LifeSite News. In a frank interview with the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who heads the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and is increasingly being billed as America’s leading Catholic cleric, says the Church has failed to communicate its moral teachings in the area of sexuality. He says further that the fault lies with Church leaders.
“I’m
not afraid to admit that we have an internal catechetical challenge—a towering
one—in convincing our own people of the moral beauty and coherence of what we
teach. That’s a biggie,” said Dolan.
“We
have gotten gun-shy . . . in speaking with any amount of cogency on chastity
and sexual morality,” he added.
The
Church’s own failure to communicate its teachings on contraception has been one
of the leading tools used against it in its fight against Obama’s mandate, with
critics repeatedly pointing out that the majority of Catholic women are using
some form of contraception.
The
Cardinal told Taranto
that the problem arose in the “the mid- and late ‘60s, when the whole world
seemed to be caving in, and where Catholics in general got the impression that
what the Second Vatican Council taught, first and foremost, is that we should
be chums with the world, and that the best thing the church can do is become
more and more like everybody else.”
The
“flash point,” he said, was Humanae vitae, Pope Paul VI’s prophetic
1968 encyclical reiterating the Church’s opposition to contraception.
Humanae vitae “brought such a tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval
of the church, that I think most of us—and I’m using the first-person plural
intentionally, including myself—kind of subconsciously said, ‘Whoa. We’d better
never talk about that, because it’s just too hot to handle’,” said Dolan.
“We
forfeited the chance to be a coherent moral voice when it comes to one of the
more burning issues of the day,” he added.
For an expanded version of just how Humanae vitae in the Cardinal's words, “brought such a tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval of the church...see my third chapter. For now, LET"S HAVE THAT HOMILY!
Here you go!
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