THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

McCarrick, dissent from HV,
and the ‘sensus fidelium’
The Church has paid an incalculable price for neglecting to preach
the truths of Humanae vitae and to promote Natural Family Planning
by Janet E. Smith

July 24, 2018

The fact that the 50th anniversary of Humanae vitae should fall within the year of the #Metoo movement is ironic since that movement painfully reveals how the modern sexual ethic has debased men, women and sex — something that (soon to be) Saint Paul VI predicted would happen if contraception became widely available.

The entertainment world and secular institutions must clearly radically change their cultures. (But) the failure of the Church to maintain a culture respectful of sexual values and to protect the innocent is even more distressing, for the Church has been appointed by Our Savior Jesus Christ to safeguard all morality.

It is very painful for any Catholic to learn of the shocking and immoral behavior of Cardinal McCarrick, who exploited, violated and betrayed the trust of so many young men. Even more appalling is the fact that his success in the Church reveals a continued existence of a culture within the Church that permits such behavior to take place and prevents it from coming to light.

Bishops, priests, religious and laity must band together to find a way to eradicate what has been repeatedly spoken of as a network of homosexuals who abuse people and who control too much of what goes on in dioceses, orders, and even in the curia. [A tough challenge when many of those who hold the levers of power are directly or indirectly invested in covering up the whole festering stink!]

To those who have eyes to see, it is not hard to see that the widespread embrace of contraception leads to approval of homosexuality. After all, those who accept contraception hold that respecting the procreative possibility of the sexual act is not essential to the moral performance of that action. Thus why not homosexuality and a whole host of deviant sexual actions?

The sexual abuse crisis in the Church was largely a crisis of homosexual priests exploiting young men. How many others did not prey on young men, but have lived double lives? Their ways of thinking and behaving surely permeated their priesthood in many ways.

What happened with McCarrick explains a lot.
- Over the last 50 years those priests and laity who have tried to promote Humanae vitae and to teach methods of Natural Family Planning have regularly been astonished and demoralized by how little support they have received from bishops.
- For decades the family life offices were dominated by dissenters, by those who taught couples in marriage preparation that using contraception was not a sin if their consciences were not troubled.

After I had given a talk explaining how the dissent from Humanae vitae quickly led to a dominance of dissenting faculty in seminaries, institutions for Catholic higher education, and in diocesan structures as well, a woman observed to me that now she understood why the good bishops who have been appointed in recent times have such a hard time with their presbyterates.

Many bishops this year are preaching on, writing statements on, and holding conferences on Humanae vitae. But that is a relatively new phenomenon. The good bishops of today inherited a Church shaped by bishops who have tolerated dissent and even manifest and egregious violations of chastity.

I have no doubt that many of the dissenting bishops were badly educated in seminary; indeed, I have been surprised that so many good bishops have come out of the seminary system that was in place for years. [McCarrick at a ripe 85 attended seminary more than 6 decades ago - before the seminary system was laid open to the anti-Catholic depredations widely occasioned by the 'spirit of Vatican II' of which McCarrick is a 'shining' example (like a comet before it plummets to earth and turns to dust). In his case, one must conclude his failings are due to an inherent character flaw that neither his decision to pursue the priesthood nor his seminary training did anything to change!]

In the midst of all this confusion, dissent, and betrayal, the fidelity of lay Catholics who have sacrificed and struggled to defend Humanae vitae and promote Natural Family Planning is all that more admirable.

Blessed John Henry Newman predicted that at times in the Church there would be a small portion of the flock (parvus grex), a flock largely abandoned by its shepherds, who would maintain commitment to the truth. It is this group that he believed possessed(s) the sensus fidelium; it was (is) this group whose faith was (is) so deep and loyally practiced that the lack of leadership from those whose duty it is to lead did (does) not deflect them from the true faith and from evangelizing as best they could.

The price the Church has paid for neglecting to preach the truths of Humanae vitae and to promote Natural Family Planning is incalculable. Lives have been ruined, vocations have been lost, priests have left the priesthood, families have been destroyed, conversions have been stymied, and the culture has been deprived of the bold witness that the Church could and should give to the spectacular vision God has for human sexuality.

Janet E. Smith holds the Father Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. She has recently edited Why Humanae vitae Is Still Right (Ignatius Press 2018) and Self-Gift, Essays on Humanae vitae and the Thought of John Paul II (Emmaus Press: 2018)


Humanae Vitae’s singular vision
By Michael Pakaluk

July 24, 2018

The marital act has both a unitive and a procreative meaning – this, we are told, authoritatively in Humanae Vitae, whose fiftieth anniversary is tomorrow, but not only there. And we are also told that these meanings are inseparable.

So couples who think they are getting the unitive dimension on its own, by using contraception, are deceived and not getting it at all. They have changed what appear to be acts of love into a mere coordination of egoisms (as Wojtyla says in 'Love and Responsibility').

A single marital act, however, seems enough for the procreative meaning of the act to have its full force – namely, when a child is conceived. The couple comes together just once and, as it happens, they have successfully procreated. So, if the unitive and procreative meanings are inseparable, does it follow that a single marital act can be enough, too, for its unitive meaning to have full force?

I want to argue that it does, not merely for its own sake, but to help refute a heresy of the day. According to that heresy, when couples get married they should want two things: to beget and raise children, and to enjoy a lifetime of sexual satisfaction.

Call this second thing “sexual companionship,” “a good sex life,” or “continual intimacy” – or whatever. The heresy is to say that this second thing, or the marital act’s contribution to this, is what is meant by the unitive dimension.

Some people even say that a married couple has a right to “sexual satisfaction.” But since pregnancy, childbirth, and the stresses of parenting are plainly at odds with this “sexual satisfaction,” it looks like contraception is needed to balance the two, in what gets called “responsible parenthood.”

For this heresy, once is not enough – no number of times is ever enough. The sex act has a purely progressive meaning, as contributing to an ongoing life of sexual fulfillment. The next act is always necessary to continue this satisfaction and, even, to prove it. The past act must appear to count for nothing.

But once is enough as regards the most important unity in marriage, whereby they become two in one flesh:

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“A valid marriage between the baptized is called ratified only if it has not been consummated; it is called ratified and consummated if the spouses have performed between themselves in a human fashion a conjugal act which is suitable in itself for the procreation of offspring, to which marriage is ordered by its nature and by which the spouses become one flesh.” (CIC 1061 §1)

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And clearly there are many couples for which once was enough for every kind of unity. You probably know couples – my uncle and aunt were like this – he was a soldier, and she his high school sweetheart. They got married just before he was deployed to Europe during World War II. He spent three years away.

Assume for argument’s sake their honeymoon night was one night only. Wouldn’t the consummation of that one night – or their marriage as viewed through that lens – have been enough for him to claim, for all those years, every form of marital union? So he would have a strong reason to refuse to visit prostitutes, or to flirt with the girls in French towns?

The case is even stronger, of course, if a child is conceived. In the movie The Natural, Iris (the Glen Close character) sends Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) a note, saying to the messenger, “I have his son in the stands. He doesn’t know his son is here.” When Hobbs (in the on-deck circle) reads the note, and realizes that his one act with this woman fourteen years before had conceived a child, he does not weigh having a son with her against lack of sexual satisfaction with her, through their years of separation – as if the lack in the one respect could touch the unity in the other respect. We would despise him if he did.
Rather, in the movie, he must deliberately reject as a false, competing ideal the sexual companionship promised by Memo (Kim Basinger).

The “once is enough” attitude is retrospective as well as prospective. A pure-hearted man, during courtship, longs to be joined with his beloved. When he gains her, he takes custody of that union in his heart. What before was longing, becomes gratitude afterwards. Gratitude is never static. But each subsequent union on this understanding is free rather than compelled. There is no need to constitute anything – continual sexual satisfaction – because the one-flesh unity of the marriage already exists, which the couple will naturally want to memorialize and restate.

I said that it “seems” that the procreative meaning can attain its full force in a single marital act. Actually not: because procreation for human beings is not the mere conception of a new life but also the raising and educating of that being over something like twenty years.

Thus, the procreative meaning is not something inert; it must be elicited by the deliberate will of the parents, cooperating together. But in the same sense it can fulfill the unitive sense, if the parents deliberately choose to see that growing child as the embodiment of their one-flesh union.

We cannot discuss the good direction of the will and “seeing” things in the right way without bringing in the virtues. That is why it is a calumny to say, as some do, against the magisterial teaching of John Paul II, that he failed to appreciate the difficulties of married couples needing to abstain.

What I have called the heresy of sexual satisfaction, he refers to as “concupiscence.” He concludes his famous catechesis on theology of the body with a lengthy discussion of the virtue of “continence” in the service of “conjugal chastity,” which “gradually reveals itself as a singular capacity to perceive, love, and practice those meanings of the language of the body which remain altogether unknown to concupiscence itself.”


Prometheus unbound
by David Warren

July 20, 2018

Prometheus – not the Prometheus of Shelley and Byron, but the Prometheus of Aeschylus and the ancient Greeks – was no liberator and no martyr. For his theft of Fire from the gods, he got what he deserved. He was trying to overturn the natural and divine order. He had committed something like the sin of Adam. He was attempting what could not be done.

The old Greeks were subtler and deeper than we realize. Their mythology was not superficial, as our children were once told. (These days not even this is taught.) We still imagine them as revolutionaries; as iconoclasts of one sort or another. They were the opposite.

We still imagine them as men who refashioned the world; as the “scientific” liberators from primordial superstition and tyranny; as Prometheans against a Jove who is petty and vindictive. We celebrate them as the initiators of “Western Civ,” and ultimately, the Modern.

In that modern view, they were not passive; they took their own fate into their own hands, and their heritage is free speech and inquiry. We place them almost in opposition to the Hebrew prophets of Obedience.

Read Hesiod with attention. Read Aeschylus again: the surviving fragments of whose Prometheus trilogy are today read anachronistically, in a false romantic light. Note that the punishment of Prometheus was eternal; that with the Fire he brings down human misery.

Aeschylus was a tragedian, not a comedian; he is not working towards a happy ending. He is most certainly not a “progressive” in any modern sense.

The gods may be inscrutable to us. They do not answer to our own convenience. Yet to man was given from the beginning a gift greater than fire, or the wheel, or any other natural contrivance. We are able dimly to discern the order of things, and to work with, rather than against, the grain of reality. The Christian revelation came as a completion, a “perfection,” of the Greek understanding of things.

It came as a stroke through the knot. The conflict of Orestes at the heart of tragedy – exactly analogous to the myth of Prometheus – was unpredictably resolved. A harmony of the human with the divine will was proposed to the Greek mind. It had come into the world not by human but by divine agency, in the form of a Man, in utter humility. Philosophy and theology converged.

As we approach the anniversary of Pope Paul’s Humanae vitae – in danger now of revision by the glib spirits who prevail in Rome – I think of this longer history.

The human interest is not to rebel. There is in this world an order of things, a grain of reality, which we may acknowledge or deny. As the pagan Greeks knew, it cannot be changed. But as the Christians taught, it can be embraced. We can be saved from the consequences of our own rebellions, by trust and by faith in that divine order, from every angle converging not on Prometheus but on Christ.

Pope Paul VI left a mixed legacy. A man of real faith, he tried to accommodate the spirit of modernity, in disastrous ways. Yet in his deepest meditations and prayers, embodied in the text of his great encyclical, he encountered that unchanging God, who Is, law-giver and not law-taker. He came as close as any man to explaining God’s law in terms of human reason.

For me, a half-century ago, this was a shocking revelation.

I shall never forget a summer train, from Buffalo to Cleveland. From a newsstand, in the old Buffalo station, I had picked up a copy of a Catholic newspaper, which contained the full text of the encyclical, in English translation. This because I had a lot of time to kill.

Back then, I was a fire-breathing, adolescent atheist, and persecutor of nice Christian souls in high-school cafeterias. My intention was to provide myself with more ammunition against Christians generally, and Catholics in particular.

On the train journey, I read the encyclical with attention. Twice. The first reading disoriented me: for the document was very intelligently argued. At the second, I began to see that, given premises openly and honestly acknowledged, the argument was irrefutable. In order to mock it, I would have to misrepresent it.

I realized that I could dismiss the premises; but that if I did, I would have to argue that Man was a creature of no moral significance; that human life did not matter. I was a reasonably intelligent child. I could see the consequences of that position.

Nineteen sixty-eight was for other reasons a memorable year. In so many ways, it became clear that Western man was attempting suicide. The convulsions on American campuses, and in her streets, the parallel events in Paris and through Europe, blared in the news. Even then, my native “conservatism” was appalled: especially by the wincing cowardice of “authority figures,” abandoning their stations. It seemed to me that Pope Paul had made a stand.

My atheism was hard-boiled, if internally scrambled. It survived this encounter for a few more years. But I was no longer able to pretend that the Catholic and Christian position on human life was (as many in my parents’ generation thought) ridiculous. Rather, I could see that the line on human life had to be drawn at the moment of conception, not at birth; that abortion is murder.

Returning to a small-town high school in Ontario (for a last year before I dropped out), I added to my growing reputation for eccentricity. In the student debating clubs to which I belonged, I was now arguing – frankly as an atheist – that Pope Paul was dead right.

If we did not draw the line at contraception, we would verily be on the “slippery slope” to real, murderous barbarism. (This in a Protestant town that despised atheists and papists about equally.)

Half a century has borne out every prediction.