Fr. Edward Oakes is a well regarded writer and seminary theology professor. The most recent issue of First Things published a letter from him, commenting on a feature written by Mary Eberstadt, on the encyclical Humanae Vitae. Of course the encyclical affirmed traditional Catholic teaching on contraception and the life issues and Eberstadt pointed to the failure to accept this teaching as a prime cause of our moral and social problems today.
Eberstadt's article should be available to non-subscriber's if you do a search here - FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life
Oakes' letter is in the most recent issue of First Things and current issues are not available online to non-subscribers (It will be available online when the February issue is current and the January issue is archived).
We are printing Oakes entire letter below. It is instructive about the bizarre approach some Catholic moral theologians took in the 1970's when it came to sexual ethics. As he points out, a publication of the Catholic Theological Society of America (1977) couldn't even bring itself to condemn bestiality!
I would like to add two small codicils to Mary Eberstadt’s magnificent jeremiad. I graduated from high school in June 1966 and entered the Society of Jesus in September of that same year. (I belonged to the last class in my province in which a majority of us entered right out of high school.) We, of course, were well aware that Paul VI would soon rule on the matter of contraception, but most of our energies were caught up in studying the documents of Vatican II, just out in Walter Abbott’s translation.
Even in my adolescent naivete back then, a sentence in Gaudium et Spes caught my eye: “Relying on these principles [of conjugal chastity and openness to children], sons of the Church may not undertake methods of regulating procreation which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law.”
Since that sentence carried a footnote citing Pius XI’s encyclical of 1910 Casti Connubii condemning artificial contraception, I could not understand the keyed-up expectations that Paul VI would overrule an ecumenical council. When I mentioned this discrepancy to my novice master, he said that the papal commission looking into the matter was convened solely to investigate whether the ovulation-regulating Pill was artificial (and thus banned) or could be seen on the order of diet and exercise that might make a woman’s fertility cycle more predictable, within the bounds of nature.
When the commission by a large majority voted in favor of the Pill, however, it did not do so on the basis of its brief from the pope. Rather, by approving of the Pill, it also went on to advocate the approval of all forms of artificial contraception. In other words, the members implicitly agreed that the Pill was artificial (in the technical sense, which was their mandate to determine), and therefore, since they wanted to approve it, they had to approve all other artificial methods as well. But such methods were already forbidden—not just by Popes Pius XI and XII but also by the liberals’ favorite Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes. As that document said in the next sentence: “Everyone should be persuaded that human life and the task of transmitting it are not realities bound up with this world alone. Hence they cannot be measured or perceived only in terms of it, but always have a bearing on the eternal destiny of man.”
This brings me to my second codicil: Dissent against the encyclical, above all in Catholic circles, was clearly premised on the commission’s view that the connection between sex and procreation ought to be, as it were, decoupled. Thus, once dissent had become institutionalized in chanceries and seminaries, all the props that promoted chastity (conjugal and clerical) collapsed, as Eberstadt devastatingly depicts. The best sign of that severance was, of course, the notorious Report on Human Sexuality, commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America, which could not even bring itself to condemn bestiality.
Eberstadt is obviously an aficionado of the darker shades of humor, so I offer her this twisted tidbit from the Report: “Sexual relations with animals is another form of behavior that is severely punished by some societies and commonly practiced or tolerated by others.” In contrast, so the Report laments, our hidebound Catholic Church comes down hard on such “commonly tolerated” practices: “Particularly with regard to sexuality, it was believed that there is a meaning intrinsic to the very nature of the act itself—a meaning that is absolutely unchangeable and in no way modifiable by extenuating circumstances of special context. Thus, masturbation, any premarital sexual pleasure, adultery, fornication, homosexuality, sodomy, and bestiality were considered intrinsically evil acts, seriously immoral, and under no circumstances justifiable.” But we have all grown out of such rigidities, these mandarins of the CTSA inform us: “Biblical, historical, and empirical evidence raise serious questions regarding such an approach.”
When the final history of the sex-abuse crisis finally comes to be written, the historian will have to devote at least one chapter to the role of mainstream theologians in this bizarre display of relativism and perhaps another chapter to how they used their expertise to browbeat bishops into taking a therapeutic, rather than moral and disciplinary, approach to wayward priests. To date—one is not surprised to learn—the members of the CTSA have yet to acknowledge their role in contributing to the malaise so vividly and instructively described by Eberstadt.
Edward T. Oakes, S.J.
Mundelein Seminary
Mundelein, Illinois
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