In the United States, the 1960s marked the beginning of a breakdown in sexual mores and a rise in family disruption, joined with a culture of dissent as many tried to rationalize deviations from traditional morality. We witnessed a massive social experiment linked to genuine progress for which the Church was not prepared — discrimination against African-Americans and women was coming to an end, and Catholics were ever-increasingly undergoing assimilation into contemporary culture. As a result, Catholics began placing their spiritual lives in one compartment and their daily activities in the secular arena in another, commencing to treat their Catholic faith as an entirely private matter, open to a “pick-and-choose” approach to doctrine. Many theologians, religious educators and clergy succumbed to the same inducement. So it was hard for the doctrinal teaching of Vatican II to be heard; what did get through was often not the true council, but a “spirit” of Vatican II.
The Devil’s goal is to seduce, to lead people away from faithful obedience to God. All that he does with regard to human beings is willfully evil, in order that he might bring them spiritual, supernatural, eternal death. I remind the reader of Paul VI’s insight (quoted in Chapter 1): “This matter of the Devil and of the influence he can exert on individuals as well as on communities, entire societies or events, is a very important chapter of Catholic doctrine which should be studied again, although it is given little attention today….” I hope to explain here that it was the sophistry of neomodernists theologians coupled with bishops sympathetic to their rebellion against the magisterium which influenced most Catholics’ views and practices regarding marriage and family in the face of the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. In reading several of the more notable examples of this deceptive reasoning, remember that in Catholic teaching the Tempter is a “consummate deceiver” whose real designs are concealed behind what may seem to be divinely inspired, but are in reality instigated by him.
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