El Pueblo Infiel de Dios

Desde EE.UU. nos llaman la atención sobre lo que en todas partes —también en Chile— se dice entre murmullos, algunos para promover el cambio de doctrina sobre la anticoncepción (para acomodarla a los tiempos) y otros —entre quienes me cuento— para afirmar que si la praxis de la Iglesia no vuelve a ser fiel a la doctrina sobre la castidad matrimonial no tiene sentido ninguna otra reflexión sobre la pastoral familiar. Todo es arena cuando la base es arena.

Y no me digan que la Iglesia no ha cambiado. No ha cambiado su doctrina oficial, pero ha sido sistemáticamente silenciada durante 50 años. Las víctimas de la revolución sexual no han encontrado en la Iglesia —salvo contadas islas de praxis antigua— una ayuda, sino una confirmación en su mal obrar.

El Pueblo de Dios debe volver a Dios.

Leed.

The Elephant in the Synod Hall

"How strange it is...that a Special Synod called by the Pope precisely to counteract the contemporary negative forces undermining marriage and the family ... should say little or nothing about the role that the virtually universal practice of contraception has played in causing this crisis."

August 07, 2015 07:24 EST

Carl E. Olson

CWR's sister publication, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, always has many excellent essays and columns. One recent essay is particularly exceptional: "A 'Categorical Silence' in the Preparatory Questionnaire for the 2015 Synod" by Fr. Mark A. Pilon. The article first touches on a couple of historical notes:

In 1930, Pius XI declared that contraception was intrinsically evil, and warned that it’s practice would accelerate the “moral ruin of society,” undermine the stability of marriage, and lead to the terrible temptation of abortion. In 1932, the secular editor of the Washington Post warned that the moral acceptance of contraception in marriage would mean “the end of marriage as a holy institution” and “lead to indiscriminate immorality.”  Who can seriously doubt today that those warnings have come true in spades, and that the institution of marriage, as understood in natural law and in revealed religion, is in the gravest trouble. Moreover, there has been yet another grave consequence of the contraceptive mentality, which was not foreseen by the Church itself, or by the secular society, and that is the fact that much of the human family now finds itself threatened by a demographic crisis caused by being seriously below replacement birth rates.

Fr. Pilon then highlights how odd it is that a Synod—an Extraordinary Synod, at that—essentially ignored the historical, theological, and philosophical elephants in the room:

How strange it is, then, that a Special Synod called by the Pope precisely to counteract the contemporary negative forces undermining marriage and the family, and to strengthen the family as the basic institution of human society and the Church, should say little or nothing about the role that the virtually universal practice of contraception has played in causing this crisis. This virtual ignoring of the tremendous impact of contraception on married life and societal stability was confirmed by the absence of a single question in the 2015 Synod lineamenta which deals directly with the problem that contraception plays in the crisis facing marriage and family life in our day.

So how can one explain this peculiar blindness in the Church today regarding the evil of contraception, and its impact on marriage and society, especially given the great intellectual and theological contributions of three great popes, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI? These popes made abundantly clear the moral and social consequences of the evil of contraception, its devastating impact for the perfection and stability of married love, and the stability of the family and human society at large. How their brilliant teaching could be so ignored is not easy to understand.

It’s been nearly 50 years now since Pope Paul VI issued what was certainly his most important encyclical, Humanae Vitae, and 35 years since Saint John Paul II gave us Familiaris Consortio. Both of these great magisterial teachings made it crystal clear how contraception, and the contraceptive mentality, damage marriage, undermine married love, family life, and human society. Yet, those responsible for the preparation of the coming 2015 Synod, for some reason, chose not to submit a single study question in the  lineamenta, directly dealing with the problem of artificial contraception. Obviously, these Church leaders did not see this moral and practical issue as a significant factor in the collapse of marriage and family life over the past half century. It was as if the extensive papal magisterium of Pope Paul, John Paul II, and Benedict—in brilliantly analyzing the devastating impact of contraception on married love and marriage stability, as well as on demographic survival of society—had never taken place.

To appreciate just how truly stunning this really is, we might consider an analogous situation. Suppose an international commission, set up to study the problem of AIDS, and composed of medical experts from around the world, had issued a report or study guide that failed to mention the problem of promiscuous sex in the transmission of this disease, and focused exclusively on the social and political dimensions of the problem. Would that not be stunning? Would the world not be shocked?

Yet, this is what basically happened after the 2014 Synod. The focus of the final report, and the questionnaire for the 2015 Synod, was largely on the political and social and cultural roots of the family crisis, while virtually no attention was given to the moral problem of contraception in undermining family life, values, stability, and unity. There certainly were bishops who raised this issue during the first Synod, and yet their concerns were virtually ignored by those responsible for preparing for the 2015 Synod. Contraception, and the contraceptive mentality, were obviously seen as having little or no importance. Or, perhaps, it was considered a lost cause?  Better to focus on other issues. But contraception is not just one moral issue among others when it comes to the destruction of marriage and society. It is without question, or should be, the single most important contributing cause to our present crises related to marriage and society, regardless of how many Church leaders recognize this fact. It may be ignored intellectually; it will not be ignored without ongoing devastating consequences for the real world.

He then notes what many others pointed out last October: the near complete absence of anything by John Paul II about, well, anything relating to marriage, sex, family, and many related topics:

What, then, has happened to the Catholic Church today when the brilliant and incisive moral and social analyses of three great popes can be basically ignored, except for a reference to their championing an attitude of “openness to life.” Pope Paul taught that contraception not only leads inevitably to an anti-life culture among married couples, but that it also gravely undermines the stability and unity of marriage by destroying the unitive meaning of the act of married love. He also warned of the grave consequences this would have on the morality of the young and unmarried as well. How can this be ignored after fifty years of sexual revolution, which depended heavily on the contraceptive culture. This is not simply Catholic or papal opinion. It is a cultural fact, admitted by nearly all social scientists. Pope John Paul II built upon this analysis, and gave us a much more detailed analysis of the way that contraceptive acts, and the consequent contraceptive mentality, undermine conjugal love itself and, thus, conjugal unity. Is this not seen to be relevant for understanding and countering today’s crises?

From this silence of the Synod documents, we can see quite clearly that this papal teaching was obviously not fully embraced by some bishops, and clearly was not faithfully handed on in the seminaries, and other Catholic institutions of learning. What seminarians and lay Catholics often received in instruction was, at best, a bare rule with little or no explanation of this moral norm, and no explanation as to how contraception undermines marriage and married love, while demeaning and minimizing the procreative purpose of marriage. Indeed, what most Catholics, at least in the western world, have received for decades is simply silence on the matter: silence in the pulpit, silence in the confessional, silence in the schools, and silence in the magisterial documents at the diocesan level, and the national level.

So, rather than a Synod that openly discussed and addressed these challenging but vital matters, there was simply more silence and stonewalling. And a fair amount of psychobabble, especially in the infamous mid-Synod document. Do read the entire essay.
Worth noting here is a piece I posted on Insight Scoop back in 2012 about contraception and abortion, quoting from works by Janet Smith and Joyce Little. The latter wrote a brilliant book back in 1993 titled The Church and the Culture War(Ignatius Press), in which she stated:

For Catholics, however, the roots of a culture of death strike deeper than abortion. The watershed issue for Catholics is not abortion but contraception. For contraception places before us the central issue of our age—who has dominion over man? Man himself or God? In Genesis, God gave man dominion over nature (Gen 1:28), but he reserved dominion over man tohimself, as exemplified in his one command to Adam and Eve. Is the human body a part of that realm over which God gave man dominion, or is the human body indissociable from the human being over whom God reserved dominion for himself? That is the unavoidable question raised by contraception. To divorce sex from procreation is to divorce man from his role as co-creator with God in order to set man up as the sole lord of even his own existence. It is to reduce sex to the level of a simple biological function which, as such, belongs to the nature over which man has dominion. In doing this, man gives himself the warrant to define for himself what is good and what is evil in all matters pertaining to sex-and thus to life and death. To the man, and even more the woman, who claims contraceptive control over his or her own body, abortion is but the logical and even necessary corollary to such a notion of control.

Because contraception involves us in a false assertion of freedom vis-à-vis God, by claiming a prerogative which rightly belongs to God, and because abortion involves us in a false assertion of freedom vis-à-vis both God and other human beings, by taking a life which God has given to another person, women, who are the primary target of those advocating contraception and abortion, must take the lead in renouncing the culture of death which such techniques produce. Women must recognize within themselves that unique capacity for giving life which defined Eve as "mother of all living" and Mary as Mother of God. A culture of death can prevail only at the expense of motherhood itself: and women must work to see that the female capacity to conceive and bear children is not treated as somehow disordered or flawed.

This means two things above all else. It means, first, that women must actively resist that contraceptive mentality which supposes that the chemical suppression of the capacity of a normally-functioning female body to conceive a child or the physical disruption by barrier methods of the marital act itself are good things. It means, second, that women must actively combat that attitude which suggests that the woman who does actually conceive a child might be regarded as having contracted a disease. Thinking of the female body and the marital act as flawed and therefore in need of a contraceptive "fix" and viewing pregnancy as a disease in need of the "cure" of abortion are two of the most vicious aspects of a culture of death. Without these mistaken concepts, no such culture could ever flourish. If women must take the lead here, this does not mean that men have no role to play. Indeed, a culture centered on contraception and abortion works in the final analysis as much against fatherhood as against motherhood, for it strikes at marriage and the family precisely because it divorces freedom from love and that responsibility which is intrinsic to love. As the Pope points out, "Responsible parenthood is the necessary condition for human love, and it is also the necessary condition for authentic conjugal love, because love cannot be irresponsible. Its beauty is the fruit of responsibility. When love is truly responsible, it is also truly free." [5]

The only way, in short, to subvert a culture of death is to embrace freely and joyfully the hierarchy or sacred order of the sacrament of marriage by which man is able to become the living image of God and thus sustain within this world the trinitarian order with which God has invested it and without which there can be only a world of tyranny and a culture of death. But this means something else of which both Vatican II and the current Pope have been most insistent. This means the laity must assume a much greater responsibility for the mission of the Church in this world. (pp 164-67)

Here is the entire post. More on this topic, I'm sure, in the weeks and months to come.