Just a bit of chronological context: 'INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIANITY', which became an almost-instant theological classic, was published one year before Jorge Bergoglio was ordained a priest.
ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI
With thanks to Scenron of La Vigna del Signore, whose 2018 B16 heading I adapted for the Forum (as I did his 2017 heading last year).
The accusation that Catholics are obsessed with sex comes from those of 'the world' engaging in the familiar psychological process of projection and inversion - projecting onto others their own obsession. Who in the secular world will deny that nothing attracts and titillates 'the public' - collectively and individually - more than anything that has to do with sex? Even the most popular celebrities get extra attention if any report about them has to do with sex. So, please, enough with the negative projections on Catholics ....
Obsessed with sex? No, Catholics are obsessed with life
There seems little doubt that 2018 is going to witness yet another great clash over
'Humanae Vitae'- arguably one of the most contested and disputed papal texts in modern history
by Carl Olson
Editorial
January 9, 2018
“Why are Catholics so obsessed with sex?” I’ve been asked the question more than once; you have probably heard or seen it as well. In my experience, it has never been asked because I was talking about sex. It usually comes out of the blue, almost as though the person asking the question — a question often uttered more as an accusation than an inquiry — is, well, obsessed with what he thinks the Church is constantly discussing. The conversation goes something like this:
Me: “Why do you think Catholics are obsessed with sex?”
Him: “Well, the Church is always telling Catholics what they can or cannot do—”
Me: “So you’ve heard quite a few homilies about sex recently?”
Him: “Um, no. I’m not a Catholic. [Or: “I haven’t been to Mass for 20 years.”] I’m talking about the pope. I don’t want the pope in my bedroom.”
Me: “I don’t think the pope wants to be in your bedroom—”
Him: “Why can’t the Catholic Church just let people make up their own minds about sex?”
The point, then, is
they don’t like the fact the Church teaches that sex belongs in a certain place (in a life-long marriage), comes with responsibilities (not just pleasures), and is oriented toward both unitive and procreative ends (again, not just momentary pleasures separate from marriage).
I’ve also found that some people like to criticize Catholics for having too many kids and lambast the Church for making sex a “dirty” topic and “unnatural” thing.
What becomes clear very quickly is the lack of knowledge about what the Church actually teaches (no surprise, that) and an equally sad lack of knowledge about the nature and meaning of sex.
Longtime readers will forgive me, I trust, if I refer again to Frank Sheed’s wonderful quip, at the start of a chapter in his 1953 book
Society and Sanity:
“The typical modern man practically never thinks about sex.” As Sheed explains, in words even more true today than they were six decades ago:
He dreams of it, of course, by day and by night; he craves for it; he pictures it, is stimulated or depressed by it, drools over it. But this frothing, steaming activity is not thinking. Drooling is not thinking, picturing is not thinking, craving is not thinking, dreaming is not thinking. Thinking means bringing the power of the mind to bear: thinking about sex means striving to see sex in its innermost reality and in the function it is meant to serve.
The fact is simply this:
the dominant culture in the West is obsessed with sex — that is, sexual attractions and acts that have little or nothing to do with authentic love, marriage, procreation, the common good, and eternal life.
And it has been for decades, during which time the Church has often been forced into a defensive stance, one that is sometimes interpreted as simply saying, “No, no, no!” (For a decidedly non-Catholic but frank history of the Sixties, the Sexual Revolution, and the culture wars, see Andrew Hartman’s 2015 book
A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, from University of Chicago Press.)
In fairness, there has been much to say “No!” to: the contraceptive mentality, the scourge of abortion, the steady drop in both marriages and births, the rise and acceptance of divorce, the mainstreaming of homosexuality, and, more recently, the wholesale embrace of gender ideology. And so this controversial comment, made by Pope Francis in 2013, makes some sense, at least initially and superficially:
We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.
[Which is not to say that it is not necessary to talk about what the Church teaches when it is clear! On the contrary, because what she clearly teaches is so often ignored, or even worse, not really known at all, not even by Catholics, it becomes necessary to reiterate such teachings as often as necessary. (Not however in the way Bergoglio chose to reiterate much of orthodox Church teaching on marriage and the family in AL - which was simply to provide the extra-thick icing and sugarcoating for the poison pill of Chapter 8. That was a sham - how dishonest it is to reiterate such teachings just before undermining the foundation of sacramental discipline that underlies them.)]
As I wrote at the time, the Pontiff’s remark could have benefitted from both clarity and context. But, as we have learned since, providing clarity and context is not usually a concern of the Holy Father, especially in interviews and off-the-cuff statements. Regardless, theologian Massimo Faggioli
[the infamous 'Maximum Beans', whose beans - and brain - aren't exactly where they ought to be] who teaches at Villanova University, finds that 2013 comment to be of some importance in light of the upcoming 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. In an article posted earlier today on the Commonweal site, Faggioli writes:
The preparations to mark this anniversary suggest we will see yet more signs of tension in how different Catholics (culturally and geographically) understand Catholicism. Based on the program they released at their November gathering in Baltimore, for example, the U.S. bishops are far more excited about celebrating the anniversary of Humanae Vitae than their counterparts in the rest of the world, who seem to be looking at marriage and family with a different kind of focus. And this “enthusiasm gap” is reflective of more than just the present moment; it suggests continuation of the skirmishes within the Church that have persisted through Francis’s papacy. It began within a few months of Francis’s election, with his decision to pull back on the obsessive emphasis on sexuality.
What, then, is involved in the U.S. bishops’ “obsessive” emphasis on sexuality? The USCCB page states:
“The papal encyclical, Humanae vitae (HV) written by Blessed Pope Paul VI in 1968, provides beautiful and clear teaching about God’s plan for married love and the transmission of life.” There will be conferences and talks on family life, marriage, the “feminine genius”, and natural family planning.
The attentive Catholic will note, of course, that
Humanae Vitae was written on the topic of “the regulation of birth” and that its opening sentence states: “The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator.” In other words, it all seems to follow rather logically and, yes, naturally.
So what, exactly, is the source of Faggioli’s apparent frustration? In sum, he is annoyed by the “culture-war approach” he finds among certain Catholics (he highlights George Weigel’s November 2017 article “What’s changed since ‘Humanae Vitae’?”) who are critical or wary of a series of lectures being given at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Faggioli offers this rather smirking take:
What’s really going on in Rome is a pluralistic and intellectually diverse engagement with Humanae Vitae; in addition to the program organized by the Gregorian, there was also the conference at the Angelicum last September. Meanwhile, the U.S. bishops have a series of events clearly focused on “natural family planning.”
And then this, which gets to the heart of the matter:
“The second symptom of impoverishment is the tendency to reduce understanding of a particularly sensitive papal teaching and its reception to a particular cultural and geographic point of view, and then universalize it.”
On one hand, it’s reasonable and important to consider how Humanae Vitae has been received in different countries and cultures. But it’s also worth noting the elephant in the room:
the Sexual Revolution and the incredible pressure put on Paul VI following Vatican II to change Church teaching about artificial contraceptives did not take place in, or come from, Third World countries. This was, quite simply, a Western/First World issue — which has, of course, now spread throughout the world as various Western countries and institutions have worked to promote the culture of death so carefully described and so rightly denounced by St. John Paul II.
On cue, as it were, there is now a detailed report by Diane Montagna of LifeSiteNews.com about a December 14th lecture delivered at Pontifical Gregorian University — yes, as part of the above-mentioned lectures — by Italian moral theologian Fr. Maurizio Chiodi, who is reported to have
spoken approvingly of “circumstances — I refer to Amoris Laetitia, Chapter 8 — that precisely for the sake of responsibility, require contraception.”
There is much to digest, but I will just focus here on these remarks, as reported by Montagna:
Through His Paschal Mystery, Fr. Chiodi said, “Jesus … opens to the believer the possibility of acting responsibly, that is, a way of acting that responds to grace, passing through the travails of history and of evil.”
“Within this perspective,” Chiodi argued, “moral norms are not reducible to rational objectivity but belong to human life understood as a story of salvation and grace. The norms conserve the good and instruct in the way of good. But they are historical.”
This (and several other statements in the report) bring to mind warnings found in St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor, as when he states:
In their desire, however, to keep the moral life in a Christian context, certain moral theologians have introduced a sharp distinction, contrary to Catholic doctrine, between an ethical order, which would be human in origin and of value for this world alone, and an order of salvation, for which only certain intentions and interior attitudes regarding God and neighbour would be significant.
This has then led to an actual denial that there exists, in Divine Revelation, a specific and determined moral content, universally valid and permanent. The word of God would be limited to proposing an exhortation, a generic paraenesis, which the autonomous reason alone would then have the task of completing with normative directives which are truly “objective”, that is, adapted to the concrete historical situation.
Naturally, an autonomy conceived in this way also involves the denial of a specific doctrinal competence on the part of the Church and her Magisterium with regard to particular moral norms which deal with the so-called “human good”. Such norms would not be part of the proper content of Revelation, and would not in themselves be relevant for salvation. No one can fail to see that such an interpretation of the autonomy of human reason involves positions incompatible with Catholic teaching.
Thus we come full circle, again, back to
essential points in Amoris Laetitia and Veritatis Splendor, which, in my opinion, cannot be easily reconciled, if at all (as I’ve discussed before, in this November 2016 essay).
There seems little doubt, at this point, that 2018 is going to witness yet another great clash over Paul VI’s encyclical — arguably the most contested and disputed papal text in history.
Those who have studied the writings of Karol Wajtyla/John Paul II will be able to show that, in fact, being deeply concerned about abortion, the contraceptive mentality, and related matters is not, in the end, a matter of being “obsessed with sex,” but of being obsessed with life. (“In marriage sex loses none of its strength,” wrote Sheed, “but it serves life.”) And that this focus is rooted in divine truth — objective, unchanging truth — about the nature of man, as
Gaudium et spes stated:
Hence when there is question of harmonizing conjugal love with the responsible transmission of life, the moral aspects of any procedure does not depend solely on sincere intentions or on an evaluation of motives, but must be determined by objective standards.* These, based on the nature of the human person and his acts, preserve the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love. (par 51)
*[This is, of course, the polar opposite of the very subjective 'discernment' process advocated by Bergoglio in AL which is pre-loaded already in favor of 'discerning' whatever the sinning couple think is 'good', i.e., acceptable, for them. It would be amazing how Bergoglio and all his fellow paladins of that satanic 'spirit of Vatican II' choose to ignore anything Vatican II says that does not conform to their 'spirit' - except that if Bergoglio himself chooses to do this selective acknowledgment with Jesus's words no less, then who can he not be selective with?]
Finally, at risk of stating what should be obvious:
Gaudium et spes is not an “American” document and St. John Paul II was not an “American” citizen. I suggest that if Faggioli and friends wish to undermine or attack the thinking of the great pontiff, they do so openly and without hiding behind their anti-American rhetoric and passive-aggressive sophistry.
I really think that the best way to deal with dishonest intellectual airheads like Maximum Beans is simply to ignore their shoddy writings and absurd non-arguments... Same goes for all those who have been squandering computer time seeking to respond to self-proclaimed Bergoglio defense attorney Stephen Walford whose only qualification for writing the blather that he does is that he is free to write whatever he pleases, no matter how big a fool he makes of himself.
Comments on Fr. Chiodi’s
're-reading of 'Humanae Vitae'
by Josef Seifert
January 9, 2018
Editor’s Note:
The following text is a statement written by Professor Josef Seifert, a famous Austrian philosopher and co-founder of the International Academy of Philosophy (IAP). He kindly sent it to us for publication.
Professor Father Maurizio Chiodi delivered last Dec. 14, 2017, at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, a speech entitled “Re-reading Humanae Vitae (1968) in light of Amoris Laetitia (2016)”.
He is a new member of PAV, the Pontifical Academy for Life, founded by Pope John Paul II in order to explain and defend the truths the Church teaches about human life in Humanae Vitae and other documents.
Nonetheless, Chiodi does not only openly reject a central moral teaching of the Church on contraception, admirably stated in Humanae Vitae, namely that a wonderful and deep link exists between the conjugal loving union and procreation, such that any single contraceptive act that separates the unitive from the procreative meaning of the conjugal act is intrinsically wrong in any situation. Above and beyond his denial of this teaching, Chiodi asserts that contraception is even morally mandatory under certain circumstances. According to him, responsible parenthood can oblige a married couple to use artificial birth control.
This suggests an answer Fr. Chiodi gives to two of the famous five dubia of the four Cardinals. Chiodi’s implicit answer may be formulated thus: “Indeed, there are no human actions that are intrinsically wrong under all circumstances”.
Chiodi invokes Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation on the family, Amoris Laetitia, as a new model and paradigm for moral theology that eliminates the notion (solemnly and magisterially laid down in Humanae Vitae, Familiaris Consortio, and Veritatis Splendor) that contraception is an intrinsically evil human act that is wrong anywhere and at any time.
Chiodi adds, in radical and direct contradiction to the teaching of the Magisterium of the Church in Humanae Vitae, that there are “circumstances — I refer to Amoris Laetitia, Chapter 8 — that precisely for the sake of responsibility, require contraception.” When “natural methods are impossible or unfeasible, other forms of responsibility need to be found,” Fr. Chiodi argued.
Chiodi’s position constitutes an unequivocal defense of the consequentialist and proportionalist ethics that attacked Humanae Vitae from the first day of its publication on, and not only took issue with its teaching that contraception is intrinsically wrong, but claimed that there are no intrinsically evil acts at all; and that any human action is determined in its moral character solely by the proportion between its good and bad effects. This opinion was clearly and unambiguously refuted and rejected by Veritatis Splendor.
Chiodi likewise proposes more general philosophical and ethical positions that are profoundly erroneous and totally destructive not only of the moral teaching of the Catholic Church, but also of the essence of morality, and in fact, of any truth and any Church Teaching: namely 1) a historical relativism, 2) a consensus theory of truth, and 3) situation ethics.
Saying that the norms of natural law “conserve the good and instruct in the way of good, but they are historical“, Chiodi denies the perennial truth and validity of the norms that tell us that contraception and many other acts are intrinsically wrong, in a way that is not relative to, and dependent on, historically changing opinions, as if Humanae Vitae could have been true in 1968 but would no longer be so in 2018.
Besides this, Chiodi, while not directly claiming it, still strongly suggests that the fact that a large percentage of Catholic spouses practice contraception and do not accept the norms justifies silence about them, or even proves that these norms are no longer valid, as if majority consensus determined the truth.[1]
In the same way, he could claim that we are justified no longer to speak of the first commandment to love God above everything else, or even that this norm is no longer valid because a majority of Catholics do not fulfill it, or that the commandment that forbids to give false witness against one’s neighbor is not valid any longer because most people lie and calumniate others.
Claiming that some “circumstances — I refer to Amoris Laetitia, Chapter 8 — precisely for the sake of responsibility, require contraception” (Chiodi, ibid.), Chiodi denies in fact directly the intrinsic wrongness of contraception magisterially taught by Paul VI and his predecessors and successors, and makes what is morally good or bad in the transmission of human life entirely dependent on concrete situations.
Drawing out the lines of such a purely teleological or consequentialist proportionalist ethics of contraception, Chiodi suggests that quite in general no intrinsically wrong acts exist and that the moral quality of a human action can never be determined universally “by a general rule,” but depends on a proportion between good and bad consequences of human actions in concrete situations.
Understood in this general way, the situation ethics Fr. Chiodi defends would also deny the intrinsic wrongness of abortion and euthanasia, and of many other acts listed in Veritatis Splendor as acts that are morally wrong under all circumstances and in all situations.
It is worth noting that this opinion has nothing to do with blindness of conscience, lack of ethical knowledge, or personal imputability invoked so often by Rocco Buttiglione in the present debate. No, Chiodi implies an entirely objective “duty to contracept” in certain situations.
Thus the lecture of Father Chiodi contains, besides his open rejection of Church Teaching on contraception in Humanae Vitae, disastrous general philosophical errors that have been magisterially and forcefully rejected by Pope John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor.
One can only hope that Pope Francis, Archbishop Paglia, and the large majority of members of PAV will ask Father Chiodi to revoke these grave errors, or to resign immediately his membership in this illustrious Academy, whose founder and spiritual Father Pope John Paul II unambiguously and consistently fought against precisely these same errors that Father Chiodi now proposes, and condemned them in a definitive way. [Abandon hope - if you think any of the above will happen!]
Moreover, Saint John Paul II founded the PAV precisely in order that it explain and defend these truths Chiodi denies. (As, prior to its reform through Pope Francis in 2016, an ordinary, life-long member of PAV, who had to take an oath never to deny these truths, I could only feel profound sadness over this betrayal of the PAV, especially dear to the heart of John Paul II, if such views as Chiodi’s are not retracted by himself, by the PAV, or by Pope Francis).
Ethical truth and the untruth of this proportionalism are not only subject of Catholic faith, however, but can be recognized by human reason as well.[2] They have been forcefully defended by the great pagan philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Cicero and are being defended by members of other religions, some of whom are members of the new John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family that continues, without any ambiguities, its service to the great founding truths and goals of PAV.
Prof. Dr. habil. Dr. h.c. Josef Seifert, President
John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family
NOTES:
[1] I rely here on the summary of the talk in LifeSite: “While in the 50s and 60s was an urgent for believers, now the great majority of even believing married couples live as though the norm doesn’t exist,” he said.
“Officially and objectively the norm has remained,” but “even many pastors” don’t talk about it, he said. “In public, in catechesis, and in preaching, they prefer not to talk about it” while “in personal encounters they maintain a very indulgent attitude when the issue is raised.” “And therefore,” he argued, “it’s significant that Amoris Laetitia speaks so little about it.”
[2] See Josef Seifert, “The Splendor of Truth and Intrinsically Immoral Acts I: A Philosophical Defense of the Rejection of Proportionalism and Consequentialism in Veritatis Splendor”. Studia Philosophiae Christianae UKSW 51 (2015) 2, pp. 27-67; “The Splendor of Truth and Intrinsically Immoral Acts II: A Philosophical Defense of the Rejection of Proportionalism and Consequentialism in Veritatis Splendor”. Studia Philosophiae Christianae UKSW 51 (2015) 3, pp. 7-37.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/01/2018 09:05]