By George



George Weigel

 I was having a weekend at the country home of a friend of mine some weeks back when I picked up George Weigle’s Evangelical Catholicism from the coffee table and began to page through it.  When I mentioned that I was finding it interesting, my host suggested that I take it as he “had no plans to read it.”  It had been a gift to him from a colleague who, not knowing my friend well, thought that he would like to read about Weigle’s idea of where the Church today needs to go.  My friend is a devout Catholic, but like most Catholics today, gets his particular brand of Catholicism from happy-clappy homilies at liturgies where they are still singing songs written in the unsophisticated ‘80’s  and where the priest wears a stole designed the needlepointed faces of hundreds of adorable boys and girls of every color of the rainbow.  He and George aren’t on the same page. 
Of course I hadn’t thought that George and I were on the same page either and that is what I found so interesting about those first pages I had perused on that late October afternoon in the mountains of the Maryland panhandle.  I resonated right away with his observation that our Christian culture has irretrievably broken down and we find ourselves in a milieu in which Christian/Catholic values are no longer just absorbed from the environment in which we live but which must be consciously and deliberately embraced as a value-choice.    Moreover, Weigle attributes this loss of culture to the pluriformity in which we find ourselves as our society has become less homogeneous.  I had not thought of this and was quite taken by his insight that cultural pluriformity subjects what had once been absolute values to relativism.  Think about it.  In the relative homogeneity of Eisenhower’s America our Judeo-Christian heritage taught us that marriage is the commitment between one man and one woman to establish a family.  Ward and June Cleaver never questioned that.  But here we are sixty years later.  Today the Judeo-Christian tradition is only one tradition among many in our society, and no longer the dominant one.  Our ethnic palate is much broader than it was in the blue-collar white America in which most of us boomers grew up.  Moreover, while growing up in the Catholic ghettos of the Northeast we may have known the occasional Presbyterian or maybe even a Jew or two, today we work alongside Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, practioners of Wicca and Native American religions, and people—many people—who have no religious practice.  We all bring different understandings—sometimes widely different undersandings—of marriage and family life to the table.  The diversity has taught us tolerance but often tolerance has, through our own intellectual laziness, degenerated into a lack of critical evaluation of diverse ideas and values.  Everything today is “relative.”  You have your ideas and values; I have mine.  And this is Weigle’s point: absolutes have collapsed into opinions. 
Case in point: “The Pill.”  “The Pill” has severed the essential link between sex and reproduction—giving sex a variety of roles within our society.  It can still be used for reproduction, of course, but recreation, bonding relationships, attaining of power, expression of gratitude, or just animal desire can all be the primary purpose for which it is sought in a particular situation.  Moreover, just as sex no longer need to entail the possibility (threat) of reproduction, neither does reproduction any longer need sex.  Nor is marriage any longer about reproduction—save by choice—and reproduction is not limited to marriage.  It is entirely respectable today for a woman—or a man—to choose to be a single parent and even to parent a child without a sexual union.  This separation of sex and reproduction has endowed same-sex relationships with an equal dignity to mixed-sex relationships and opened the door to same-sex marriage.  Mamie Eisenhower would be flushed Mamie Pink with Gin if she could see this. 
It is not only in the area of human sexuality that our cultural homogeneity has broken down.  Divorce is as common as marriage today and the presupposition that marriage is “until death” is no longer accepted even by otherwise devout Christians much less by our society at large.  Religious practices are more and more pushed behind the closed doors of family homes and houses of worship.  Classes—even at Catholic Universities, much less public schools—no longer typically begin with a prayer.  Fewer towns has a crèche or a Menorah in public squares during the respective holidays.  Crosses, even when they are no more than a piece of jewelry, are discouraged by human resource personnel.  Even in private homes of religious people, religious objects are relegated to the bedrooms.  Religious figures are sometimes the butt of media jokes and editorial cartoons.   I am not saying that these things are bad, but they would have been unthinkable fifty years ago.  And frankly, I think they are bad, but hey—that is just my opinion and you can have yours.  It’s all relative.    
We look at a movie such as A Wonderful Life and find George to be a charmingly naïve figure in his optimism and integrity.  On the other hand, our movies today are saturated with violence that robs human life of any absolute value. Children’s entertainment is no longer Fantasia or Darby O’Gill, but video games that find their entertainment value in killing and mayhem.  Fred, Ethel, Ricky and Lucy have been replaced by Sheldon, Leonard, Howard, Raj, and Penny as symbolic of the time.  Think about that: married couples replaced by networks of friends involving casual sex. Moreover—and I must admit that I am an avid watcher of Big Bang Theory, the characters are not religiously neutral as were the Mertzs and Riccardos, but openly contemptuous of religion.   
And then, in this land of Paul Bunyan, George Washington with his little axe and his surveyor equipment, and Benjamin Franklin, the Printer, manual work is seen as something beneath the American born.  Thrift has been replaced by convenience and sobriety of lifestyle by Kardashian excess.  This breakdown of culture has happened in a span of less than two generations.  I think Weigel’s insight of how cultural pluriformity breads down the social consensus that establishes the norms by which we live—and in this case the Christian consensus by a new post-Christian secular culture—is genius.  What does he suggest we do about it?
Before I answer that, while Karl Rahner did not trace the cause of the breakdown of the Christian consensus, he did make a similar statement and offer the alternative when he wrote:

“The devout Christian of the future will be a ‘mystic’, one who has experienced something, or he will cease to be anything at all.  For devout Christian living as practiced in the future will no longer be sustained and helped by the unanimous, manifest and public convictions and religious customs of all, summoning each one form the outset to a persona experience and a personal decision.

Rahner thinks that the breakdown requires a spiritual renewal, specifically a focusing on spirituality.  Weigel pooh-poohs spirituality as part of the problem, an anthropocentric self-indulgence by “man” looking for meaning in his search for God.  Weigel doesn’t think much of the “search for God”—he read somewhere in a pop theology book that God is in search of us and the idea has sort of stuck with him.  I will deal more with this in a future posting as I believe that God is in fact in search for us, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t in search of God. Weigel, for his part, would seem to do away not only with the new-age silliness that passes for spirituality today but for the sound traditions represented by Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius Loyola.  But more to that later.

Instead of spirituality, Weigel proposes that the Christian today—to be a Christian in this post-Christian world—must choose a life rooted in the scriptures and in the sacraments and he calls  the consequent life-system “Evangelical Catholicism.”  Safeguarding Rahner’s equally valid insight which, spirituality correctly understood, does not exclude Weigel’s call,  I am inclined to agree with him—or was inclined until he began to explain what he meant by rooted in the scriptures.  But more on that in a future post when I read more and am ready to revisit this topic.    

No Warrior Pope

Ross Douthat published a rather interesting column in the New York Times this past Sunday in which he claimed that Pope Francis and those Catholics who like his approach might want to take a lesson from the experience of the Jewish community in New York.  The Jewish community in New York has seen a period of rapid growth over the past number of years.  This growth is due entirely to the Orthodox faction however as both Reform and Conservative Judaism are in decline.  A similar phenomenon is experienced in the Protestant sectors of society where liberal groups such as the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ are all in decline while the more socially conservative groups such as Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, and the Church of the Nazarene are holding steady or, in some cases, showing membership growth.  Similarly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) who follow a very conservative social agenda, are showing remarkable growth—up from 10 to 15 million members in the last twenty years. 

Mr. Douthat does not criticize the Holy Father for his efforts but he does suggest that Catholic conservatives are worried that by his efforts to seize and hold a theological “middle ground,” the Pope might be trying to build the House of God on the shifting sands of popular opinion rather than on solid rock of where the winds and floods of modernity won’t be able to wash it away. 

Pope Benedict used to speak of a smaller, more faithful Church.  Some neo-traditionalists used to use this as an excuse to push those with whom they disagreed out of the barque of Peter.  That wasn’t what Pope Benedict meant, however.  It is time for us to call one another to a deeper commitment to Christian life and witness.  This doesn’t have to be exclusionary of anyone, only that it is time to stand and be counted.  I think the Gospel call challenges us to “fish or cut bait”—for us, as members of the Church, to be self-selective. 

The litmus test of discipleship however is not agreement with a particular dogma or even concurrence with a particular moral discipline.  The litmus test of discipleship is fidelity to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I think Pope Francis is trying to shift our focus from the doctrinal rigidity of a certain Taliban Catholicism to the more dynamic message of Grace and Redemption offered by Christ Jesus in the Christian scriptures. 

This is a tremendous disappointment to those who want the Church to be the cavalry that will come riding in to save their besieged fort in the culture wars raging in 20^th century America.  If the culture wars were honestly about moral principles that might be a reasonable expectation but the stakes are not about the Right to Life and the Sanctity of Marriage.  Those principles were surrendered long ago.  We stood silently by when millions were marched off to death camps for being Jews or Gypsies or Gay.  We were silent as blacks were hung from trees in the old south and children were blown up at choir practice and “freedom riders” disappeared in the bayous of Mississippi. We stood silently by when napalm was dropped on schools and hospitals and orphanages and when villages “had to be destroyed to save them.”  We have stood silently by as scores are put to death in the execution chambers of our prisons.  We have stood silently by as our government trained death squads to murder missionaries and archbishops and campesinos in Latin America.  We stand silently by as hundreds die in the seas between Africa and Italy and in the desert between Mexico and the United States.  The garment of life is seamless or is nothing by and old rag.

I am not saying that we should not protect the unborn but I am saying that anyone who whines about “Right to Life” and supports, implicitly or explicitly, the entire range of attacks on human life today is simply a hypocrite and nothing more.    And I am all for the Sanctity of Marriage but not when it is used for a cover on the most gross prejudice.  Too many people today who would deny the benefits conferred in the civil law to married couples to people who are gay fifty years ago supported those laws which denied recognition to couples of mixed race.  Why didn’t we hear our bishops complain that they had to offer medical benefits to employees who were married outside the Church—to heterosexual couples who had been divorced and remarried, for example?  Granted those married outside the Church were told they should not present themselves for the sacraments, but we baptized their children.  We didn’t try to block them adopting.  We hired them as teachers in our schools and musicians in our churches and lawyers in our chanceries.  And we paid their insurance—and with spousal benefits.  Why are we so afraid of same-sex couples being given the same rights and responsibilities under civil law—no one here is disputing the internal discipline of the Church—as “straight” couples?  If I could come up with any other answer than plain and simple prejudice I would be grateful.  But I can’t.   I have heard “good Catholics” and priests—and even a few bishops—wax eloquent on this subject but in every case in which I have spoken with an individual who is opposed to the benefits of civil marriage to same-sex partners, I have found a deep prejudice beneath the surface and most often it is a prejudice that extends far beyond gay targets but also has racial and ethnic overtones.  I am not saying that there aren’t good people who oppose the legalizing of same-sex marriage; I am only saying that I have yet to meet one.  I don’t want my Church caught in the cross-fire of the culture wars because I believe that it gets in the way of our mission which is to preach the Gospel.  I am not saying that we have to cave in the values of the world today but I am saying that that the values of the Gospel are values that draw people to Christ not repel them from him.  

Inaugural Weekend II

So we owe gay marriage to Martin

Luther?  Well, in a certain sense, in

the world of unintended consequences,

yes. 

This weekend the Liturgy of the Roman Rite presents us with the Gospel of the Wedding Feast at Cana.  And there will be many parishes, tragically, that will use the occasion to “defend Marriage” by attacking their fellow citizens whose understanding of what constitutes a marriage is different than our Catholic understanding.  And a fortuitous coincidence of Gospel and calendar will provide an opportunity, while they are at it, to knock the President as he begins a second term of service.  Incidentally, I don’t understand how attacking same-sex marriage, “defends” or upholds the commitment of those in traditional marriages.  I think we need to do everything we can to support those who have committed themselves to Christian marriage, but attacking others doesn’t seem to really add anything positive.   
What we probably should note, though not necessarily in the homily, is that we are at one of those rare historical moments where the tectonic plates of culture are shifting.  The era of Christendom—that period in which a large segment of culture (in this case, “Western” or Euro-American culture) was fashioned by Christian faith and doctrine—is over.   It has been imploding for some time; certainly from 1789 and the end of the ancien regime with its alliance of throne and altar.  The roots of this secularization go back further through the Enlightenment to the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century.  (Martin Luther would die to think that he is in some way responsible for gay marriage, but then as he is dead anyway—what difference would it make?)    
Instead of crying about the spilt milk of the Church’s loss of influence (or should we say power?) over society and its norms, we need to ask ourselves what we must do to live as Christians in a post-Christian world.   The game has changed; indeed I think it is becoming more interesting.  This isn’t about Barack Obama and it isn’t about gay marriage: it is about Christians making a choice to follow Jesus Christ in a world that, very much like the world of Jesus and his disciples, challenges rather than supports Gospel Values.   It is time to put on our big boy (or big girl) pants and take responsibility for making Christian choices in a world that demands discipleship be  a decision and not a default. 

Rageoholics and Religion

Cardinal O'Malley greets President

Obama at the funeral of the late

Senator Ted Kennedy

Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, making his swan-song after twenty-four years in the United States Senate, recently said:

I’m not saying I was always right,” he said at his Senate office. “I’ll leave that to God and history. But I believed I was doing what I thought was right and people didn’t just disagree with me. There was hatred. But I’m not alone in that. You can take the last three presidents — Clinton, Bush, Obama — and people haven’t just disagreed with them, they’ve hated them. And to me, that’s really terrible. That’s a cancer that’s eating at our politics.”

As I would also say about Mr. Justice Scalia on the political right, while I have not always agreed with Senator Lieberman, I have always had a lot of respect for him because he is a man who is not afraid to speak up for what he believes to be right.   And I find that people of small intellects and narrow spirits have met both the Justice and the Senator with a personal animosity that is nothing less than pathological.  And if that is true for the lesser lights, such as Justices and Senators, how much more so for Presidents—Clinton, Bush, and Obama most of all.

I must admit that I have never cared for Mr. Clinton personally though I think he had a successful presidency and will go down in history as one of our better Presidents.  Mr. Bush I think is a good man but was a terrible president not only because of the disastrous policies that led both to a national financial shambles and two immoral wars with the consequent socio-political chaos of the implosion of the Middle-East, but even more so because he allowed himself to be surrounded by evil persons who manipulated their access to power for personal gain at the cost of national ruin.  As a professional historian, I have no doubt that the Senior President Bush and his predecessor, President Reagan, will be evaluated very differently in the long-run than they have been in the short.  When archives are opened and the definitive history of the 1980 election and subsequent presidencies of the winning candidates can be written, Americans will be appalled at the way in which the Republican Party undermined our constitutional government.   And to be honest and fair, the roots of the evil that like a cancer is eating out the democracy from within our republican form of government go back further and deeper and are not limited to one party.   I only wish there were more Joe Libermans and Antonin Scalias whose integrity I trust.  All this is a way of saying that while I while I wouldn’t buy a used car from Bill Clinton, and I think George W was in way over his head, and while I think Ronald Reagan and George H.W., and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft are (or were) evil people—and I don’t use that term lightly—I don’t have any personal animosity, much less hatred, for them.  I don’t wish them harm or even misfortune.  Like evil people I have personally encountered in my life—in the Church, in academics, in business, as neighbors, or as relatives—my disappointment in them doesn’t fester into rage or even an abiding anger.  My perception of them as “evil” is precisely that—my perception—and I don’t expect that God sees them the same way I do.  In fact, I am aware that if I saw them as God did I might better understand where their moral failure—or what I perceive to have been their moral failure—comes from and having a context for it I might better understand it.     

On the other hand, the rage we see today directed by some towards President Obama baffles me.  I can understand people disagreeing with him.  I can see their being disappointed in their fellow citizens choosing him for a second term.  I can see people worrying for the future of the country as I did under the last three Republican administrations.  I can even see people not liking him, as I obviously have disliked some of his predecessors.  What I cannot see is healthy people being enraged by everything the man does from spending a Christmas vacation with his family to his occasional attendance at a Church service to his appearance at a Catholic Charities benefit to his visits to our wounded warriors to his remarks at a memorial service for the victims of the Newtown Connecticut gun murders.  When everything an individual does inspires rage in a person, one begins to see that the problem is not with the individual but with the person who becomes angry.  

Regular readers know that one of my bête noires is the author of a blog under the title of “Les Femmes.”   Twenty years ago when I worked in Northern Virginia this woman had a certain reputation and her little home-printed newsletter circulated quarterly among the various parishes and organizations to which she mailed it, unsolicited and gratis.    She used it to excoriate various priests and nuns and diocesan officials that didn’t meet her criteria for orthodoxy or whose read on canon law differed from her own.  Though “Les Femmes” entitled themselves “Women of Truth,” she never hesitated to use lies, half-truths, innuendos, and out-of-context quotes and stories, to pass judgment on her spiritual betters.  Over the years her organization, never more than a handful, has dwindled down to what pretty much appears to be a one-woman campaign to attack a range of foes from Jesuit Father James Martin to Benedictine Sister Joan Chittester to local prelates and priests such as Father Tuck Grinnell or Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.  But these last few years, foes within the Church have been eclipsed by an increasing and incredible personal animosity towards not only President Barack Obama but towards his wife.  When, during a question and answer period after a talk I gave recently, I used her blog and newsletter as an example of pathological anger hiding beneath a cover of religion, a member of the audience told me:  

" I have known this woman for over forty years.  We had children together at St X School in Y, Virginia.  She is a rageoholic.  For her, religion—her religion, not the Church-- is the fuel that drives her anger.  Her anger blinds her ability to see reality in any way other than she constructs it and she constructs it to feed her anger.”

I found this insight fascinating.  A colleague of mine who is a psychotherapist often speaks of rageoholics.  Some people, more than a few in our society, are addicted to anger even as others are addicted to alcohol or drugs or are compulsive in their sexual acting-out, or their use of food, or their self-mutilation.   Like other addicts, rageoholics construct their realities to support or justify their addictions.  It is not that they are conscious of their lies or deliberate in their evils—reality becomes for them that which they need it to be to feed their addiction.  The roots of this addiction, like the roots of other compulsive  behavior, can be many—incidents of abuse, fear, depression, loneliness, anxiety or a thousand other experiences that produce a need for whatever gratification the addiction gives or angst it soothes.  Anger releases many of the same endorphins as sex and even as sex-addicts find their compulsions soothed by sexual release, anger-addicts find comfort in their release of those endorphins by giving rant to their rage.  The moral culpability for such behavior needs to go not towards the addict—whose loss of moral freedom has been diminished by the addiction—but to those who fan the flames of this anger.  For those who find in pseudo-Catholicism a justification for hating—not disagreeing with, but hating—someone we must find the sources that are feeding that compulsive rage.  Those who use the pulpit or the press for demagoguery or voices like that of Michael Voris and his “Real Catholic T.V.” are the ones who need to be held responsible for the epidemic of hatred under the cover of “religion,” that is becoming part of the warp and woof of our society.   There is no way that the Gospel of Christ can be used to justify the sort behavior that can swell ideological disagreement into personal hatred and as a Church we do not want to be known for this sort of attitude.  By this shall know you are my disciples—that  you have love for one another.  There is enough evil in the world already; we don’t need Westboro Baptist Catholics.              

Rethinking God III

Model of the Jerusalem Temple where

sacrifices were long offered to God in

the period of the Hebrew Scriptures

After reading the previous post about how our ideas of God have evolved since the historical periods  in which the Hebrew Scriptures were written one of my readers sent me this letter which had been circulating on the internet some years back.  You may remember Dr. Laura Schlessinger, physiologist turned advice counselor/radio personality, whose nationally syndicated radio show ran from 1994 to 2010.  From 1998 until 2003 Dr. Schlessinger practiced orthodox Judaism and often brought her religious insights to bear on the advice she dispensed to her listeners.  For the most part this very rich tradition was well received but people who did not share her religious convictions sometimes found her opinions off-putting.  These adversaries were not necessarily non-believers but often Christians and Jews who had a “different read” on the meaning of Scripture for contemporary society.  I want to print a letter purportedly directed to Dr. Schlessinger  that was circulated about twelve years ago that spoofed her biblical literalism.  I do this not to support the views of those who disagreed with Dr. Schlessinger but rather to show how different our understanding of God is today—even Dr. Laura’s understanding—than it was two or three millennia ago.     

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.
a.              When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
b.              I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
c.               I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
d.              Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
e.               I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
f.                A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
g.              Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
h.              Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
i.                 I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
j.                My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev.24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev.20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted disciple and adoring fan,

J. Kent Ashcraft

 

"The Pill" --and a World Gone Upside Down

Paul VI--the Pope who decided

against the Pill in his encyclical

letter, Humanae Vitae

Someone recently brought to my attention an essay on “how the Pill changed everythying.”  George Weigel was the essay’s author but at first I could not remember that and so I googled  “the pill changed everything.”  Lots of articles came up, most in praise of the Pill and its changes to better the lives of women.  Weigel’s article was not so generous in its laudatory remarks about contraceptive pharmaceuticals.  I personally have mixed feelings about the effects of the Pill, but my primary purpose as a historian is to note them and let the reader make his or her own judgments.  That is not to say that I am objective—no one is every truly objective and every historian has his or her bias, especially on an time as crucial to our modern world as the Pill.  We need to be aware of our biases and to try to be as transparent about them as we can—or at least to let our readers be aware of them so that the reader can compensate in making his or her evaluation.

      Ironically the main scientist in developing “the pill” was John Rock, a Catholic obstetrician and gynecologist.  Rock wanted to develop a method of contraception that worked within the Catholic Church’s concept of using the natural fertility/infertility cycle so that women could make a choice in becoming pregnant while remaining sexually active.  To be honest, Rock had always pushed the boundaries in regard to birth control.  Actually, as a scientist and academic (he was a professor at Harvard) he did not support Church teaching on contraception.  As early as 1931 he signed a petition advocating the legalization of birth control (which at that time was illegal in Massacusetts) and in 1949 he co-authored a book teaching methods of contraception.  Moreover he was a pioneer in the fields of freezing sperm and of in vitro fertilization.  He was, however, a practicing Catholic, he had founded a clinic to teach the rhythm method, and he attended Mass and received the sacraments regularly.  His motivation in developing the Pill was to make available a means of contraception that worked within the boundaries of Catholic moral teaching—i.e. a “natural” method, a method that employed the feminine fertility cycle to cause or avoid pregnancy.  

     Well, the Pill did cause a stir when it first became available in the’60’s and the Church had to consider it independently of previous papal teaching which condemned contraception that did not follow “natural” methods.  The Pill, with its interdependency on the ovulation cycle, was a complex issue that had not been anticipated by previous papal teaching.   Shortly before his death, Pope John XXIII convoked a commission to study the issue.  Paul VI enlarged this commission to 58 members, including married persons, men and women, in addition to scientists, theologians and bishops.  That alone was a remarkable choice—not for centuries had laity been given such a significant voice in developing Church doctrine.  In 1966 the commission issued its report to the Pope suggesting that hormonal contraceptives might be acceptable.  A minority of the commission who disagreed issued a report forwarding a contrary argument.  In the end, Paul VI went with the minority report. 

     I am not anxious in this entry to write about Humanae Vitae. We will do that at some other time.  What I am writing about is the Pill.  Even though the Pill was rejected by the official levels of the Catholic Church, it has been embraced by Catholics and non-Catholics alike.  All studies show that at least in the developed world there is no substantial difference in the percentage of Catholics who use the Pill (or now other means of contraception) than in the general population.  But contraception is only part of the consequences of the Pill.

     The Pill became the occasion where Catholics began making their own decisions regarding everyday questions in their lives rather than unquestioningly following Church authority.  I don’t think it was just the Pill.  There were other questions of the day in which many rank and file Catholics were not willing to follow the lead of the hierarchy but were starting to think for themselves.  The Church’s embracing of a fairly radical “social justice” agenda in the 1960’s put the hierarchy ahead of the average American lay Catholic when it came down to questions of economic justice, peace, and even civil rights.  As Catholics climbed into the ranks of the professions and rose into economic and political power, their opinions became quite independent of the magisterium.  Even today on questions of distributive justice or of the death penalty most American Catholics reject Church teaching  

      But even more serious than encouraging Catholics to think independently of the Church’s magisterium, the Pill has broken the connection between sex and reproduction and this has made us redefine the purposes of sex.  This affects not only questions of family planning, but of the very nature of sexual relationships. Americans—and probably most people in the developed world, no longer acknowledge that there is an inherent connection between sexual intimacy and reproduction/ family life.  This works various ways.  With sex and reproduction no longer two sides of the same coin we are not only very open to in vitro fertilizaiton or even surrogate parenthood, but genetic engineering.  At the same time that we are willing to create life by design, we have lost our scruples about destroying life that is somehow or other defective or even superfluous.  And then, since we have changed the nature of sexual relations from essentially reproductive to purely recreational, we are far more encouraging of non-committed sexual relationships.  We now find that the majority of American households are “non-Traditional” and in this we are “behind” Europe.   Only a generation ago the heir to the British throne had to marry a woman who had no previous sexual experience.  That same heir’s son was able to live with his fiancée before their marriage without any social stigma.  But then the Brits have always been loony.  More to the point, here in America there is no social stigma whatsoever to a couple’s living together before marriage and the attempts of some clergy to require couples to live apart for six months before the wedding leads only to deceit and ridicule.  And then there is the issue of same-sex couples and—since sexual intimacy is no longer linked to reproduction—why not?  

     Traditional Christian morality has been turned upside down by “the Pill.”  Now, despite the tone of the above paragraph, I am not sure this is all bad. That is not to say that I agree with the new morality—because I don’t.  It isn’t morality at all. It is just making one’s life choices without much moral reflection.  But the situation invites us to construct a moral framework from the ground up.  In fact, the situaiton not only invites us to give serious thought to today’s complex questions and to build anew a moral framework on the foundation of the Gospels, but it requires us to do so.  The old answers aren’t working.  It doesn’t mean that the new answers will be all that different, only that they must be rethought and expressed in ways that are consistent with the modern sciences—both the physiological and social sciences—if the Gospel is to have credence in our contemporary world.