cincinnati in 1972 and a year later published the first version of The Art of Natural Family Planning. Within two years, they had trained 10 teaching couples who, in turn, had taught a total of 2,000 couples the Sympto-Thermal Method of Natural Family Planning.
The organization went international in 1975 when a teaching couple from Virginia moved to Ireland and developed a network of teaching couples in Ireland and England. In the late 1970s, another couple that attended a CCL workshop in New York approached the Kippleys about teaching the method in Belgium where they were stationed at an Air Force base.
By 1978, the reputation of the Kippley’s work had grown to the point where the Couple to Couple League was endorsed by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. That was also the year the League conducted its first convention.
To date, CCL has taught 161,430 couples, and sold over 374,000 copies of The Art of Natural Family Planning. CCL now teaches 7,000 couples each year and 28,000-plus households receive Family Foundations.
During three decades of work, the Kippleys and the rest of the CCL family had to work hard to overcome negative stereotypes associated with NFP, which some people confuse with the old Calendar Rhythm method. John Kippley, however, found encouragement in the Church. Writing for this magazine in 2001, he said: “The biggest source of hope has been the papacy of John Paul II. … He made the Church’s teaching about love and sexuality a primary focus of his pontificate during his first 10 years as Pope. This has had good effects. Regularly, I hear reports that priests ordained in the last 10 years are much more in tune with Humanae Vitae than priests ordained in the 1970s and 1980s.
“More and more priests are making the CCL course a normal part of marriage preparation. That’s a great source of hope.”
CCL continues to do the work that the Kippleys initiated in the early 1970s. CCL currently reaches people in 26 countries. Eleven additional countries have candidate teaching couples who could be certified soon. In 2003, CCL couples taught 1,484 NFP class series, which is almost 200 more than the previous year.
In 1990, John and Sheila were honored for outstanding achievement as co-founders of CCL by the Wethersfield Institute, an organization which supports the Catholic Church in the United States through the study of Christian culture. “Sheila and I are just the symbols of the organization,” John Kippley said upon accepting the recognition. “We accept this honor on behalf of all of CCL’s volunteer teachers and promoters without whom the organization wouldn’t exist.”
“Natural Family Planning has found in the Kippleys its most eloquent champions and promoters,” commented professor Ralph McInerny when he presented the award. “In season and out, in fertile and infertile periods, the Kippleys have spread the good word, earning in the process the gratitude, admiration and esteem of many.”
McInerny went on: “In an age of great turmoil in the Church with respect to sexual morality and marriage, there are many things to be done. To defend the teaching of the Church in word and print, the Kippleys have done this. To refute the arguments of dissenters, the Kippleys have done this. But nothing drives out the bad like the good, and it is by their steady publicizing of NFP — the method dissenters from Humanae Vitae refuse to discuss — that John and Sheila have performed an enormous service to the Church and to their country.”
From Family Foundations, May-June 2004.
