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