Fr. Philip Bloom's medical missionary work aims for more than just
healthy bodies. He's helping Peruvians cultivate a healthy respect for
marriage, fertility, and new life, through natural family planning.
The Mary Bloom Center, in the highlands city of Puno, near Peru's
Lake Titicaca, is named after Fr. Bloom's mother.
He began the center's
work during his years as a Maryknoll priest associate in Peru, in
conjunction with the Canadian lay missionaries Denis and Liane Bruneau.
They wanted their work to pass on what Mary Bloom taught her son
about valuing “marriage, family, children, and faith in God.”
The center
began in 1994, while Mrs. Bloom was still alive.
She died in 2000, but her legacy continues to inspire her son's
efforts to promote authentic women's health care.
Although he is now a
parish priest in the state of Washington, he remains president of the
center, and leads a group from the Archdiocese of Seattle to volunteer
every year.
WOOMB international, which teaches the Billings Ovulation Method of
fertility awareness and natural family planning, has partnered with the
center to educate married couples, as well as medical workers and young
adults.
Fr. Bloom explained to CNA that the center's work began when Denis
and Liane Bruneau introduced a local obstetrician and midwife, Luz
Marrón, to the Billings Method of natural family planning.
Marrón had been trained to “help” women through conventional means of
birth control, which pose serious health risks and can cause septic
abortions. But she soon wholeheartedly embraced the natural methods that
the Bruneaus showed her, and now serves as the Bloom Center's director.
Fr. Bloom teamed up with the Bruneaus, to give spiritual and moral
grounding to their practical instruction.
According to Fr. Bloom, many
residents of Puno's rural villages understood the logic of natural
family planning better than more educated and cosmopolitan Catholics
elsewhere.
“The people that we taught largely were farmers and country people,
so the method made a lot more sense to them just intuitively. They're
used to planting seeds, and know that the rains have to come first,
that the earth had to be moist in order for a seed to grow.”
For the farming families of Puno, that understanding of cycles and
fertility throughout nature “led into the basics of the Billings method
and how to use self-observation” to observe fertility within marriage.
While proponents of artificial contraception praise its apparent
convenience, advocates of natural family planning point to the increased
communication their method promotes between men and women.
Circumstances in Puno allowed Fr. Bloom to observe this phenomenon in a
remarkable way.
“A lot of times, the women in the countryside would have very limited
literacy skills. The men, generally, would be more able to read and
write. So the men would be the ones who would keep the journal. We
encourage that, too, even if both knew how to read and write.”
This family planning and women's health clinic is a far cry from
other Peruvian organizations that might describe themselves in the same
terms.
Fr. Bloom mentioned that other forms of artificial and dangerous
“family planning” have received significant U.S. government funding,
under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Those methods, he
said, are based on a mechanistic concept of the body, that strips
sexuality of its meaning.
“In an urban environment, we can be more alienated from our bodies,
and treat our bodies as a kind of machine – and not really see the
integration of body and spirit that the (NFP) method is based on.”
Fr. Bloom noted that no population could possibly stand to benefit
from policies that treat fertility as a disease, and new life as an
inconvenient byproduct.
He explained that natural family planning,
besides being practical, also expresses a larger “philosophy of life”
that affirms women as they were created.
Although the Mary Bloom Center's primary purpose is to strengthen
families by helping them appreciate and manage fertility, its donors and
volunteers partner to meet a number of other needs among the population
of Puno – including medicine, food, clothes, scholarships, and school
supplies.
Just as their concern for children goes far beyond safe birth, their
work in women's health encompasses the broadest range of needs.
The
center has provided hundreds of screenings for female cancers, as well
as local treatment and help with referrals to those who are diagnosed.
According to Fr. Bloom, the Mary Bloom Center has also helped women
value themselves in a more authentic way – one that bypasses Western
feminism's obsession with power and independence, in favor of helping
communities value women for their unique roles and capacities.
“We have women seeing their own dignity, and the whole beauty of
their creation. I always tell them, it's not an accident that woman was
the very last thing that God created. Because she's the most beautiful,
and the most complex thing in God's creation.”
Fr. Bloom asked one man, at the end of the five-week Billings method
course, what the main point was that he would take away from it.
He told
Fr. Bloom: “The main thing I learned was respect for women.”
More information on the Mary Bloom Center is available at
SIC: CNA/INT'L