“I think there are a lot of clever people in the world who have
values and a plan or program different from the Gospel who very actively trying to promote a different worldview.
I think if we just look at basic causes…”
One of his causes he sees as
“….the
contraceptive birth control pill. It separated procreation from love as a
possibility in the sexual act. Once you separate procreation from the other
aspects of sexual encounter, all kinds of things happen. The nature of the
family changes. What it means to be a father and what it means to be a mother
changes. It is what has opened so much of the Western world to much more
premarital sex — much more divorce, homosexual marriage, transgenderism that we
are talking about these days. Those changes all have a root I think in a
practical sense in the contraceptive pill. It
also has its root in the intellectual trends that have been a part of our culture
— since the 1930s really….”
At last, I can read in the social media a devout
Churchman who puts his finger on exactly the force Paul VI had in mind when, at
the close of Vatican II, he remarked that Christianity, the religion of
God-Incarnate, had encountered the religion of man-made God, Chaput’s “trends
that have been a part of our culture.” On June 29, 1972, Paul delivered an
assessment of the state of the Church. As I noted in my book, Cardinal Silvio
Oddi recalled it, the Holy Father told a congregation:
We
have the impression that through some cracks in the wall the smoke of Satan has
entered the temple of God: it is doubt, uncertainty, questioning,
dissatisfaction, confrontation. And how did this come about? We will confide to
you the thought that may be, we ourselves admit in free discussion, that may be
unfounded, and that is that there has been a power, an adversary power. Let us
call him by his name: the devil. We thought that after the Council a day of
sunshine would have dawned for the history of the Church. What dawned instead
was a day of clouds and storms, of darkness, of searching and uncertainties.
The Pope then reminded his listeners of references
in Scripture and the Mass to the aggressive and oppressive “power of darkness,”
adding:
So
we know that this dark disturbing being exists and that he is still at work
with his treacherous cunning; he is the hidden enemy who sows errors and
misfortunes in human history. It is worth recalling the revealing Gospel
parable of the good seed and the cockle, for it synthesizes and explains the
lack of logic that seems to preside over our contradictory experiences:
"An enemy has done this." He is "a murderer from the beginning .
. . and the father of lies,"[Jn 8:44] as Christ defines him. He undermines
man's moral equilibrium with his sophistry. He is the malign, clever seducer
who knows how to make his way into us through the senses, the imagination and
the libido, through utopian logic, or through disordered social contacts in the
give and take of our activities, so that he can bring about in us deviations
that are all the more harmful because they seem to conform to our physical or
mental makeup, or to our profound, instinctive aspirations.
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.
Archbisop Chaput’s new book gives the matter the
attention it requires. Read it.
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