Where’s the Holy Spirit in the Contraception Debate?

I just came across this letter that I wrote in response to “Pew View: Doctrine + Reality = Disconnect ± Hypocrisy,” a Guest Commentary by James P. Walsh and “Both sides are wrong” a letter to the editor by Woody Nedom in the March 16, 2012 issue of The Valley Catholic, the San Jose, CA, diocesan newspaper. I still find it appalling that the bishop's newspaper would print articles and letters strongly critical of Church doctrine on contraception and other moral issues.  See also a related post I wrote  titled Contraception and the Average Catholic, which  describes my experiences with how a "moral" theologian  taught at the bishop's Institute for Leadership in Ministry against the Church's prohibition of contraception and other doctrines.



James Walsh’s Guest Commentary in The Valley Catholic is an angry stew of an article, mixing praise for John Rock as the inventor of The Pill and of in vitro fertilization with chunks of criticisms of Catholic Church doctrines, which he labels as disconnected with reality, backward, and hypocritical. In the same issue of The Valley Catholic, the first letter, by Woody Nedom, in the "Letters to the Editor" section refers to the Catholic bishops’ “irrational opposition to birth control” …. “a doctrine that should no longer exist and that harms the credibility of the Church.”

“What is such an article doing in a diocesan Catholic newspaper? And “Why is such a letter prominently featured in the same issue?” are questions that a devout Catholic might well ask. So I’m asking. [It won't surprise you that I never got an answer.]

Left: John Rock, the only Catholic doctor who signed a petition to legalize birth control in 1931 [From the the Wikipedia article on John Rock.]

Walsh’s article is heavily seasoned with his beliefs that Church doctrines victimize women, minorities and the poor. Without citing any proofs, he also states that the same doctrines somehow benefit old males and those perverted priests who have preyed on the young.  It appears as if he throws in a completely off-topic mention of the sex abuse scandal with an aside about the old male hierarchy to try to make his stew more palatable to the like-minded.

Also, oddly enough, Walsh throws in a blurb about the 2008 book, The Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Fertility Revolution, even though book reviews are not usually published about books that have been out for four years.

Rock is no hero. Rock, along with many others, wanted the Church to join with the Protestant denominations who abandoned the universal Christian condemnation of contraception starting in 1932. Walsh and Nedom are in the camp that believes that Pope Paul VI’s restatement of the ban on contraception in Humanae Vitae was due to that pope’s “weakness and timidity.”

None of those who despise Humanae Vitae seem to be able to glimpse the evident work of the Holy Spirit in how that so-called weak and timid Pope was able to stand up against the so-called “experts” and reaffirm the Church’s traditional teaching on this matter. Part of what seems to be lacking in opponents of that document is Faith in the discernment of the Church’s Magisterium.  Also lacking is an understanding that Church doctrine is not defined by majority vote.

In spite of the spiteful contrary claims, the Pope prophetically predicted the damage to the status of women, to the family, and to society that would result if birth control became the norm. If you haven’t read Humanae Vitae yet, read it. You might just be amazed at how true his predictions were about the harm that would come if contraception was fully accepted.


Fortuitously behind the scenes, and far away from the Vatican, by the grace of God, a Polish Archbishop and doctor of philosophy had been teaching for years a reasoned defense for the Church’s position against contraception, that was published as Love and Responsibility. . The young Archbishop Karol Wojtyla was one of the experts consulted by Paul VI before the pope released the encyclical.  The arguments of the Krakow archibishop were not used in full in the encyclical, which author George Weigel says is a large part of the reason why the encyclical was not received with more acceptance.

When Wojtyla became Pope, he presented his philosophy of marital love in a series of talks to papal audiences that has become collected under the title Theology of the Body.

I can’t begin to address all the misinformation about how contraception reduces the “need” for abortions. But I remember speaking in 1989 with a high school counselor who provided birth control information to her students, who frankly admitted that out of wedlock births and abortions have skyrocketed since education about contraception was made widely available. It is completely unnatural and has devastating consequences to teach that the intimacy that belongs in marriage should be encouraged inside and outside of marriage, for the pleasure alone.

The natural outcome of intimacy between a man and a woman is conception. When a pregnancy results, which it often does, no matter what form of contraception is used, the conception of the child is seen as a failure. The woman who conceives is often blamed and abandoned, and the child who is conceived is often killed.

At the time when The Pill was being touted as “natural birth control,” no one, including the experts knew how The Pill works. Now it is agreed that The Pill uses hormones that put the woman’s body into a state of false pregnancy for year after year and inhibit ovulation. Doctors know now that The Pill has serious consquences for women's health, with highly increased risk of breast cancer. They also have discovered that The Pill also is an abortifacient.

Eggs often do get released, and conception often does occur, but The Pill makes the lining of the womb inhospitable. Metaphorically speaking, the conceived child then dies because there is no room for him in his mother’s womb.

Walsh notes that that his parish bulletin in 2011 listed 28 twins, a contrast to only one set of twins in his first Communion class, and sees in this explosion of twinning the result of the work of John Rock.  What Walsh doesn’t note is that the Catholic Church forbids in vitro fertilization.

Here are a few reasons why: In vitro fertilization starts with the use of pornography and masturbation to obtain the father’s sperm, continues with the use of dangerous doses of hormones administered to the woman to achieve the creation of multiple fertilized eggs (known as human beings to those of us who care). When any of the new lives that are conceived are found to be imperfect or superfluous, they are destroyed.  Those multiple sets of twins Walsh saw in his parish bulletin were most probably the survivors of what would often have been sextuplets if the doctors and the parents had allowed all of the “superfluous” children to live.

Walsh writes that Rock lived and died within Boston’s Irish Catholic Church, but as I read once in a New Yorker article, Rock left the Church when it didn’t accept his pitch that The Pill was a natural form of birth control. And Rock died in New Hampshire, not Boston.

"Heaven and Hell, Rome, all the Church stuff--that's for the solace of the multitude," Rock said. … "I was an ardent practicing Catholic for a long time, and I really believed it all then, you see." From “What the co-inventor of the Pill 
didn't know about menstruation 
can endanger women's health” March 10, 2000 
ANNALS OF MEDICINE
Who do you trust?

Margaret Sanger: Her Life in Her Words

Reed, Miriam, Ph.D. Margaret Sanger: Her Life in Her Words. Fort Lee: Barricade Books, 2003.

In the Introduction to Margaret Sanger: Her Life in Her Words, we find out that Margaret Sanger was a redhead, a "charismatic woman," daughter of a free-thinking father--a point which I think is very significant. The photo on the cover of the book shows her as a lovely apparently loving mother holding a smiling baby about a year old.

When Sanger was a child, the sixth and middle child of a total of eleven children, her father read and discussed the ideas of the most progressive thinkers, the radicals, of his day, feeding his family large doses of, among others . . . William Ingersoll, the atheist and early advocate of artificial contraception and women's rights."

"Hearing Margaret pray for 'our daily bread,'"her father hectored her, "Is God a baker?" He was a talker and "an improvident provider" more fond of espousing his ideas than earning a living. He also kept his tubercular wife pregnant with a total of eighteen pregnancies and eleven live births. He kept on impregnating her; even though she was ill in bed for ten years, she was pregnant every one of those years.

Her yearly rate of conception leads me to surmise that she wasn't breast feeding because breast feeding usually naturally spaces births. Margaret concluded that her mother's misery was due to a lack of birth control, but it seems to me that it was just as much due to her blowhard layabout father's lack of self control.

Very early in my childhood I associated large families with poverty, toil, drunkenness, cruelty to children, quarreling, fighting, debts, jails, and the Catholic Church.-- From Sanger's memoir Girlhood

From knowing the large families that worship with me at traditional Latin Masses, I associate large families with virtues such being able to live happily with fewer luxuries, interchange of a lot of love between the children, better moral upbringing, well-behaved children who are eager learners -- and the Catholic Church.

Sanger was a beauty, but wanted to be appreciated for her brains. At least in this area, I have to agree and say, "Good for her." At the end of the memoir quoted in the biography, Sanger wrote that she turned her thoughts away from the stage because the application to drama school asked for the measurements of her calves! "I turned my desires to more serious studies where brains, not legs, were to count."

Like Dorothy Day, who was born eighteen years after Sanger, Sanger was a big believer in socialism for a time. Like Sanger, Day  studied and practiced nursing and was friends the playwright, Eugene O'Neil. Sanger was also friends with Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle, which strongly influenced Day in her development of her own philosophy of how to help the poor.

When Sanger and her husband moved from the suburbs to NYC in 1911, and he stopped practicing architecture, she went to work as a nurse in the povery-ridden Lower East Side. Sanger attributed the hellish conditions of life among the poor to lack of birth control, and also to capitalism. Sanger cared a lot about the rights and health and happiness of poor women (but she spent her time hanging around with educated socialists and later with the upper crust of society, which might be a kind of Lady Bountiful way of life).

Sanger exhorted women to organize and to join the Socialist party, which alone out of all parties was working for the following:

• Absolute equality between men and women.
• Welfare (she didn't call it that) which would allow women to stay home with their children and thereby give the fathers some relief from having to support the family solely on the low wages that were available to them
• Support and education of children at least until they were 16
• The end of child labor

Even though Sanger was an habitual adulterer and often lied, the author refers to Sanger as having "a deep spiritual quality." The author also writes this about Sanger, that her demands for the benefit of women were specifically these: "Let women decide for herself if and when she is to have children. Let the coming of the children be spaced so that the mother has physical health, emotional strength, and sufficient funds to care for the child. Let every child be wanted."

In the moral theology class I'm taking, Father Bretzke says we should be able to summarize the main points of those who disagree with us on a matter under dispute. I would say the above are the main points that helped swayed the world and the world's churches away from prohibiting birth control towards fully advocating it in the 1930s.

Sanger's book refers to "the absurd state and federal Comstock laws, which since 1873 had made contraception advice and devices illegal and straightforward language pertaining to sexual matters legally obscene. ... Rushed through Congress in 'hot haste' just before its close in 1873, the federal Comstock law made it a crime to manufacture, sell, or send through the U.S. mails any obscene article, including any article that was intended to prevent conception, or any printed matter that offered information on preventing conception."

Margaret Sanger's advocacy of birth control was part of her socialism. in "What Every Girl Should Know" Sanger wrote, "Until capitalism is swept away, there is no hope ... [that girls will live a beautiful life ... that women can live in the family relation and have children without sacrificing every vestige of individual development. . . .Soon . . . women [will] rise in one big sisterhood to fight this capitalist society which compels a woman to serve as an implement for man's use."

I agree that nobody should be anybody's tool, but part of that freedom Sanger campaigned for, the way Sanger lived it, was something I can't agree with-- for a woman to be able to have sex with whomever she pleased. Sanger herself pursued sexual pleasure entirely for its own sake, and the author records the Sanger taught her quoted how to sexualize her entire body. Sanger was a close friend and some say lover of sex researcher, Havelock Ellis, and the promiscuous lover of many other partners. Ellis was a scientist who was also a proponent of sexuality for its own sake, divorced from reproduction.

Sanger wrote about sex education in How Six Little Children Were Told the Truth. She wasn't thoroughly a modern thinker, at least about some things. She warns the children against tampering" with "the generative organs, "which would lead to 'darkness, dullness of intellect, stupidity, physical and mental weakness.'" She described the development of marriage in terms that are part of our current mindset, telling the children that in the early days of human life, women chose their mates freely, but when men developed tools that they wanted to insure went to their own children, they bought women from the chief, and women lost their freedom of choice. [Don't know where she got her "facts" from.]

Here's an odd historical aside about a revered company now mostly associated with toothpaste:  Samuel Colgate from Colgate and Compay, "advertised the contraceptive benefits of Vaseline . . .."

Also like Dorothy Day, Sanger protested and was arrested for what she believed in. An article in the New York Call, April 20, 1913, called "With the Girls in Hazelton Jail, Sanger wrote about her arrest and jailing for walking in a picket line." Sanger was a better writer than Day was. In an unpublished article quoted in the book, Sanger uses such catchy phrases as "conscript motherhood" (for those forced to bear children they didn't want) and "their slavery, the bondage of unwilling maternity." She describes how for the first time in the world, in her newspaper "The Woman Rebel" were printed the words "birth control."

In her autobiography she told how she and her associates came up with the term "birth control."

“We tried population control, race control, and birth rate control. Then someone suggested, ‘Drop the rate.’ Birth control was the answer; we knew we had it – the baby was named.”

Even though Sanger wrote later that her goal was single-minded: to make birth control available to women, the book says that The Woman Rebel had a broader aim, no less than the end to marriage. Here is how the paper's goals were expressed in its first issue:

The fight was not only to be one against 'slavery through motherhood' and ignorance of the 'prevention of conception,' but with equal ferocity to attack prostitution, sexual prudery, marriage, middle-class morality, wage slavery--all things that enslaved women.

I am sad to say that for most of the so-called independent thinkers of our era, who all think alike, Margaret Sanger has won her battle. God help us all.

Here's another eerily modern-sounding quote from the June 1914 issue of Women Rebel. (The first sentence was echoed in the title of the 1971 book Our Bodies Our Selves, that went on to sell 4 million copies and be translate into thirty languages.)  

A woman's body belongs to herself alone. It is her body. It does not belong to the church. It does not belong to the United States of America or to any other government on the face of the earth. The first step toward getting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for any woman is her decision whether or not she shall become a mother. Enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman's right to life and liberty.

Sanger self-published and mailed 100,000 copies of her pamphlet describing how to prevent pregnancy, arranging to have the mailings sent out after she was on a boat to Europe to flee the prosecution she would probably be facing for breaking the Comstock laws. In her pamphlet, she described among other methods, how to prevent a fertilized egg from "making its nest in the lining of the womb."

Quote from Sanger's diary when she was in London "Women & men must be a god unto themselves."

She made a lot of progress. "By late 1915, public interest in birth control was no longer confined to liberals and lefties."

She often railed like this against the Catholic Church:

As she [Julia Rublee] pointed out, women must recognize how "the stupid decrees of men; the church; a false tradition" have deliberately turned women into tools for the ends of patriarchal institutions. . . .. With marriage under its control, the church not only made the woman subject to her fertility, but it made her subject to her husband--or father or brother--along with subject to God and all the priests, more or less enforcing a sort of triple or quadruple jeopardy. Abundantly subjected, woman accepted her role as 'that of an incubator and little more.'"

The author of the biography also mentions several times how attracted Sanger was to Neitzschean philosophy, which, as described here, seems very similar to the modern moral theologian's attitude towards traditional morality:

Neitzschean philosophy . . . gloried in the courage to challenge the convictions of centuries and encouraged the individual to stick to one's convictions in the higher truth . . ..

Sanger started her own publication called The Women Rebel starting in March 1914, again like Dorothy Day, who started the Catholic Worker a few decades later, on May 1, 1933.  Sanger went on to split with "the radical community in the early 20s" and later downplayed her Socialist associations.

On January 26, 1932, The Nation published her article, "My Answer to the Pope on Birth Control." On August 11, Margaret Sanger was "banned from Rome." In 1933, Hilter burned books by Sanger, Ellis, and Freud.

In 1921, November 10 "Margaret Sanger organizes ABCL" (the American Birth Control League), which eventually became (on January 29, 1942) "Planned Parenthood Federation of America."

Sanger is said to have wished for a magic pill to separate sex from reproduction. She was instrumental in bringing that magic pill into being. In 1951, Sanger met Katherine McCormick (major funder of research specifically dedicated to developing the Pill), and Gregory Pincus who was McCormick's chosen researcher (with John Rock). 1955, Pincus announced the Pill. On May 11, 1960, the FDA approved it. Sanger got her wish.

Contraception and the Average Catholic

Because of my total agreement with the Church's teachings against birth control, I always start wondering when I see Catholics who are very active in their parishes who only have one or two kids. Did they decide to disobey Church teachings and practice artificial contraception? Or was there some other reason I don't know about that they couldn't have kids?  Maybe they practiced Natural Family Planning? I know many couples who practiced NFP successfully and had exactly the number of children they wanted to have. There really is no way to know, and I try not to wonder, because ultimately it is none of my business.

But I do know other Catholics, even members of my family, who limit their family size using condoms or other birth control methods.

Not my mother and father though. My mother and father tried the old rhythm method. I was born before they started using rhythm. When my middle sister, Martha, was born 11 months and a half after me, my mother was told by her doctor not to have another child. When they tried to abstain according to the old rhythm method, my mother quoted my dad as saying blithely, "Oh just this once won't hurt." After I don't know how many times of my father using that line, my mother got pregnant with a third child. My father was killed in the line of duty as a fireman in December a month before the baby was due in January of 1948, 16 months after Martha.

My mother described her state at that last month after Daddy died, with two little girls (2 and 1 year old), having recently lost her husband, and not knowing whether she was going to die when the third child was born the next month. But doctors not being gods or prophets, sometimes not even very good guessers, my mother didn't die. She named her third daughter, Joe-anne Bernadette after my father Joseph Bernard.

She told the story sweetly to us over the years. She said that Joe-anne and daddy passed each other, him on his way up to heaven, Joe-anne on her way down. When we got older she told us that people used to tell her she shouldn't have had so many kids. Even in those days in the late 40s, people were limiting how many children they had so they could afford more things, like new cars or other goods that come with a higher standard of living. She used to quote the famous Roman matron who referred to her children as her jewels. I think she was heroic that way.

Along the same line, I was surprised to read once (maybe in the book The Irish in America) that in spite of the high percentage of Irish who are practicing Catholics, the first generation of Irish immigrants dropped from their parents' average of 8 or 10 children to a immigrant's average of 4 children, and by the next generation the average Catholic family size dropped to 2. This was even before contraceptives besides lambskin condoms were widely available. End of digression, at least for the time being.

Strictly speaking, the Church teaches that even with NFP, a couple should undertake to limit family size only for grave reasons.

What I Learned from a Jesuit Moral Theologian

I think I now understand better,  from my firsthand experience with a moral theologian from a Catholic University, at least part of the reason why the teaching against artificial contraception is disobeyed: Many if not all priests are trained to believe that contraception is a matter of individual conscience, instead of as Pope Pius VI wrote, a grave moral evil.

Fr. James Bretzke, S.J., S.T.D., is the "moral" theologian (I can't help myself, I always put "moral" in quotes when I describe him) who is teaching our current session at the San Jose Institute for Leadership in Ministry, and he writes and preaches that a person's conscience has a higher weight than the teachings of the Magisterium and the Pope. He teaches lay leaders and seminarians and college students here and in other countries, including the Philippines and Korea.

Fr. James Bretzke, S.J., S.T.D. Professor of Moral Theology

The teachers at the ILM all seem to share the same attitude, that we don't have to listen to those old repressed celibate men in Rome who have no right to tell Catholics what they are allowed to do in the privacy of their bedrooms. This claim makes me laugh at its lack of logic, and I remember a blog post by a recent convert who heard a priest repeat that same brainless idea. She said that made her wonder if the priest would think that committing a murder or keeping a slave or sexually abusing a child would be all right, as long as she did it in her bedroom. Good question!

Fr. Bretzke strongly implies that it is immoral to not use contraception in a case when the parents do not feel ready to have more children--for any reason. In contrast to what Bretzke is teaching us, I believe that my mother and my father did exactly the right thing. Death is not the worse thing for a Christian. Committing evil acts that lead a person to hell are the worse thing.

Since all churches until 1930 or so taught that contraception is a grave moral evil, the popes who have since then affirmed the traditional teaching aren't making anything up. Bretzke tries to convince his students that to follow the Church's moral teachings above their own consciences is idolatry, because of the twist he puts on the primacy of conscience.

When I tried to debate him (when will I ever learn) he told me I should only follow what the Pope teaches as if it comes from God if I could be sure that all things that Popes have taught through the centuries were free from error. I trust His Holiness Pope John Paul II (because of his holiness and his erudition combined) more than Father James Bretzke or my own conscience for that matter. Bretzke uses as examples of areas where conscience is greater than Church teachings: contraception, ordination of women, and other issues.

Fr. Bretzke told us that when he teaches seminarians about confession, he tells them: There are only three people in the confessional, you, God, and the penitent. Not the Pope. Not Cardinal Ratzinger. He instructs them that the individual should be taught to follow his or her conscience.

He makes an exception to the primacy of conscience for acts that he disapproves of, such as slavery. [This I believe is the flaw in his argument to which he is blind, because he is deciding on his own that contraception isn't evil, and that slavery is. ]

I truly believe that the Holy Spirit prevented the Church from capitulating on the contraception issue, even though many priests, bishops, and cardinals lobbied to have the teaching changed. The weight of public opinion and all the experts were against Pope Paul VI.

Father Bretzke writes that his approach is a personalist one, better than the old "manualist" or "physicalist" approaches.

I reminded Fr. Bretzke that Pope John Paul II had worked out a personalist defense of the Church's teachings about conjugal love when he was a pastor, and that the Pope continued to develop this philosophy. The Pope taught his personalist "theology of the body" at his weekly audiences for years, which have been collected into a book called (I think) Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body. And Christopher West, a layman who graduated from the Pope's Institute for Marriage and the Family teaches in laypeople's terms what the Pope has taught.

I told Fr. Bretzke my theory that the Holy Spirit had to be credited with Karol Wotyla's imput to Paul VI's decision making. Fr. Bretzke said that the current pope did not attend many of the sessions (because of the communists in Poland at the time prevented him from traveling) but I quoted Woodward and Bernstein's book on the Pope, which claimed that the input from Wotyla strongly affected the outcome of Paul VI's deliberations.

One of the lobbies that Pope Paul VI had to counter was the march on Rome by a bunch of pro-contraception clerics from American who were armed with the good news of a so-called "natural" method of birth prevention, the Pill. According to a New Yorker article a few years ago that I've saved somewhere, the pill's inventor John Rock was a Catholic, and many Catholics who were pro-contraception hung their hopes on being able to convince the Pope that the Catholic Church should accept this "natural" method of controlling fertility. After Humanae Vitae was published, Rock left the Church, I'm guessing because it didn't conform to his superior knowledge, and things didn't go his way.

The experts didn't know how the pill worked, but that didn't stop them from promoting it. It is currently known that the pill does not always suppress ovulation. Eggs that get released will get fertilized in some unknown number of cases. The pill then prevents the fertilized egg from implanting on the wall of the uterus. To those of us who believe that life begins at conception, the pill is abortion-producing (an abortifacient).

If the Holy Spirit had not led the Church in the person of Pope Paul VI and by means of the encyclical Humanae Vitae to hold the line against the Pill, we would now be in the position of supporting a means of birth regulation that is also abortion-producing. The health consequences, including cancer, were not known at the time either. Thank you Holy Spirit for keeping the so-called weak pope on the right track!

In his book, A Morally Complex World: Engaging Contemporary Moral Theology, that was our class textbook, Bretzke quotes just enough from the writings of Pope John Paul II to perhaps give the idea that the pope would agree wholely with his arguments. Bretzke also focuses strongly on some wording in a document from the Church's second Vatican council and on some things St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about conscience, while building his invalid non-doctrinal case that the individual MUST follow his or her conscience even when it is contradicted by the teachings of the Church.

He leaves out the requirement that a person must follow his conscience when his conscience is properly informed by Church teachings!  If a person forms his conscience by reading Kinsey's works that suggested that no harm comes to children who are sexually abused, should that person be told to follow his conscience?

Can't believe that the Pope would agree with that! Fr. Bretzke specifically uses examples of common things Catholics use their consciences to disobey the Magisterium about, and gives examples where he believes the silly benighted people who believe what the Church teaches are guilty of idolatry!

Following is from email interchanged between me and another ILM student on this topic:

From: Roseanne Sullivan [mailto:roseannesullivan@sbcglobal.net]
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2004 12:20 PM

I am very upset with the moral theology text. In one overview chapter he manages to undermine three of the Church's teachings: that life begins at conception, that women cannot be ordained deacons or priests, and that artificial contraception is wrong. He uses these issues in examples in such a way as to belittle the teachings.

Our instructors claim to be practicing Catholics but they also support anti-Catholic positions.

Bah, humbug!

--------
Update March 15, 2016

Fr. Bretzke is now a Full Professor of Moral Theology at Boston College School of Theology & Ministry.

Below are some other things I've written about Fr. Bretzke's teachings.

No Recipe for Morality Says Bay Area Jesuit

Redefining Morality and the True Teachings of Vatican II  (My Amazon review of Fr. Bretzke's book, March 25, 2005)

In this book Fr. Bretzke teaches complex methods for evaluating the morality of actions - while Catholics who follow traditional teachings would call the same actions "sins" without Bretzke's methods. Putting individual conscience above Church teachings identifies Fr. Bretzke with a breed of theologians who believe the Vatican II Council licensed them to redefine what the Church teaches and to claim that traditional Catholic morality is wrong. People who think the way Fr. Bretzke does never bother to explain why they stay in a Church they believe was so misguided for so long, or how they were granted the grace to understand more than the great saints that came before them.

Fr. Bretzke impugns the maturity of people who base their values on what the Magisterium teaches, using statements like the following: "To sit back and wait for a clear-cut response from any outside moral authority, even if it be the Pope, would result in a sort of moral infantilism."

Fr. Bretzke does not credit the writings of others who defend the Church's traditional teachings, prominently Pope John Paul II.

The following quote from the Pope's encyclical on moral theology seems to apply to theologians like him.
" Certain currents of modern thought ... exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values. . . [T]he traditional doctrine ... is rejected; certain of the Church's moral teachings are found simply unacceptable; and the Magisterium itself is considered capable of intervening in matters of morality only in order to `exhort consciences' and to `propose values,' in the light of which each individual will independently make his or her decisions and life choices."

You can read on Amazon the reply to my review from The Old Book Worm. Here is my reply to his reply.

Dear Mr. Old Book Worm, Your criticisms of me are way off base.

In 2004, I took a course from Fr. Bretzke at the San Jose Institute of Leadership in Ministry in which this book was the textbook. And I can assure you that I read it, more than once.  Have you read it?

I don't respect your ad hominem attacks against me at all.  It is a red herring for you to bring up the issues about sexual abuse.  Bretzke's approach to morality gives all the freedom to decide about the rightness or wrongness of things to the individual's conscience. This is not Catholic doctrine, never has been.

I'm sure that many child abusers were relying on their own consciences. Fr. Bretzke would not approve of what they did (and neither would I), but he cannot tell you why, according to his lights.  I'll tell you though, Fr. Bretzke supports people using their own consciences to decide whether a Church teaching is right or wrong--except, and this is a big exception that shows the flaw in what he teaches--he does not support the rights of individual conscience when a person's conscience tells him to do something Fr. Bretzke feels in his conscience is wrong. So now Fr. Bretzke has set himself up as higher than the Magisterium of the Church.

Obviously the way Fr. Bretzke uses the whole primacy of conscience argument is just a rationalization for encouraging people to do things that are contrary to official Church teaching, such as use contraception or engage in homosexual acts. (I read his course notes from when he was teaching at University of San Francisco where he tried to debunk Scriptural passages about the evils of homosexual acts and worked to undermine Church teachings on that matter too.)

Just because you believe that a vast majority of "moral" theologians disagree with the Church's prohibition against artificial contraception, that doesn't mean they are not seriously in error. I've been on both sides of this issue, and I returned to that Catholic Church because I saw how much harm comes to those who disobey Her teachings.

You might do worse than close your own far too open mind.