Unequal Rights for Women

I have known many men who profess strong feminist views because doing so makes points with feminist women.

In an odd way by pretending to care about women's issues, a man does not have to care about individual women. In fact it's the opposite. A man who supports what is erroneously called women's rights doesn't have to court a woman, be tender to her, marry her, love her, support her, give her children, give her a home, or care for any children she conceives while being used for the man's pleasure. 

From many men's point of view, the man and the woman are perfectly happy to have what I call "guy sex" together: uncommitted, unfruitful, unloving, just for the thrills, and not for anything more life-enhancing. Many men have the attitude that since an uncommitted "relationship" is exactly what they want, their female partners must be satisfied if the "sex" is good for both of them.  But they and we really do know better. 

I read an survey one time that found that even Playboy bunnies want to find a husband and have children. It is sad to see Hugh Hefner's live-in women clutching their pet dogs for comfort while being photographed, videoed, paraded on television in little or no clothing to satisfy men's egos and their lust. Did you ever stop to realize that calling a woman a bunny is totally inappropriate--not to mention degrading?  Bunnies are renowned for reproducing, but these vulnerable-human-forever-young-because-perenially-replaced women called bunnies are relegated to sterile unnatural sex and must be satisfied with the empty thrills and financial rewards that being desired bring, as long as they remain desirable, that is. 

Hefner keeps getting older and his bunnies keep getting younger.  In 2012, he married a 26 year old at the age of 86. (She has been quoted as saying that Hef doesn't turn her on and that making it with him only lasts a few seconds. Another former bunny wrote about how when she lived in his Playboy Mansion all the women there would be invited to Hefner's room after he took Viagra, and they would be supervised by the main "girlfriend" as they each took turns for a brief time as he lay prone on the bed.)

Women are actually being abused and thwarted physically and emotionally by these so-called "freedoms." Women's sexuality is being limited to the act of intimacy alone, and they are forced either to take dangerous hormones or use devices and sperm killers to prevent the natural result that is built into their very being. Women's full sexual expression requires much more than the act of intimacy. To be fully realized, it needs  love, commitment, tenderness, pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and caring for the children that are the result of the marital act.

Several women who are "sexually active" have told me they don't have orgasms.  I believe it's partly because many men don't even pretend to love their bed partners any more.  Intimacy is much more profound when the woman feels loved, so cads pretend love to fraudulently reap a full response from the woman.

The new sins are to be possessive or jealous. The advice women have to live by is to not scare a man away by letting him know you want to be married and have children.

We all know that women are heartbroken and degraded when they are used. But we pretend that equal rights means that sex means nothing more than what the worst of men want it to mean, which is nothing at all. 

Equal rights would actually mean that women wouldn't have to unsex themselves to make points with men.

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Photos:  Now 90, in 2012, Hefner married one of his girlfriends and posed for wedding photos with her dog.  He was 86 and she was 26.  Another earlier girlfriend is shown with several dogs on the lawn of the Playboy Mansion.

First Comes Love .... Not Anymore!

Do kids still sing this "playground song" to embarrass a boy and a girl that give signs of liking each other?

Name and name are sitting in a tree
K - I - S - S - I - N - G
First comes love, then comes marriage.
Then comes baby in a baby carriage.

Whether or not children are still singing about that once commonly expected sequence of attraction between the sexes, hardly anyone  believes that love progresses that way any more.

What would be a modern revision?  The way we live "relationships" now is so complicated that it wouldn't scan as a playground song. To eliminate just some of the myriad possible permutations, my off-the-cuff revision here assumes that the couple who is kissing in the tree consists of a male and a female.

Not Just K-I-S-S-I-N-G but G-O-I-N-G A-L-L T-H-E W-A-Y

Say that Dick and Jane are sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Next, and at a very early age, comes intimacy, usually with contraception, which is often provided by the fond parent or the school. Kids are going to do it anyway, they think, so let's help Dick and Jane have "safe" sex. Although that term strictly means sex without venereal disease, most young people think it means sex without babies.  The safety of the minds, emotions, bodies and souls of the couple is not considered by those doting enablers of extramarital intimacy.

Another thing "everybody knows" is that it would be foolish to not try a potential marriage partner out before marriage, ignoring the fact that studies show that couples who marry without having sex beforehand stay married and enjoy their marital intimacy much more often than those who don't wait. I still remember reading a Playboy magazine survey during the 1970s whose results showed that couples who practiced traditional sexual morality were more satisfied. The editors were shocked.

Love, Only Maybe

Sometimes after a long time, ever so cautiously, Love might be mentioned between the couple, but only if the person who says it first is sure it won't come across as needy and scare the other person away.  Then only if Dick and Jane both agree that the word applies to what they are doing, then Love is allowed to be mentioned.

I always thought this Steven Sondheim song sung by Judy Collins is about what happened when the woman revealed she is in love, then realizes she had miscalculated, and the man doesn't want what she wants.  In circuses, they send in the clowns to distract the audience when there has been a terrible accident. In the story in the song, the woman calls for the clowns to divert attention from her mistake and the resulting shame and dismay.

Isn't it significant that when couples make what used to be called love, they are now seen as merely making "it." 

Marriage, Only Sometimes

For our hypothetical Dick and Jane, marriage is out of the question, because they are too young. But with more-mature couples, more often than not, it's the woman who wants to marry. Men are often quite happy to keep enjoying all the pleasures of modern intimacy and cohabitation without commitment.

One other cultural reference. We don't talk about the cruelty and pain involved when people use each other for sex, but sometimes reality even slips into the movies. In "Jerry Maquire," the athlete character Rod, who Cuba Gooding played, confronted Tom Cruise's character, his sports agent, Jerry, because he was using Dorothy, the Renee Zellwegger character, for sex. And Jerry finally had to admit it and agree it was wrong.

A Real Man Wouldn't Hijack the Pootie

Often the man (and less often the woman) knows that the partner is not someone he or she would ever marry, or simply never wants to be married, but keeps the "relationship" going as long the Marriage ultimatum can be avoided.

Couples who aren't married are often referred to as"significant others." But when the partners do not want to commit to marriage, doesn't that really make them "insignificant others"?

Only if both of them desire marriage, and each of them finally decides that he or she can't reasonably expect to find a more perfect partner, and they both agree that the other person is worthy, a proposal may be made and accepted, and Marriage may occur. But since Marriage is optional, totally up to the whim of the couple, and it costs 10s of thousands of dollars to stage the kind of royal spectacle couples have come to expect, for those and many other reasons, a wedding may never actually take place.

Another result of premarital intimacy is loss of romantic feelings. I remember reading several years back that there was a fad for engaged couples to abstain from intimacy for a time before their wedding day, not from any religious considerations, but just so they could regain lost passion so they could better enjoy their honeymoon. People who work at resorts frequented by honeymooners tell stories of bored couples fighting with each other, since there is nothing new for them to look forward so after the big wedding shebang is over. The honeymoon was over before it began.

One unspoken reality is that "free love"  inhibits joy.  When intimacy is experienced outside of love and marriage, love is not supposed be expressed. When commitment is not there, trust is not possible. All these combined with fear of being found wanting and rejected can inhibit the couple, especially the woman. Women and men are cheated out of the pure, uninhibited joy of being able to give love - without fear - to a partner you know loves you and who has promised to be with you 'til death you do part.

For those who don't believe in the permanence of marriage, there is always the fall back position; if the marriage doesn't "work out," even after the extensive pre-marriage period of trying-the-other-person-out, Dick and Jane can always divorce, as everybody know.

And Pity Poor Baby

Baby might arrive at any stage in today's conditional love sequence: the widespread acceptance of intimacy outside of marriage is based on an assumption that contraception won't fail. This assumption ignores the statistics that show that even when contraception is perfectly practiced, inside or outside of marriage, whether  there is love or no love, babies do result: Planned Parenthood statistics show that up to six out of every hundred women who faithfully take the pill conceive a child, six out of 100, every year.  A baby usually won't be welcomed unless the couple has moved to the Marriage stage. When a woman's motherly heart prompts her to not kill her child, she often finds she has to face losing the father and the wrath of her otherwise tolerant family.

It used to be that the conception of a baby was seen as a blessed event between a married couple, as the fruit of their love. Nowadays, only if the Baby is wanted by both, will it be allowed to live long enough to be wheeled around in a baby carriage. Close to a million abortions are performed every year in the United States alone.

It is too easy to go down to the same Planned Parenthood clinic that dispenses contraception to have an inconvenient baby killed. Their door is always open for Jane if she has the cash.  Planned Parenthood knows the statistics very well, and their business model depends on services that abort the babies who predictably are conceived from failures of the contraceptives they prescribe.

A New X-Rated Playground Song

Dick and Jane Sitting in a Tree
G-O-I-N-G A-L-L T-H-E W-A-Y
First Comes Sex Ed
Then the Pill
And an Abortion Appointment is Only a Phone Call Away

Love is Conditional
Marriage is Optional
Divorce is Expected
And We've All Lost Far More than We Know

How to Fix It?

The solution is too complex to fully cover here, but we have to start by shouting the truth.  "Sexual freedom" is not freedom and it's not even satisfying. It is not healthy for the bodies,  emotions, and souls of those who practice it. Marriage is not an automatic guarantee of bliss. But a return to traditional Catholic morality would eliminate most if not all of the heartbreak and other evils I've described.

A couple that is chaste before and after marriage, which means to be celibate while single and faithful while married, is going to live a happier and healthier life. One great benefit is that a person who is pure before and during a marriage cannot catch a sexually transmitted disease, except through a freak occurrence such as getting tainted blood transfusion.

When the pill is not used, the woman is spared being poisoned by hormones for years of her life. When female sterilization and male vasectomies are not used, the couple's bodies are not mutilated. When barrier methods are not used, no physical or chemical obstacles are put up between the man and woman in the act of marital intimacy.

Intimacy between a man and woman is far more satisfying when it is experienced within a sacramental marriage.

Of greatest importance is the fact that no child will be unwanted or aborted if men and women come to see again that the creation of new life is a desirable part of marital happiness. Even if an inconvenient and even difficult pregnancy occurs, no thought of abortion can be seriously entertained when the couple realizes that God wills each child into existence.

Throw out the Playboy philosophy and tell the world. Free love is not love and it comes with a great price. Those who are able to see the wisdom of rising above the culture and of living by the rules our loving Father ordained for our happiness find that they gain far more than they could ever imagine.

Do You Ever Wonder Why Prominent Catholics Openly Defy Church Doctrine?

Do you ever wonder why many prominent Catholics, such as Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Tim Kaine, claim to be Catholic and still support certain immoral actions that contradict Church doctrine? If you read this column "Moral Theology: Software, Moral Formatting and Living in Sin," which was published in this week's Valley Catholic (from the Diocese of San Jose), it might help you better understand.  The author, Reverend Ron Rolheiser, is a member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, president of the Oblate School of Theology and a popular writer who has had a column running in the Valley Catholic, and I assume other diocesan papers, for years.[1]

Fr. Ron, or just Ron, as he refers to himself at his website, is one of the open-shirt-collar-wearing-no-clerical-collar-I'm-just-one-of-you-guys moral theologians (Jesuit Fr. James Bretzke[2] is another) who I've run across who seem to me to be expert at making clear doctrinal matters obscure. The writings of theologians like them are so nuanced that they make it seem reasonable for Pelosi/Biden/Kaine-type-Catholics to think they can disagree with traditional Catholic teachings about what is sinful and still remain convinced they are mainstream Catholic believers.
In this column, Fr. Rolheiser used a weak analogy when he compared classical Roman Catholic moral theology to "a highly specialized software ... that was honed, nuanced, and upgraded through centuries."  The analogy is weak because software determines how applications behave.  If Roman Catholic moral theology is software, then shouldn't it program how Catholics behave?

Fr. Rolheiser believes that the classical software has to change. He writes that he believes in the principles of classical moral theology, but we can no longer use its way of naming sin.  Why? Because much of our culture and many of our churches no longer understand that language, and, so, oh my goodness, many "good" people who are living in sin will be offended if we tell them that the way they are living is inherently disordered.

What is a modern "moral" theologian to do?  Teach people so they do understand the language of the Church's moral teachings? Defend Church teachings as inspired by God and existing for our benefit? No! Change Catholic theology! "We need a new software, a new way of morally formatting things."

That strikes me funny. I would like to find out what any of the many programmers I worked with during my career as a technical writer would think of the idea of a software program formatting such a thing  as morality. If you don't reject Fr. Rolheiser's analogy out of hand, his logic falls on its face because redefining a value changes how you treat it. If your moral theology software no longer defines a value as sinful or immoral, the program would no longer logically need to include any routines that would define how to change the no-longer-sinful value. 

Fr. Rolheiser describes a few different individuals (such as a housekeeper has been married many times and, like the woman at the well, living with a man who is not her husband) and a few different types of people who objectively are living in sin in other ways as having "life-giving" relationships, as good people who "bring oxygen into a room." 

So instead of having the kindness to tell sinners that if they die in sin they are in serious danger of being condemned to hell for eternity and if they go to Communion with unconfessed and unrepented mortal sin they are committing sacrilege and, according to St. Paul, are making themselves guilty of the death of Christ[3], he seems to want the Church tell sinners that they are just fine the way they are and not challenge them to change sinful behavior. That way they won't be offended.

I believe that Jesus would tell him there are worse things for a sinner to endure than being offended.

Fr. Rolheiser doesn't seem to consider that a more merciful way would be to not affirm people in their sinful ways, but to tell them the way to heaven, and to lead them to repentance, conversion, penance, and to make amends for their sins. Jesus did not leave the woman at the well satisfied with how life-giving her lifestyle was. 

And that, boys and girls, is one example of why Pelosi/Biden/Kaine-Catholics are confused and are convinced they are justified in contradicting Church teachings, and why they despise those of us who don't agree--because we are backward. They were taught this kind of modern "moral" theology in Catholic schools, in classes led by modern "moral" theologians like Fr. Rolheiser or by teachers who were trained by teachers like him.

Isaiah 5:20 Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness: that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.  

Colossians 2:8 Beware lest any man cheat you by philosophy and vain deceit: according to the tradition of men according to the elements of the world and not according to Christ.

The following quote from Saint John Paul II's encyclical on moral theology seems to apply to theologians like Fr. Rolheiser.

" 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." 

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[1] I found out from his Wikipedia page that Fr. Rolheiser has "a regular column in the Catholic Herald which is featured in approximately 60 newspapers in five different countries." Fr. Rolheiser is a mainstream, modern moral theologian, who has a doctorate from the University of Louvain.

[2] James T. Bretzke, S.J., is currently professor of moral theology at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry.  I met Fr. Bretzke when I was a student of his while he was teaching at the University of San Francisco and moonlighting as an instructor at the San Jose Diocese's Institute for Leadership in Ministry. In his book A Morally Complex World: Engaging Contemporary Moral Theology and in his courses, 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 exalted wisdom that made them able to understand what is moral better  than the great saints that came before them. I've written in several blog posts and elsewhere against Fr. Bretzke's teachings, for example, this article from San Francisco Faith newspaper: No Recipe for Morality Says Bay Area Jesuit.  Fr. Bretzke writes often for America magazine, including this recent article, "In Good Conscience" about Amoris Laetitia.

[3] Corinthians 11:27-32 is left out of the modern lectionary as a "difficult" passage, so Catholics are no longer taught these hard truths, that whoever received the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin is "guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord. According to St. Paul, many of those who do so sicken and die.

Corinthians 11:

27 Therefore, whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the Body and the Blood of the Lord. 28 But let a man prove himself; and so let him eat of that bread and drink of the chalice. 29 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the Body of the Lord. 30 Therefore are there many infirm and weak among you: and many sleep. 31 But if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. 32 But whilst we are judged, we are chastised by the Lord, that we be not condemned with this world.

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!

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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.