"Progressive" Catholicism, Humanae Vitae and the Spirit of Vatican II

This Worth Revisiting post dates from September 26th, 2015, shortly before Pope Francis visited the United States. We'll be hearing more on this topic throughout this year as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI''s encyclical Humanae Vitae.

To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

A Blast From The Past

   Some years ago, as part of a staff spiritual development project at a Catholic high school, I was asked to read and comment upon a number of excerpts from a book called A People Adrift: The Crisis Of The Roman Catholic Church In America, by a fellow named Peter Steinfels.  

I didn’t know much about the author at the time except that he and his wife had some connection with the leftish quasi-Catholic publication Commonweal.  I soon ascertained that he was very much of the “Spirit of Vatican II” school of Catholicism, in which the teaching and tradition of the Church often appears to serve as little more than window dressing for whatever enthusiasms are fashionable among the cultural elite.  It seems that it’s hard to maintain this stance if one is too particular about that doctrine and tradition, as I pointed out in one of my responses to the assigned reading:

Steinfels typically uses vague generalities when proposing his heterodox positions, as when he fails to cite any of the documents of Vatican II in his discussion of the council and the reform of the liturgy [literally not one citation in an entire chapter on the topic!]. Other times he simply ignores factual evidence that doesn’t fit his theses, as when he omits the scriptural background and the teaching of the Fathers in his discussion of contraception, and in his discussions of the current state of the Church he never mentions the ecclesial movements or some of the vibrant new publications spearheaded by lay Catholics.

I couldn’t possibly respond to every omission, distortion, and non-argument in his book, but still my comments grew longer and more elaborate with every chapter assigned. Finally, after reading his chapter on Humanae Vitae and contraception, I submitted a thirteen-page critique of Steinfels' argument and a defense of the Church’s centuries-old ban on contraception, with attached documentation of at least equal length.  It was an exhausting (and tiresome) exercise.

    The Catholic Left, however, never seems to tire of discussing Humanae Vitae and contraception.  Mr. Steinfels continues to opine on the topic in public, most recently just a couple weeks ago in the Washington Post [here], where he takes advantage of the publicity surrounding the Pope’s visit to the United States and next month’s Synod on the Family in Rome to renew his campaign to persuade the Catholic Church to abandon its condemnation of contraception.  

The More Things Change . . .

    As for Steinfels’ arguments, well, not much has changed over the past ten years.  To begin with, he tries to minimize the Catholic teaching on contraception with the usual red herrings and non-sequiturs:

The church’s sexual norms were woven out of the Old Testament, apostolic injunctions and classical doctrines such as Stoicism, which held passion suspect and condemned sexual acts not directed toward procreation as “against nature.”

But unlike, say, adultery or fornication or defining the conditions of a valid marriage, contraception was a relatively marginal issue until the 20th century, when reliable methods replaced a brew of folk remedies. Before that, birth control was associated with prostitution or illicit sex and decried by virtually all Christian denominations . When Anglican churches broke that pattern in 1930, followed by many Protestant denominations, Pope Pius XI reacted with a stern encyclical reasserting the condemnation. Opposition to birth control soon became a kind of identifying mark of Catholicism.

So, the implication is that a centuries-old doctrine can be done away with because 1) it’s based on the Bible, the teaching of the Early Church, and Classical moral philosophy, 2) we can accomplish the proscribed activity much more effectively now than we could in the past, 3) said activity was formerly associated with prostitutes, but now, apparently, behaving like a prostitute is no longer a big deal, and 4) the Anglicans and other Protestant bodies changed the teaching, and they’re doing just fine, aren’t they? . . .  At least the ones who are left. This last point is especially funny, given the massive decline of those ecclesial bodies after their acceptance of contraception, when the the main point of Steinfels’ essay is that banning contraception is driving decline in the Catholic Church.  As a matter of fact, along with points 1 through 3, this actually sounds more like an argument for maintaining the prohibition on contraception, doesn’t it?

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

    There is also the usual unspoken assumption among the “progressive” set that Catholics can somehow vote to repeal unwelcome moral teachings.  He trots out the the notorious “600 theologians” who, in the best traditions of theological discourse, published a full-page ad in the New York Times the day after Humanae Vitae was promulgated in order to proclaim their opposition (one wonders when they found the time to study its arguments, or whether, in fact, they read it at all).  We are asked to accept uncritically the thoroughly unbiblical, uncatholic, and ahistorical notion that, on matters of faith and morals, academics in university theology departments can overrule the Successors of the Apostles.

    We also hear from the voice of the supposedly faithful laity:

Approximately 80 percent of U.S. Catholics, including the thoroughly devout, disagree with that stance [i.e. the prohibition of contraception] (support for changing the ruling is nearly as high around the world). And the vast majority ignore the teaching altogether — one study suggests that 68 percent of sexually active American Catholic women have used birth control, sterilization or IUDs.    

Blessed Paul VI, author of Humanae Vitae

This last quote is a good example of just how slippery these statistics can be: what precisely does “thoroughly devout" mean? Who gets to decide who falls into this category? How can one be “thoroughly" devout if one rejects the teaching of the Church to which one is supposedly devoted? Notice also the careful parsing of “68 percent of sexually active American Catholic women have used birth control.” First of all, I’m surprised the percentage isn’t higher, because we live in a culture where contraception is the norm, where doctors routinely prescribe birth control pills to teenaged girls without a second thought.  That makes it easy to distort the real situation: by including all women who have used birth control, Steinfels is putting in the anti-Humanae Vitae camp the growing number of women who, on the contrary, have embraced the encyclical's teaching after trying the current conventional wisdom and finding it sadly wanting.  Quite a few of the public promoters of Humanae Vitae's teachings today, in fact, are lay people who have gone this route.  More importantly, it doesn't matter how unpopular it might be, Doctrine isn't made, or unmade, by popular opinion: it's Doctrine because the Magisterial Church to which Christ gave the power of binding and loosing (Matthew 18:18) has determined that it's the truth.

The Truth

    That, finally, is the fundamental problem with the Steinfelsian approach, not only in regard to Blessed Paul VI’s encyclical, but to everything.  There is no sense of coming to terms with The Truth: everything is put in terms of a battle of opinions, as if this were a wrangling over a political platform, where whoever can concoct the more persuasive argument "wins". For instance, Steinfels writes:

At last October's Synod on the Family . . . the discussion of contraception was perfunctory.  The bishops simply called on the church [sic -lower case in original] to do a better job of propagating "the message of the encyclical Humanae Vitae." In other words, the rejection of the birth- control ban is simply a messaging problem.

Well, no, it doesn't necessarily follow that the bishops consider it a "messaging problem", which is political jargon for not “selling” your position in a way that appeals to voters. I suspect the bishops were more concerned about the fact that the Church, in the person of its bishops and priests, virtually never mentions the topic at all (for more on that point, see here).  For Steinfels, however, and for "progressive" (another political term) Catholics in general, politics seems to be the prism through which they view everything, including their faith.  Instead of the traditional definition of theology, "Faith seeking Understanding", we have merely "policy preferences seeking justification". That’s not the sort of thing that inspires ordinary people to become saints.

   And yet, sainthood is what we are all striving for, isn't it?  St. John Paul the Great used to exhort us to embrace the “Adventure of Orthodoxy”, and “Set Out Into the Deep”; Mr. Steinfels is willing to settle for “give the people what they want”.  Which one sounds like he’s talking about the Church of Jesus Christ?   

The Pope Is Catholic Yet Again . . .

One of the constants of the current Pontificate is that we can rely on the secular press (and, sadly, some ostensibly Catholic outlets as well) to misrepresent what Pope Francis is saying, particularly when it comes to his unprepared comments.  Remarks that can be interpreted in such a way that they seem to support the current secular enthusiasms will be presented in that way, while utterances that contradict the spirit of the age will be downplayed or ignored. We've seen it happen again with some of the  Pope's comments during his recent trip to Mexico; the post below is a throwback to last year (February 22nd, 2015), after a papal trip to the Phillipines.  Yet again, the real Pope is much more Catholic than the Pope depicted in the news media.

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Who would have guessed that the Pope is Catholic?

     It’s funny that Pope Francis is the most quotable of Popes . . . except when he’s not.  A few weeks ago, when he appeared to criticize couples who were ‘irresponsible” in having children “in a series”, dismissing the idea that, “in order to be good Catholics, we have to be like rabbits,” it was big news.  More recently, when he said that “Not to have children is a selfish choice,” and suggested that a culture that “views children above all as a worry, a burden, a risk, is a depressed society,” well, where was the news media?  Where are the “Spirit of Vatican II” Catholics who trumpet every reference to rabbits and every off-the-cuff  “who am I to judge” remark?  Yes, it was reported (mostly in non-U.S. outlets), but given very little play and quickly forgotten, especially compared to the hullaballoo surrounding some other comments from this Pope.

     Not that any of this is a surprise, of course.  Since the revolt against the Church’s teaching on contraception that erupted into public view at the issuance of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968, reproduction and sexuality have been Ground Zero in the culture of dissidence that exists within the Church.  Not coincidentally, those are also the issues that animate the drivers of cultural trends in the secular world as well.  The “news” media is a major component in the Spirit of this Age, and so it is happy to run with anything the Pope says that could further its agenda, especially if it can be spun to undercut Catholic moral teaching on their favored issues.

     It may be hard for some of us to believe just how important this last point is to the promoters of the new sexual ethic.  They quite correctly see the Church as the main obstacle in their way.  The Popes agree.  In his encyclical letter Casti Connubii (“Of Chaste Marriage”), published in response to the abandonment by the Anglican Church of the age-old Christian ban on contraception, Pope Pius XI describes:

. . . the Catholic Church, to whom God has entrusted the defense of the integrity and purity of morals, standing erect in the midst of the moral ruin which surrounds her . . . (Casti Connubii, 56)

     If this description was true in 1930, when Casti Connubii was published, how much more so today?  Not only are the moral ruins around us more widespread than ever, but there is a visible group of people who identify as Catholic actively working to pull down the Church into that debris.  Pope Francis’ remarks on the selfishness of sterility are most unwelcome both to this set of Catholics, and to the media, not only because he is contradicting their agenda, but specifically because he is re-stating long-standing Catholic teaching.  These comments give the lie to the mythical Pope Francis who is freeing the Catholic Church from its judgmental and puritanical past.  And we can’t have people think the Pope really is Catholic, can we?

Marriages Are Made In Heaven

(My lovely bride and I celebrated our 29th Wedding Anniversary this past weekend; given that, as well as the Synod on the Family currently unfolding in Rome, it seems Worth Revisiting this post about marriage from January 14th, 2015. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.)

    Marriage is our oldest human institution, and the indispensible foundation for any successful society, and hence is a perennial topic of discussion.  Just this past week I’ve run across two different articles, one from a positive perspective, the other from the negative; together, they say a lot about marriage today, which is to say that they say a lot about the challenges facing our world.

     First, the good news.  This is a feature article from Foxnews.com called “Seven ways to stay married” [full article here].  The author starts out by explaining that he wanted to know, “What can people do to have a happy, fulfilling, lifelong marriage?”  Rather than ask the so-called experts (“psychologist or self-help gurus”), he went to the real experts: “older Americans who have been married 50, 60, 70 years and more.”  What he found turns out to be not that surprising, at least the first six points (not all are really presented as “ways”): “ 1. Marriage is hard . . .  2. But marriage for a lifetime is worth it . . . 3. Marry someone a lot like you . . . 4. Think small . . . 5. Talk, talk, talk  . . . 6. Stop trying to change your partner.”  Number 7 looks like a new one at first: “Are we hungry?”  “The elders”, our author tells us, recommend stopping to eat when a big fight is in the offing.  As it turns out, the food is just a way of buying some “cooling off” time, which is another tried and true technique.

     The good news about the good news is that all of these things are commonsensical and accessible to anyone, once you know them.  My lovely bride and I have benefited from them (sometimes, it is true, after learning them the hard way) in our own experience over twenty-eight years of marriage.  The bad news is that such obvious things, most of which would have been conventional wisdom passed on from mothers and fathers to their children a couple generations ago, are now presented as revelations.  But it makes sense: how many newlyweds today can turn for advice to parents who are still married to each other?  The number is shrinking all the time.

     Which brings us to Exhibit B: a lifesitenews.com article called “Young men giving up on marriage: ‘Women aren’t women anymore’” [hat tip to Fr. Z; full article here].  The article draws on a survey from the Pew Research Center detailing attitudes about marriage among various people from various age groups.  One section focuses on data showing that young men are growing less interested in marriage: only 29% say that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things, a six-point drop since 1997, while the number of women saying the same thing rose nine points to 37% over the same period (perhaps a reflection of the fact that women and their children suffer the brunt of family erosion more directly).  There are plenty of other frightening statistics in the article; I found this one particularly alarming:: “Just 20 percent of those aged 18 to 29 are married, compared with 59 percent in 1960.”  In other words, four out of five people in their prime child-bearing years are unmarried, which means they are either denying their children the enormous advantages of married parents who are committed to each other and to the family, or they are having no children at all.  Those who do get married after thirty will have much less time for building a family (fertility starts declining sharply after 35, here), but a surprisingly large number of them will never marry at all, according to Pew’s own updated summary [full summary here] of their survey:

                In 1960, some 12% of adults ages 25-34 had never been married.  After 10 years, when that group was between the ages of 35 and 44, 7% of them still hadn’t wed.  By 1980, when they were in their mid-40s to -50s, only 5% had still never married.  The next cohort starting in 1970 followed a similar trajectory.  However, each new cohort of young adults since then has had a higher share of never-married members than the cohort that came before it.  If current trends continue, 25% of young adults in the most recent cohort (ages 25-24 in 2010) will have never married by 2030.  That would be the highest share in modern history. (Pew Research: “Record Share of Americans Have Never Married” – bold mine)

     We are headed into uncharted waters.  In most western countries we are not producing enough babies to replace our current population as it dies, and an increasing proportion of those children who are being born are being raised outside of the framework of the traditional family, with all the well-documented implications for their own well-being and the health and stability of society as a whole.  And, it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better soon: the Pew report also tells us that 67% of those aged 18-29, the prime family-building years, are off the opinion that “society is just as well off if people have other priorities than marriage and children”. This is a recipe for societal suicide.

     And yet . . . I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet.  Let’s return to the first article for a moment, on the Seven Ways to Stay Married.  We are told that marriage is hard, “both because of the range of stresses and problems that confront all couples, but also because of the fundamental difficulty of merging two separate and different people into one single life.”  Nonetheless, for those who persevere, “It is a sublime experience, a connection to another person unlike any other relationship.  The elders describe it as the experience of a lifetime.” 

     Now, I’m not privy to the author’s private notes, but I can’t help but suspect he’s left something out.  Where do people find the strength and perseverance to stay at it long enough to merge themselves ”into one single life” with another person?  In effect, to sacrifice themselves? One might almost say, to become one flesh? I find it very surprising that none of these long-married couples seem to make any mention of Faith, or relying on the help of God.  Most of the long-married couples I know (not all, it is true, but most) would put those things at the very top of their list.  Surely many of those who spoke to this author did the same. In any case, we know, as Psalm 127 puts it, “If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor”, and also “Truly sons are a gift from the Lord, a blessing, the fruit of the womb”.  Not only that, Jesus Christ provides us with both a model of self-sacrifice, and help in bearing our own burdens. 

     Just as God is the only sure foundation for individual marriages, so he is for society as a whole.   Scripture tells us to be ready with reasons for the Hope that is within us (1 Peter 3:15), which means we need to be prepared to speak out on the importance of marriage and family; we also know that those who are not amenable to reason can often be swayed by the power of example, and so we need to show by our actions we honor and support marriage and family life, and that we find it a joyous, "sublime" experience.  Above all, we need to pray for marriage, families, and for our society, and ask the Lord to yet again “turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6) and heal our wounded culture.

Progressive Catholicism, The Spirit of Vatican II, and Humanae Vitae

A Blast From The Past

   Some years ago, as part of a staff spiritual development project, I was asked to read and comment upon a number of excerpts from a book called A People Adrift: The Crisis Of The Roman Catholic Church In America by a fellow named Peter Steinfels.  I didn’t know much about the author at the time except that he and his wife had some connection with the leftish quasi-Catholic publication Commonweal.  I soon ascertained that he was very 

much of the “Spirit of Vatican II” school of Catholicism, in which the teaching and tradition of the Church often appears to serve as little more than window dressing for whatever enthusiasms are fashionable among the cultural elite.  It seems that it’s hard to maintain this stance if one is too particular about that doctrine and tradition, as I pointed out in one of my responses to the assigned reading:

Steinfels typically uses vague generalities when proposing his heterodox positions, as when he fails to cite any of the documents of Vatican II in his discussion of the council and the reform of the liturgy. Other times he simply ignores factual evidence that doesn’t fit his theses, as when he omits the scriptural background and the teaching of the Fathers in his discussion of contraception, and in his discussions of the current state of the Church he never mentions the ecclesial movements or some of the vibrant new publications spearheaded by lay Catholics.

I couldn’t possibly respond to every omission, distortion, and non-argument in his book, but still my comments grew longer and more elaborate with every chapter assigned, until finally, after reading his chapter on Humanae Vitae and contraception, I submitted a thirteen-page critique of Steinfels' argument and a defense of the Church’s centuries-old ban on contraception, with attached documentation of at least equal length.  It was an exhausting (and tiresome) exercise.

    The Catholic Left, however, never seems to tire of discussing Humanae Vitae and contraception.  Mr. Steinfels continues to opine on the topic in public, most recently just a couple weeks ago in the Washington Post [here], where he takes advantage of the publicity surrounding the Pope’s visit to the United States and next month’s Synod on the Family in Rome to renew his campaign to persuade the Catholic Church to abandon its condemnation of contraception.  

The More Things Change . . .

    As for Steinfels’ arguments, well, not much has changed over the past ten years.  To begin with, he tries to minimize the Catholic teaching on contraception with the usual red herrings and non-sequiturs:

The church’s sexual norms were woven out of the Old Testament, apostolic injunctions and classical doctrines such as Stoicism, which held passion suspect and condemned sexual acts not directed toward procreation as “against nature.”

But unlike, say, adultery or fornication or defining the conditions of a valid marriage, contraception was a relatively marginal issue until the 20th century, when reliable methods replaced a brew of folk remedies. Before that, birth control was associated with prostitution or illicit sex and decried by virtually all Christian denominations . When Anglican churches broke that pattern in 1930, followed by many Protestant denominations, Pope Pius XI reacted with a stern encyclical reasserting the condemnation. Opposition to birth control soon became a kind of identifying mark of Catholicism.

So, the implication is that a centuries-old doctrine can be done away with because 1) it’s based on the Bible, the teaching of the Early Church, and Classical moral philosophy, 2) we can accomplish the proscribed activity much more effectively now than we could in the past, 3) said activity was formerly associated with prostitutes, but now, apparently, behaving like a prostitute is no longer a big deal, and 4) the Anglicans and other Protestant bodies changed the teaching, and they’re doing just fine, aren’t they? . . .  At least the ones who are left. This last point is especially funny, given the massive decline of those ecclesial bodies after their acceptance of contraception, when the the main point of Steinfels’ essay is that banning contraception is driving decline in the Catholic Church.  In fact, along with points 1 through 3, this actually sounds more like an argument for maintaining the prohibition on contraception, doesn’t it?

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

    There is also the usual unspoken assumption among the “progressive” set that Catholics can somehow vote to repeal unwelcome moral teachings.  He trots out the the notorious “600 theologians” who, in the best traditions of theological discourse, published a full-page ad in the New York Times the day after Humanae Vitae was promulgated in order to proclaim their opposition (one wonders when they found the time to study its arguments, or whether, in fact, they read it at all).  We are asked to accept uncritically the thoroughly unbiblical, uncatholic, and ahistorical notion that, on matters of faith and morals, academics in university theology departments can overrule the Successors of the Apostles.

    We also hear from the voice of the supposedly faithful laity:

Approximately 80 percent of U.S. Catholics, including the thoroughly devout, disagree with that stance [i.e. the prohibition of contraception] (support for changing the ruling is nearly as high around the world). And the vast majority ignore the teaching altogether — one study suggests that 68 percent of sexually active American Catholic women have used birth control, sterilization or IUDs.    

Blessed Paul VI, author of Humanae Vitae

This last quote is a good example of just how slippery these statistics can be: what precisely does “thoroughly devout" mean? Who gets to decide who falls into this category? How can one be “thoroughly" devout if one rejects the teaching of the Church to which one is supposedly devoted? Notice also the careful parsing of “68 percent of sexually active American Catholic women have used birth control.” First of all, I’m surprised the percentage isn’t higher, because we live in a culture where contraception is the norm, where doctors routinely prescribe birth control pills to teenaged girls without a second thought.  That makes it easy to distort the real situation: by including all women who have used birth control, Steinfels is putting in the anti-Humanae Vitae camp the growing number of women who, on the contrary, have embraced the encyclical's teaching after trying the current conventional wisdom and finding it sadly wanting.  Quite a few of the public promoters of Humanae Vitae's teachings today, in fact, are lay people who have gone this route.  More importantly, it doesn't matter how unpopular it might be, Doctrine isn't made, or unmade, by popular opinion: it's Doctrine because the Magisterial Church to which Christ gave the power of binding and loosing (Matthew 18:18) has determined that it's the truth.

The Truth

    That, finally, is the fundamental problem with the Steinfelsian approach, not only in regard to Blessed Paul VI’s encyclical, but to everything.  There is no sense of coming to terms with The Truth: everything is put in terms of a battle of opinions, as if this were a wrangling over a political platform, where whoever can concoct the more persuasive argument "wins". For instance, Steinfels writes:

At last October's Synod on the Family . . . the discussion of contraception was perfunctory.  The bishops simply called on the church [sic -lower case in original] to do a better job of propagating "the message of the encyclical Humanae Vitae." In other words, the rejection of the birth- control ban is simply a messaging problem.

Well, no, it doesn't necessarily follow that the bishops consider it a "messaging problem", which is political jargon for not “selling” your position in a way that appeals to voters. I suspect the bishops were more concerned about the fact that the Church, in the person of its bishops and priests, virtually never mentions the topic at all (for more on that point, see here).  For Steinfels, however, and for "progressive" (another political term) Catholics in general, politics seems to be the prism through which they view everything, including their faith.  Instead of the traditional definition of theology, "Faith seeking Understanding", we have merely "policy preferences seeking justification". That’s not the sort of thing that inspires ordinary people to become saints.

   And yet, saints is what we are called to be.  St. John Paul the Great used to exhort us to embrace the “Adventure of Orthodoxy”, and “Set Out Into the Deep”; Mr. Steinfels is willing to settle for “give the people what they want”.  Which one sounds like he’s talking about the Church of Jesus Christ?   

Blessed Paul VI, The Synod, And Pope Francis

     Now that we're in the run-up to Part II of last year's, um, "eventful" Synod on the Family, and especially after Pope Francis' reform of the annulment process the other day, it seemed a good time to re-run this piece from October 25th, 2014, for Throwback Thursday.

     Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini is reported to have said at the time that St. John XXIII didn't realize what a "hornet's nest" he was stirring up in calling the Second Vatican Council.  A few short years later, Montini,  as Pope Paul VI, found himself presiding over that very hornet's nest.  He faced the Herculean task of trying to preserve the unity of the Church in the face of the forces that had been unleashed, both during the council and in the years that followed. Pope Paul's approach seemed to be based on the maxim (often erroneously attributed to St. Augustine): "Unity in essential things, liberty in doubtful things, charity in all things".  Pope John had quoted it in his first encyclical,  Ad Petri Cathedram [here], and Pope Paul took it to heart.  He allowed everyone to have his say when possible, which tended to create the appearance (and, quite frankly, often the reality) of disarray in the Church.  Where he judged it necessary, on the other hand, he firmly restated the traditional teaching: on priestly celibacy [here], for instance, the all-male clergy [here], and most famously, human sexuality in his most well-known encyclical, Humanae Vitae [here]. As a rule he refrained from condemnations, denunciations, and other seemingly uncharitable gestures.

Blessed Paul VI at the closing ceremony of the Second Vatican Council        

       Pope Paul is now Blessed Paul VI, having been beatified last weekend [19 October 2014] at the conclusion of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family.  Speaking of which, one can't help but agree with the numerous commentators who have observed that this synod was not just Extraordinary, but extraordinary.  There's no need for me to recap all the hijinx that took place; let it suffice to say that such public disarray in the upper reaches of the Church has not been seen the pontificate of, yes, Paul VI.

          There are some interesting connections here.  There has been a lot of speculation as to Pope Francis's position on the controverted issues and controversial maneuvering at the synod.  He gave Cardinal Kasper the opportunity to run with his long-time project of loosening up the rules preventing divorced Catholics who have remarried without annulment from receiving communion, and appointed administrators for the synod who finagled to make that and other liberalizing proposals seem much more agreeable to the assembled fathers than they actually were; he also put more traditionally-minded prelates such as South African Cardinal Napier in a position to counter the machinations of Kasper and his crew.  As the synod unfolded, the Pope appeared to have no public reaction to the actions of the liberalizing faction in the first week, nor to the successful revolt of the others in the second.  He very consciously took an evenhanded approach in his final address, mixing some "pox on both your houses" rhetoric with a call for unity in arriving at the truth.

          What does this have to do with the beatification of Paul VI?  Clearly, raising up the author of Humanae Vitae as the culmination of a synod on the family sends a pretty strong message that Pope Francis is not going to soften Church teaching in this area (as I previously suggested here).  I wonder if he isn't also looking to Blessed Pope Paul as a model for how to approach the question of Church Unity.  It may seem to him that, despite the fact that a whole lot of people weren't happy, Paul's light touch largely succeeded in holding the Church together.  The one significant exception, of course, was Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers, now embodied in the Society of Pius X - to whom Pope Francis seems to be making some very charitable overtures for reconciliation [here].  Like Blessed Paul VI, Francis seems to be aiming for a style more pleasing to the "progressives", while maintaining (on doctrinal matters, anyway) a more traditional substance.

Blessed Paul VI Is Proved Right . . . Yet Again

 Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power [i.e., contraception] passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. (Bl. Paul VI, Humanae Vitae 17)

    Outrageous, but hardly surprising. As Pia Di Solenni reports [here], the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, the international aid group created by the United Nations, have been giving women in Kenya tetanus vaccine secretly laced with the HCG hormone, which causes infertility and miscarriages.  Di Solenni includes the text of a statement by the Catholic Bishops of Kenya detailing: the Kenyan government’s refusal to cooperate with the Bishops’ inquiries about the immunization program; their own clandestine efforts to acquire a few vials of the vaccine, all of which tested positive for the hormone; the “attempts to intimidate and blackmail medical professionals who have corroborated information about the vaccine, with threats of disciplinary action.” She also excerpts a portion of a statement by matercare.org that confirms the Bishops’ findings, and also reveals that the tetanus campaign in Kenya “is targeted at girls and women between the ages of 14-49 (child bearing age)” and involves giving five doses six months apart, which is not required for tetanus, but is necessary for the sterilization hormone.  The statement also reveals that WHO/UNICEF has previously done exactly the same thing in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the Phillipines.

     Sin loves company.  It’s not content to sit quietly by itself, but seeks to implicate others in its corruption.  And so we see now the working out of Pope Paul’s prediction: having freed ourselves from the burden of Christian morality, we determined first that contraception was Good for married people; next, if it’s good for them, well then, it must be good for everyone.  If it’s good for everyone, it must also be good for brown-skinned people living in poor countries, even if they don’t want it.  If they don’t want what’s good for them, then we more enlightened folks (having freed ourselves from the burden of Christian morality) have not just the right but an obligation to force it on them. 

     So it goes when we allow such power to pass “into the hands of those authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law”.  The problem is, such authorities and, come to think of it, individuals, tend to create their own precepts, their own “moral law”, but it is untethered to God’s law, which is the only law perfectly attuned to the true good of humanity.  Thus Henri de Lubac, S.J., famously said: “It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God.  What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man”. 

     Catholics have long believed that our personal sins affect not only ourselves, but our neighbors, the Church, and the rest of the World.  We have usually taken these effects to be more spiritual in nature, but we can see that it is true in a very practical material sense as well. When we reject God and his precepts, we reenact the rebellion of Satan and the Fall of Adam and Eve.  And as we see here, even private sins can eventually become Public Policy.

     Now, going to confession and resolving to avoid further sin will not directly or immediately help the exploited women of Kenya: that requires exposing the wrongdoing and working to change the policies that allow it.  In the long run, however, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  If we want a more decent and moral world, we all (myself included  - mea culpa!) need to become more decent and moral people.  And we can only do that with God’s help.

    

This Thursday Throwback was first published 7 Nvember 2014.

When "Progress" Isn't Progress

The beginning of another school year seems a good time to republish this Worth Revisiting post, an earlier version of which was first posted June 22nd, 2014. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.


 A thoughtful friend recently lent us a book called DisOrientation: The 13 “isms” That Will Send You To Intellectual  “La-La Land”.  It is a collection of essays edited by John Zmirak with contributions by such luminaries as Jimmy Akin, Robert Spencer, and Fr. John Zuhlsdorf (a.k.a. “Fr. Z”), among others.  Its purpose is to prepare prospective college students for the various intellectual traps that await them, such as Relativism, Hedonism, Utilitarianism, etc.  One of my favorite essays in the collection is Peter Kreeft’s contribution on Progressivism.  He starts out by clearly delineating what it is to be a “progressive”:

The opposite of Progressivism is conservatism or traditionalism. A conservative, by definition, is a happy person, one who is happy with what is.  It is only for that reason he wants to conserve it.  A progressivist, on the other hand, is by definition an unhappy person, one who is unhappy with what is.  It is only for that reason he wants to change it . . . Adam and Eve were conservatives until the Devil made them into progressives.  For the Devil himself was the first progressivist.  The other angels were happy with God and His will, but the Devil wanted to progress to something better.

Now, Kreeft may be having a bit of mischievious fun with his argumentum ad Satanam, but his point is nonetheless valid.  Satan’s chief sin was Pride, a belief that he knew better, and isn’t the belief that one’s self knows better than the unenlightened rubes of the past and the ignorant and/or evil-minded boobs of the present the driving force of progressivism?

Progress? I think not . . .

     Kreeft notes various “justifications” for the assumptions of Progressivism: evolution, technological progress, etc., and he uses the term “chronological snobbery” to sum up the attitude that something is undesirable simply because it is not new.  The progressive’s dislike of “what is” is not the result of any actual qualities of what is, but is based solely on when what happens to be ising. That’s why the progressives rely on “justifications”: they need to persuade others who are  interested in the actual situation on the ground. While Kreeft doesn’t put it quite this way, a consequence of all this is that the positions and policy prescriptions of progressives very often are not rooted in reality but in feelings, the felt need to be “progressing” to . . . well . . . who knows? 

     The progressive tendency is not simply a political view, it is really a mindset, and one that finds expression not just in politics, but also in culture, and in the Church. It is particularly problematical in the Church, because the Church is founded on the unchanging revelation of an eternal God. While there is a place for “progress” of a sort,  here progress consists in faithfully applying the eternal principles to new situations (development), in making the Church more fully what it has always been, rather than “progressing” to something new. We should keep this combination of principle and practice in mind.  Despite its Divine source, there’s something very down-to-earth and human about Catholic Doctrine: Christians have found it not only possible to live by that teaching, but have flourished through it: “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

     That’s why I find it odd that those who advocate “progressing” beyond the magisterial teaching of the Church claim that they are drawing on the “lived experience” of Christians.  That’s nonsense, of course, because as we saw above Church teaching has always been the lived experience of Christians. In its place they would put things that have never been, such as homosexual marriage, or things that have been tried and failed, such as the panoply of ecclesial innovations that can be found in the rapidly declining “mainstream” Protestant denominations.

     In the end, “Christian Progressivism” is an oxymoron, and a double-irony.  First, progressives advocate moving away from any signs of the Transcendent (Eucharistic Adoration, Ad Orientem worship, incense and bells, etc), and from Biblical and magisterial moral teaching; for a Christian, however, progress means precisely moving closer to the transcendent God.  Not only that, they fail even on their own terms: they reject the 2,000 years of human experience embodied in Sacred Tradition, all the while claiming to align themselves more closely with experience.  Progressivism for its own sake is problematic in any context, but in the Church it is impossible.  Instead, we should follow St. Paul’s advice: “So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us” (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

A Couple Paving Stones On The Road To Hell

This Throwback Thursday Post was first published on December 12th, 2014. Warning: contains content of a sexual nature.  

      There’s an old saying: “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”  It’s a little odd, when you think about it: shouldn’t our intentions be good?  The road to Heaven certainly isn’t paved with bad intentions, is it?  The answer, I think, is that the second half of the proposition is left out.  It's about good intentions that are not grounded in reality, or in wisdom, or in God’s law: they create more problems than they solve (if, indeed, they solve anything at all). 

“Is it OK if I take my pants off?”

     A classic example of the Road to Hell Principle is the thoroughly modern practice known as “Sex Education” (Sex Ed informally).  A concern, and I believe a sincere one in most cases, for the well-being of young people in an increasingly sexualized world has led to instructional programs in schools (and not just public schools) that, because they are disconnected from God’s law, and Natural Law, and plain common sense, promote the very harm they are intended to ameliorate.      One such program has been in the news recently: a class run by a Planned Parenthood chapter in California that was invited to teach a class on sexuality to 9th graders in the local public high school.  According to the Fox News story [full story here]:  

. . . some parents are irate that their children’s sex ed class at Acalanes High School in Lafayette is being taught by employees of Planned Parenthood without their prior knowledge. They are also fuming over the methods and materials being used, including a checklist that asks students if they are “ready for sex” and another worksheet that describes how to give and obtain consent, as well as a diagram that uses a "genderbread" person for lessons in gender identity. 

The Gingerbread Person is a cute little fellow who clearly was designed to appeal to children, much like the old Camel Cigarettes mascot “Joe Camel”; and like the much maligned cartoon camel, who was criticized for promoting an unhealthy product to children, Gingerbread Person offers reassurance to the very young that whatever they want to express or do sexually is not just all right, but good and desirable.  Things, perhaps, that had not even occurred to them before.  As for the class itself, many of the children “felt the sessions were pressuring them to have sex” or, as one parent put it, “Some of the kids were distracted because it was divergent from what they were taught at home.”  Indeed. For example:   

Included in the materials provided to students were documents and worksheets that included a checklist entitled, “Sex Check! Are You Ready For Sex?” in which the 13 and 14-year-old students are asked questions such as if they have water– based lubricants and condoms and if they could handle a possible infection or pregnancy. Another worksheet reads like a how-to on obtaining consent from a possible sexual partner and offers possible statements like “Do you want to go back to my place?” and “Is it OK if I take my pants off?”  

"You can go now."

There are more problems with school-based sex ed classes that I can get into here.  I will point out that the foregoing tends to support what many of us have been saying for a long time: that such classes not only debase sexuality and separate it from its appropriate place in a loving marital relationship, but actually encourage (or even “pressure”, as the students say above) early and promiscuous sexual activity. 

     Here’s another case, this time from the UK [full story here].  After a sex ed class, a thirteen year-old boy and girl   

. . . went to a secluded area where they discussed what they had just been taught about sexual intercourse. The boy said that he asked the girl if she wanted to "try sex." Although the young girl repeatedly said "No," the schoolboy proceeded to pin the girl down and rape her. Afterward he allegedly told the girl, "You can go now."  

     This is only one case to be sure, but we can see a clear connection between the instruction and the act.  And, as it turns out, many British students have misgivings similar to those expressed by their American counterparts above.  From the Life Site story:  

Earlier this year a poll of UK teenagers by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) [here]found that a large majority of both boys and girls complained that sex education often presents promiscuity as normal, putting additional pressure on them to become sexually active before they might otherwise do so. Many of the teens criticized the sex education lessons they had received at school for not doing enough to discourage them from becoming sexually active. One 18-year-old girl responded to the poll question about her sex-ed experience: "I always felt pressured by teachers, like, 'sex is normal, just be safe OK' when actually I wasn't interested in having sex at the time and was happy to wait for the right person.” "I don't think sex should be taught as 'the norm'. I think people should be made to feel comfortable and teachers should say, 'you should wait, the law states 16, don't be pressured'." 

The Definition Of Insanity

According to Dr. Philip Ney, a retired professor of psychiatry, there is plenty of research to show that the negative effects of sex ed programs are very real.  In an essay he wrote for Life Site News [full article here] he says: 

It is quite conclusive now, that the more sex education, the more sexual activity and all the problems that go with that.  The introduction of sex education is well correlated with the increase in abortion, STDs and boy-girl interpersonal problems. Good education gives people the desire to try it out or learn more experientially.  Paradoxically, in that respect, current forms of sex education are good education but have the wrong results . . . The earlier the sex education, the younger children explore sex and try various sexual techniques. Present evidence makes it possible to also conclude that the earlier the sex education, the earlier the sexual behavior. Thus sexual education is sexual titillation.  

     Despite all the evidence that these programs do the opposite of what they intend, the “experts” have nothing to offer but more of the same.  In response to the British case above, one such expert said that “in her opinion the solution to this type of misbehavior is more sex education, ‘and much earlier than 13, I would say.’”        This whole situation brings to mind an old saying: “Insanity is to keep doing the same thing, while expecting a different result”.  But what else can they do in the public schools, or in the secular world in general?  They have rejected a worldview in which healthy sexuality is nourished and supported.  They have torn down the social attitudes and institutions that protected people from the consequences of lust run amok. In a world where the most important thing is feelings (and isn’t that what the Genderbread Person is all about?), right and wrong are random abstractions.  That’s why even abstinence classes, while better than the Planned Parenthood inspired alternative, are still not enough.  Young people need to be taught not simply the (negative) practice of abstinence but the (positive) virtue of Chastity, and not just in a classroom: they need to see it as part of a coherent worldview, as something that not only works but can be lived out joyfully, especially by the example of the adults in their lives. 

         It has happened before. There are many reasons why Christianity spread as quickly as it did throughout the Roman Empire in the first few centuries after Christ.  I have heard that one of them was that pagan Romans saw the joy in the lives of their Christian neighbors, not the least part of which was the love and respect Christian men had for their wives.  In a culture that more and more encourages people to use each other for pleasure rather than embrace each other in love, we are again called to show a more excellent way.  We need to understand, and help our fellow Catholics see, that Church teachings on sexuality and marriage are not so much a series of prohibitions as they are a road map to happier, more productive, and holier lives.  We need to rebuild, one person, one family, at a time a culture in which Christ is King.