Not exactly breaking news, but I am not sure all Catholics are aware of this. A lot of time has been spent trying to, not so much cover it up, but just to leave it out of historical accounts of contraception and the Church when the subject is discussed:
Excerpted from: Facing up to Spiritual Abuse: Sean Fagan S.M.. Association of Catholic Priests (I bolded certain parts to call attention to them in the above quoted material)
And, yes, I did post this link in another thread, but it's a very lengthy article that addresses a ton of different subjects with the broad overview of spiritual abuse, and I doubt most people will read it all. So, I wanted to do a thread where we could specifically discuss the six paragraphs about contraception I quoted above (And try to encourage people to read them)- this is the contraception thread.
"Fr Zalba, do you really believe God has carried out all your orders?" is classic. Can you imagine being a fly on the wall at that meeting?
As a reminder, our sub-forum's statement of purpose specifically states that:
"This area allows for what would normally be considered by Rome dissent from the teachings the Magisterium of the Catholic Church."
So, we can do this here.
Both sex abuse and spiritual abuse are really abuses of power and authority. An interesting indication of this is an incident from the discussions of the special commission set up by Pope John XXIII to study the question of birth control. The majority of its members at the start supported traditional Church teaching against artificial contraception. But they changed their minds in the course of their meetings, and in the end the almost unanimous conclusion was that contraception is not intrinsically evil. The Spanish theologian Fr Zalba could not accept this, and he burst out impatiently: ‘What becomes of the millions we have sent to hell if this teaching is not true?’ Courteously Patty Crawler (who with her husband was one of the first lay people invited to the committee) asked him: ‘Fr Zalba, do you really believe God has carried out all your orders?’
But she was up against a Church convinced that it had all the answers even before hearing the questions or looking at the facts. A Church that insisted so much on authority had no regard for the authority of the facts. The three thousand letters from Catholic married couples in eighteen countries describing their experience were totally ignored by Pope John’s successor, as was the recommendation of the special papal commission set up to study the case. The Vatican has not allowed this documentation to be published.
The four theologians holding on to the traditional teaching had to admit that they had no arguments to prove the majority wrong, except that to change the teaching would damage the authority of the Church. And so the encyclical Humanae Vitae came to be written and published.
Insisting on authority conveniently forgets the many dreadful things that were proclaimed for centuries as the ‘teaching of the Church,’ but which nobody could accept today. To take an example from living memory: Pius XI in an encyclical on Christian education (with the same level of authority as Humanae Vitae) solemnly declared: ‘co-education is against all Catholic principles. It is erroneous and pernicious, and is often based on a naturalism which denies original sin … Nature itself, which makes the two sexes different in organism, inclinations and attitudes, provides no argument for mixing them promiscuously, much less educating them together.’
Catholics naturally wonder how the thirty-seven-year interval between the two encyclicals (1931, 1968) allows us to treat one as a museum piece quietly forgotten and the other as a serious obligation in conscience. Is this not a further reminder that all doctrinal statements, like the Bible itself, are historically and culturally conditioned? No statement from the past is set in stone, and it would be difficult to prove that the Church never made a mistake. We are a mixture of saint and sinner, and this applies to the Church as institution as much as to its members individually.
Excerpted from: Facing up to Spiritual Abuse: Sean Fagan S.M.. Association of Catholic Priests (I bolded certain parts to call attention to them in the above quoted material)
And, yes, I did post this link in another thread, but it's a very lengthy article that addresses a ton of different subjects with the broad overview of spiritual abuse, and I doubt most people will read it all. So, I wanted to do a thread where we could specifically discuss the six paragraphs about contraception I quoted above (And try to encourage people to read them)- this is the contraception thread.
"Fr Zalba, do you really believe God has carried out all your orders?" is classic. Can you imagine being a fly on the wall at that meeting?
As a reminder, our sub-forum's statement of purpose specifically states that:
"This area allows for what would normally be considered by Rome dissent from the teachings the Magisterium of the Catholic Church."
So, we can do this here.
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