{"id":60,"date":"2008-08-04T08:55:28","date_gmt":"2008-08-04T08:55:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/08\/humanae-vitaethe-pill-pedophil.html"},"modified":"2008-08-04T08:55:28","modified_gmt":"2008-08-04T08:55:28","slug":"humanae-vitaethe-pill-pedophil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/08\/humanae-vitaethe-pill-pedophil.html","title":{"rendered":"“Humanae Vitae”–The Pill, pedophile priests, and the real story"},"content":{"rendered":"

An earlier post on the 40th anniversay of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on contraception and procreation, “Humanae Vitae,”<\/a> referred to various doom-and-gloom scenarios that champions of the teaching attributed to our wayward rejection of the encyclical’s reasoning and conclusions.
\nAmong those I did not see until later were claims that the widespread rejection of the pope’s comprehensive ban on artificial (as opposed to “natural”) contraception is that it is one of the causes of pedophilia in the priesthood and the sexual abuse scandal.
\nOver at “The Catholic Thing,”<\/a> Michael Novak writes:<\/p>\n

“In the long years after 1968, many abuses took root in the church. Most of the Catholic West drifted away from Humanae Vitae. In all these years, I recall hearing only one sermon that presented a succinct argument against the corrosive effects of contraception, and offered a special vision of Catholic marital life. Worse, far worse, many Catholic priests habituated themselves to rarely or never speaking of self-mastery. Most became reluctant to talk about sexuality at all, let alone chastity. In this darkness, a few granted themselves the same leniency their silence granted lay persons. A few brought intense public shame on the Church.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(I assume he is talking about the Father Geoghan types rather than the Cardinal Law types.)
\nOver in the Diocese of Madison, Bishop Robert Morlino gave a talk<\/a> in which he made the connection even more explicit, telling the diocesan staff:<\/p>\n

…”Once bishops, priests, and others decided that they could use conscience to excuse them from obedience to the truth, as taught by the Church – when bishops and priests started giving conscience the authority to determine moral truth, rather than to obey the truth as taught by the Church, it’s not surprising that [during those years] some priests and some bishops started to follow their own conscience in terms of sexual misconduct.”
\n“The rejection of the Natural Law and reason, in the rejection of Humanae Vitae because of a misunderstood notion of conscience, has led to all of these terrible consequences (mentioned above) and on top of all of it too, the sexual misconduct scandal with some priests.”
\n“That is where the disobedience to Humanae Vitae has led us; it’s a pretty grim picture and it’s going to be a long time before we recover from it,” the bishop added.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his “Beliefs” column<\/a> last weekend, Peter Steinfels went a long way toward compensating for the puzzling John Allen op-ed a week earlier (to date the Gray Lady’s only significant piece on the issue). In the piece, Steinfels is both enlightening about what was and is at stake, and incisive in getting to the heart of the matter:<\/p>\n

It was not, for example, an analysis and prescient warning about the sexual revolution. Only a few sentences mentioned what was already obvious by 1968: effective and easily available contraception reduced the shame and suffering (“incentives to keep the moral law” was the papal phrase) that violating sexual norms had traditionally entailed.
\nNor was “Humanae Vitae” simply an argument for openness to having children in marriage, although the encyclical certainly includes eloquent language about that. Nor was it a general argument that human sexual bonding should never be totally sundered from the procreative dimension that is its biological base and a natural outcome.
\nThe central point of “Humanae Vitae” was that each and every act of sexual intercourse had to be free of any deliberate effort to prevent conception. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An earlier post on the 40th anniversay of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on contraception and procreation, “Humanae Vitae,” referred to various doom-and-gloom scenarios that champions of the teaching attributed to our wayward rejection of the encyclical’s reasoning and conclusions. Among those I did not see until later were claims that the widespread rejection of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\n"Humanae Vitae"-The Pill, pedophile priests, and the real story - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/08\/humanae-vitaethe-pill-pedophil.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""Humanae Vitae"-The Pill, pedophile priests, and the real story - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An earlier post on the 40th anniversay of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on contraception and procreation, “Humanae Vitae,” referred to various doom-and-gloom scenarios that champions of the teaching attributed to our wayward rejection of the encyclical’s reasoning and conclusions. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}