Lots More Contraception Discussion
Carl Olson has a couple of posts. One on Cherie Blair’s comments and another one reacting to an article published in Austrailia.
Dave Armstrong has a post about abortion in which he talks about contraception a lot.
Also, Erik Twist has a couple more good posts plus his own conversion story.
Catholic Exchange has an article on the same subject as well.
Lots of interesting thoughts. It was a watershed teaching 40 years ago not because it taught anything new. What was new was that so many people chose to dissent. Now we can see the fruits of that dissent. Of course it didn’t remain with one issue. When so much of the church openly opposes one of her key teachings it creates a ton of problems.
What we experienced was a huge rift opening up between Catholicism and western culture. Catholics all over Europe and North America had to get their minds around the idea that what society was saying was OK was not OK according to Catholic moral teaching. This is normal. Jesus told us we would be like aliens in a foreign land. People would not understand the way we think. But we were not used to it. Our world had become so Christian that we didn’t need to be countercultural. We could just go with the flow. It wasn’t the church who changed but the flow of society that changed. Still we were not used to swimming against the current so many simply didn’t do it. That included priests, bishops, theologians, and lots of “good Catholic” laity.
People were confused to suddenly find the gospel message offensive. They assumed the problem was the church. That is the easier assumption. It means they can do what they want. There were very few voices saying the church was right on the issue. All the other denominations caved in. Could it really be so wrong? Everyone expected the next pope to change the teaching anyway. Why wait when you can indulge now?
But what happened? Mass attendance dropped. Vocations became rare. People stopped going to confession. Sure there may have been other causes for these things but the rejection of the gospel of Christ as taught by the church was huge. One you say the church has firmly taught error then your relationship with the church has to be seriously damaged. Here is Monsignor Cormac Burke:
In solving this conflict of conscience so he would have fundamentally altered his position as a Catholic; he would have largely emptied it of its basic meaning, and almost certainly rendered it sooner or later untenable. The point (whether he sees it or not) is that, in resolving his problem of conscience in this way, he is rejecting the Church. He is rejecting the Church in effect, in its essence, even if he says he has no intention of leaving it. He is rejecting the meaning of the Church even if he claims he is not rejecting membership within it. The conclusion he has come to - which is really that in an important matter of its teaching the Church has not after all been upheld by Christ - is precisely to reject the Catholic concept of the Church and its Magisterium. The Catholic concept of the Magisterium - a teaching body guaranteed by God (cf. Lk 10:16) - has collapsed in his mind. [2]
The man whose conscience can no longer tolerate a Catholic concept of the Church, may still in fact continue to live the practices of a Catholic; he may still frequent the Sacraments, for instance. But the heart will have gone out of his religion. His religious life can no longer have the dimension of joy it gives to know that one cannot be deceived about the Christian way of life on earth, about the road to Heaven… In actual practice, the whole of his encounter with Christ will become uncertain, for if Christ is not present in the living voice and teaching of the Church, there is no guarantee of his presence in the Sacraments, in the Eucharist, in the Mass… If a man concludes that Christ does not uphold the Church’s teaching on birth-control, then he has no reason to put faith in her teaching about divorce or euthanasia or abortion or pre-marital sex. All these become open questions, as far as he is concerned, crossroads of choice without any signposts, where one man’s preference is no more likely to be right than another’s.
There is no such thing any longer as a true Christian criterion in his mind. There is just human opinion, no more. He has not only lost grip on the rock of Christian truth, he has lost sight of it.
Thankfully there are more and more people coming back to the notion of Church as a teaching body guarenteed by God. I am grateful for that because finding Catholics who believed that made the church attractive to me.
