“[O]ften men, deceived by the Evil One, have become vain in their reasonings and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, serving the creature rather than the Creator. […]By the proclamation of the Gospel… [the Church] gives [non-Christians]the dispositions necessary for baptism, snatches them from the slavery of error and of idols and incorporates them in Christ…” -Lumen gentium, 16-17.
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.
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