Sex Au Naturel Read Online Free Page A
Author: Patrick Coffin
primarily by clergy, including some bishops. Arguably, the strongest voices of support for Pope Paul VI have come from the laity, a sterling example being H. Lyman Stebbins, who founded Catholics United for the Faith in 1968 during the maelstrom over Humanae Vitae .
Americans are enamored with the ideals of democracy. The habit of making vital decisions by a vote runs deep in American life. We vote on civic laws, police chiefs, mayors, presidents. On television, we vote off survivors from islands and idols off stages. And yet, as we’ll see in Chapter Three, the Church was established by the authority of the Lord Jesus, not by the consent of His disciples. Jesus is Lord, on His terms. And if He is not Lord of our sexuality, He is Lord of nothing. The Church is a Bride with a Bridegroom, a Body with a Head. And her doctrines come from Him, not from a show of hands.
The secular causes of the shift toward dissent are easy enough to track. The timing of Paul’s encyclical could hardly have been worse, having appeared during the pause between the Summer of Love and the Woodstock Music Festival. “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” sang the chorus in Hair! , the nudist musical of the day. The cultural ethos bristled with the anti-traditional values of Haight-Ashbury, LSD experimentation, Hippies, hand-painted Volkswagen vans, “free” “love,” and campus unrest.
The year 1968 saw the Tet Offensive in Viet Nam and a spike in antiwar protests across the country. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy were murdered that year, the same year the French government was almost toppled by strikes and the May student uprising. Two years earlier, in Hollywood, the decades-old Hays Production Code was replaced with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings system. 5 Tumult was the theme, change the constant. The English historian Paul Johnson called it the year of “America’s suicide attempt.” 6
Into this galloping river Humanae Vitae was dropped, to whirl bravely upstream like a gawky, determined salmon. And whirl it did, even though, from a worldly point of view, it carried the wrong message at the wrong time to the wrong audience.
The Catholic flock of the late 1960s was disoriented as to what was expected of them in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Tens of thousands of priests and religious had fled their vows. As the Church recalibrated her relationship to the world, many Catholics recalibrated their relationship to the Church. Latin was everywhere eclipsed, quite against the mandates of the Council. Theological outlooks became congealed: the Right wanted only continuity with the past; the Left, with the future. For many of the ordinary faithful, the idea that conscience trumps truth had a seductive ring to it—an idea that would have consequences for the birth control debate, particularly in the Canada of my childhood, as we’ll see in the next chapter.
Candor requires the admission that some intra-Church factors also unwittingly encouraged dissent.
Everybody Loves a Majority
Catholics believe that popes, when they teach in union with the bishops of the world, do so infallibly in matters of faith and morals—including the common teaching of Ecumenical Councils. Again, not necessarily in temporal affairs. We can retain filial respect for leaders in the Church while affirming that not all administrative or disciplinary decisions are created equal; some have unintended and unforeseen results.
A few examples: The Second Vatican Council addressed the issue of birth control in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 7 but declined to make any direct, explicit pronouncement since the Papal Commission on Birth begun by Pope John XIII and enlarged by Paul VI in 1964 was still in session. 8 It is odd that a more forceful statement wasn’t made in the sections dealing with marriage and family. Leftists could, and did, view the
Americans are enamored with the ideals of democracy. The habit of making vital decisions by a vote runs deep in American life. We vote on civic laws, police chiefs, mayors, presidents. On television, we vote off survivors from islands and idols off stages. And yet, as we’ll see in Chapter Three, the Church was established by the authority of the Lord Jesus, not by the consent of His disciples. Jesus is Lord, on His terms. And if He is not Lord of our sexuality, He is Lord of nothing. The Church is a Bride with a Bridegroom, a Body with a Head. And her doctrines come from Him, not from a show of hands.
The secular causes of the shift toward dissent are easy enough to track. The timing of Paul’s encyclical could hardly have been worse, having appeared during the pause between the Summer of Love and the Woodstock Music Festival. “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” sang the chorus in Hair! , the nudist musical of the day. The cultural ethos bristled with the anti-traditional values of Haight-Ashbury, LSD experimentation, Hippies, hand-painted Volkswagen vans, “free” “love,” and campus unrest.
The year 1968 saw the Tet Offensive in Viet Nam and a spike in antiwar protests across the country. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy were murdered that year, the same year the French government was almost toppled by strikes and the May student uprising. Two years earlier, in Hollywood, the decades-old Hays Production Code was replaced with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings system. 5 Tumult was the theme, change the constant. The English historian Paul Johnson called it the year of “America’s suicide attempt.” 6
Into this galloping river Humanae Vitae was dropped, to whirl bravely upstream like a gawky, determined salmon. And whirl it did, even though, from a worldly point of view, it carried the wrong message at the wrong time to the wrong audience.
The Catholic flock of the late 1960s was disoriented as to what was expected of them in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Tens of thousands of priests and religious had fled their vows. As the Church recalibrated her relationship to the world, many Catholics recalibrated their relationship to the Church. Latin was everywhere eclipsed, quite against the mandates of the Council. Theological outlooks became congealed: the Right wanted only continuity with the past; the Left, with the future. For many of the ordinary faithful, the idea that conscience trumps truth had a seductive ring to it—an idea that would have consequences for the birth control debate, particularly in the Canada of my childhood, as we’ll see in the next chapter.
Candor requires the admission that some intra-Church factors also unwittingly encouraged dissent.
Everybody Loves a Majority
Catholics believe that popes, when they teach in union with the bishops of the world, do so infallibly in matters of faith and morals—including the common teaching of Ecumenical Councils. Again, not necessarily in temporal affairs. We can retain filial respect for leaders in the Church while affirming that not all administrative or disciplinary decisions are created equal; some have unintended and unforeseen results.
A few examples: The Second Vatican Council addressed the issue of birth control in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 7 but declined to make any direct, explicit pronouncement since the Papal Commission on Birth begun by Pope John XIII and enlarged by Paul VI in 1964 was still in session. 8 It is odd that a more forceful statement wasn’t made in the sections dealing with marriage and family. Leftists could, and did, view the
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