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Four reasons to pray for our bishops this week

Sunday, November 11th, 2018

First, see 1 Cor 12:26 about hurting.  I maintain that when 95% of Catholics, to say nothing about other baptized persons, are hurting by reason of their sinful contraceptive lives, then 100%  of the body is really hurting because so many are not pulling their weight in the work of building up the Body of Christ.  That sinfulness makes it more difficult for priests, as well as everybody else, to be chaste.

Second, the bishops have not yet repudiated as horribly wrong what they or their predecessors wrote in their 1968 response to Humanae Vitae, namely their “Human Life in Our Day.”  It contains a section titled “Norms of Licit Theological Dissent.”  Obviously, if there can be dissent against the centuries of teaching against marital contraception, there can be dissent against the centuries of teaching against sodomy.  The acceptance of marital contraception is the acceptance of the idea that we modern men and women can take apart what God has put together in the marriage act and, by logical extension, everything else in the area of love, marriage and sexuality.  There is no such thing as licit dissent from Humanae Vitae or the teaching regarding sodomy.

Third, the bishops have failed to emphasize that God has built into the human sexual act its intrinsic meaning.  Humanae Vitae teaches that the contracepted marriage act is “intrinsically dishonest.”  That means there must be a marriage act that is intrinsically honest.  JPII introduced to Papal teaching the idea of the marriage act as a renewal of the marriage covenant.  I submit that this meaning can be summarized this way: “The human sexual act is intended by God to be, at least implicitly, a renewal of the marriage covenant, for better and for worse including the imagined worse of possible pregnancy.”  First, only a marriage act.  Second a renewal of the marriage covenant.

Fourth, we don’t need more abject apologies that stop there.  We need our bishops to reaffirm confidently and firmly that the priestly sex abuse Scandal clearly points up what happens when priests do not accept and live by what the Church teaches.  The disaster of the whole sexual revolution including the current huge out-of-wedlock pregnancy rate shows what happens when fertile-age people do not accept the biblical norm that the human sexual act ought to be exclusively a marriage act. 
 
“What God has put together let no one take apart.” It applies with equal force to the marriage act and to marriage itself. 

Pray for our bishops as they meet this week.

John F. Kippley

Posted in Humanae Vitae, Marriage Covenant, Scandal 2018 | Comments Off on Four reasons to pray for our bishops this week

Current Scandal and Humanae Vitae

Sunday, October 14th, 2018

Friends, I think that as a result of the current Scandal even you can better understand what Sheila and I have endured for 50 years of defending Humanae Vitae: 50 years of significant rejection! Immediately after Humanae Vitae, I wrote about the need to counter the efforts to rationalize, in the worst sense of that word, the acceptance of contraception.  I advocated that adequate Catholic theology would help “the [contraception-accepting] couple to realize that their solution of one evil to counteract another tends to provide the rationalization for adultery, fornication and every other violation of the sexual order of creation as well as just about every sin imaginable” (Covenant, Christ and Contraception, Alba House, 1970, p. 126).  At about the same time, Michael F. Valente’s book was published.  He took dissent to its logical limits and proclaimed a doctrine of subjectivity in which he accepted even bestiality.

I wrote in 1971 in Theological Studies that the principles of dissent against Catholic teaching regarding marital contraception were also principles of dissent against every other aspect of sexual morality.  No one ever criticized me in public, but the book and the article did little or nothing to stop or slow the dissenter’s bandwagon.  In 1977 the Catholic Theological Society of America published a book that also accepted a truly radical subjectivity.  I can still remember that they would leave any teaching about adultery to the sociologists.  This was the horrible situation in the Church when St. John Paul II began his papacy in 1978 and made the support of Humanae Vitae the principal teaching effort of the first ten years of his pontificate. 

My point is this: It was public knowledge among the theologically educated that the acceptance of unnatural forms of birth control was at least implicitly an acceptance of sodomy and bestiality and anything imaginable provided the parties were mutually agreed and were of legal age.   Even ten years of teaching by St. John Paul II seemed to have little effect. 

Now, thanks to the outrageous pride and sins of some of those with same-sex orientation, the cancer in the Church is being recognized and steps are being taken to heal it with the radiation of the truth as well as by the surgery of public exposure.  Yes, surgery sometimes can be very smelly, and the same is true at present within the Church.

Hang in there, my friends.  Keep praying for authentic renewal within the Church from top to bottom and for the conversion of sinners, as our Lady of Fatima asked us to pray, including those in high places.  This is a wonderful time in the Church. We cannot pray too much for the cleansing to be authentic and thorough.
John F. Kippley

Posted in Humanae Vitae, Scandal 2018 | Comments Off on Current Scandal and Humanae Vitae

The Scandal of 2018

Sunday, September 16th, 2018

I think the only appropriate reaction to the revelation of the sexual abuse scandal is sadness.  Sadness for Pope Francis.  Sadness for the Church. Sadness for all those who have been adversely affected by sins and coverups dating back even to the Sixties.

The John Jay Report showed that in 1960 and again in 1968-69 there was a big spike in the number of “first experience” by homosexual priests.  That is, as they saw the widespread acceptance of the Pill and the whole Sexual Revolution in 1960, they apparently concluded that the acceptance of anything and everything applied to them as well.  In 1968, they could rationalize that such behaviors had been authorized by the widespread rejection of Humanae Vitae and traditional morality right within the Church. This whole unhappy scene stems from the widespread dissent from Humanae Vitae.

Some will rightly argue that in the case of the priests using minors, that was not only a crime but a wrongful use of influence and power.  I agree, but I think it is quite possible for these guys to have rationalized that what they were doing power-wise was like parents who use influence to get their kids to eat their veggies.  I mean, if these guys really believed that sodomy is a good thing, it is very possible that they rationalized that they were just sharing something good.  Perverse?  Of course.  But that’s what happens when a person lets the idol of sex become the Principle of his or her decision-making.  In 1971, Theological Studies published my article, “Continued Dissent: Is It Responsible Loyalty?” in which I showed that the decision-making principles published by archdissenter Father Charles Curran could not say NO to spouse-swapping. I am not aware of any published criticism of that article, and no one criticized me personally.

What can we do?  What every Catholic needs to do is to heed the request of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima 101 years ago:  pray the rosary every day for world peace, for the conversion of Russia and for the conversion of sinners all throughout the world.  And we can add a special emphasis for all the conversions necessary at every level within the Church.

John F. Kippley

Posted in Morality, Scandal 2018, Spirituality | Comments Off on The Scandal of 2018

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