|
Pope’s Gift For Moms – More Kids Than You Want & A Saint Who Banned Birth Control
By Jerry Slevin
Christian Catholicism
May 11, 2014
http://christiancatholicism.com/popes-gift-for-moms-more-kids-than-you-want-a-saint-who-banned-birth-control/
Pope Francis’ No. 1 priority increasingly appears to be to avoid at all costs a US national investigation of priest child sexual abuse cover-ups like the one now underway in Australia.
Francis is evidently gearing up to support his US bishops’ current anti-Obamacare contraception insurance crusade to help the Vatican’s “tax and regulation opposed” billionaire allies, including apparently Rupert Murdoch, install a right wing US Senate in November.
For key background, see Betty Clermont’s perceptive and well documented overall analysis here
http://opentabernacle.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/what-democrats-need-to-learn-from-pope-francis/
and Aletha Blayse’s penetrating analysis of Murdoch’s News Corp’s ‘The Australian” newspaper’s efforts here
http://lewisblayse.net/2014/05/08/the-australians-premature-reporting-on-the-nsw-special-commission-of-enquiry-or-support-for-peter-fox-needed-now/
Francis’ top “Vatican police” official, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, has AGAIN “smacked down” US nuns, as described well by two prominent US Catholics, the NY Times’ Maureen Dowd here http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/opinion/sunday/dowd-with-malice-toward-nuns.html
and the independent National Catholic Reporter’s publisher, Thomas Fox, here
http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/lcwr-accusations-communication-has-broken-down-mistrust-has-developed
and here
http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/lcwr-vision-builds-john-paul-ii-initiative
The Australian investigation has apparently already led the lone Cardinal Pell to seek Vatican protection. With his No. 1 priority, Francis has been busy dealing with related “women’s politics” and almost racing to make all modern popes “saints”, both seemingly aimed at firming key Catholic voter and donor support and enhancing thereby protection for his increasingly beleaguered absolute monarchy.
Francis is also seemingly racing to “beatify” and make another “pope saint” of Paul VI, the pope from 1963 to 1978. Paul VI had deeply disappointed many Catholic couples who were hoping for liberalization of church teaching on sexuality. He instead in 1968 “enshrined”, in spite of his own papal commission’s recommendation for change, the Catholic Church’s 1930 ban on birth control and expanded it to all contraception, including the new “Pill”, in a seemingly purported “infallible decree” entitled “Humanae Vitae’.
As sometimes “Vatican friendly” Boston Globe reporter, John Allen, indicated recently: ” … this beatification ought to lay to rest any lingering doubt as to whether Francis truly is a “pro-life” pope. … Paul VI {is} the pontiff who gave the world the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, reiterating the church’s ban on birth control … “
The full story of Paul VI’s dark decision to “Ban the Pill” and of his overridden papal “birth control” commission (that included married couples) is told definitively in a classic book now available, thanks to the author’s generosity, for free here https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/151118
The book, “The Politics of Sex and Religion”, is by Robert Blair Kaiser, who was a Jesuit-in-training for ten years before leaving to pursue journalism and a family. He served as an award-winning religion reporter for The New York Times, CBS News, Newsweek,and Time. He is the author of sixteen other books, including the new and widely acclaimed book, a description of which is linked here: Inside the Jesuits: How Pope Francis Is Changing the Church and the World
The contraception issue is among many expected to get scrutiny in a special meeting, a Synod, of 150 childless and celibate bishops called for at the Vatican in mid-October to discuss family life, of course, with no women as full participants.
Couples know well in good conscience their moral priority is to have children that they can afford to raise. The childless, celibate, wealthy and unaccountable Catholic hierarchy, who believe, it appears, that the hierarchy benefits financially and politically from unlimited Catholic babies, push relentlessly the Rabbit Rule — “Breed, breed, breed, …”
Paul VI’s beatification ceremony would come at the end of the “family gathering”. One miracle is required for beatification, and traditionally a second for canonization. It has been reported that the miracle was that of a boy born healthy in California despite the diagnoses in 2001 of the rupture of the fetal bladder and absence of amniotic liquid. The mother reportedly refused an abortion and prayed for Paul VI’s intercession at the urging of a nun. The baby reportedly was born a month prematurely and is now a healthy adolescent.
Now over a decade after the “miraculous” pregnancy and just in time for the anti-Obamacare election campaign, Pope Francis has declared the child’s birth a miracle. Are you watching in Kansas, Dorothy and Toto?
Women and children do not appear, in practice, to be a very high priority for Francis, but avoiding a US national investigation of institutional child sexual abuse is very high on Francis’ list. US military, economic, media and political power, which Francis and Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Parolin and his mentor, Cardinal Sodano, fully understand, necessitates that Francis pay close attention to US politics.———————–
The US nuns’ group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and their frequently associated and highly visible, “Nuns on the Bus”, are a lightening rod for many right wing US Catholic voters. The US Congressional elections, especially key US Senate races, in less than six months will, as predicted by informed pollsters, be decided often by a small number of votes. Victories will likely go to the candidates who can bring out more of their own local supporters. The Vatican’s help for right wing US Senate candidates, via anti-Obamacare and anti-gay marriage crusades, as well as publicity from “smacking down” the “left wing sisters” and Francis’ unique influence over traditionalist US Latino voters, appear to be very important now to the right wing political bloc and their “tax and regulation opposed” billionaire backers. ————————————-
The lead Nun on the Bus, Sr. Simone Campbell, gave a prime time TV address during President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign that surely moved some Catholic voters to Obama, while the ex-Pope and the US bishops tried hard with their “Fortnight For Freedom” to defeat Obama.———————————————————————-
The sister in charge of the massive US Catholic health group also in 2012 publicly supported Obamacare, and the contraception insurance mandate that in effect makes effective contraception choices available to poor and even middle class couples.————————————————————-
The Vatican, and their right wing allies, remember this and are, in my view at least, clearly trying to preempt this between now and November by “smacking down” both (1) progressive sisters, by humiliating the LCWR, and (2) progressive theologians, by once again unfairly pounding Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, a well regarded Fordham theology professor and author, who has yet to weigh in currently. The US bishops’ recently announced agenda for their semi-annual national meeting in New Orleans next month makes clear the bishops, who take their signals from the Vatican, are stepping up their right wing political support, especially on opposing Obamacare and gay marriage.—————————————-
Under the Reagan and both Bush presidencies, the Vatican was treated as a privileged ally. No more. As more US bishops, and even the Vatican, face being dragged increasingly into US Federal bankruptcy and even criminal courts, the Vatican seems to think, correctly but immorally in my view as a Catholic international lawyer, that the Vatican needs a “friendlier” US Senate, especially one that can preserve a right wing US Supreme Court majority that interprets “religious freedom” to give the Catholic hierarchy a legal pass on priest child abuse misconduct.——————-
The current US Supreme Court five conservative Justices majority has indicated in a recent St. Louis Archdiocese case, as well as the new “prayer in public meetings” case, that they are “friendlier” to the Catholic hierarchy’s pressing legal needs than the current four Justice progressive minority is. With four of the nine current US Supreme Court Justices now over 75 years of age, control of the US Senate in November that will give control of future Supreme Court Justices’ confirmations, appears critical to Pope Francis and his Vatican advisors, in my legal assessment. If it means Francis via Cardinal Mueller has to steamroller some “left wing nuns” and “feminist theologians” so be it.———————————————
Francis showed during Argentina’s Dirty War and elsewhere that he will bend for pragmatic purposes.———————————————————————
As to Francis latest, “pope saint”, Paul VI had been part of the Vatican Curia most of his earlier career, which is a major reason he was elected with significant Vatican cardinal support in 1963. The power structure at the time gave the pope significant power because of the almost novel “doctrine” of infallibility. This doctrine was virtually created by Pius IX in 1869. Younger Catholics were then indoctrinated in this unsupportable fiction by Pius X’s 1910 decision to reduce the First Confession age to 7 years old from the centuries’ old traditional age of 12 years or older. Now Catholic schools could indoctrinate children on papal infallibility at seven. I went through it in the early 1950′s.—————————————–
Paul VI knew all this in 1968. He, and his predecessor, John XXIII, also knew the indoctrination of seven year olds led to a spike in young children being groomed by sexual predatory priests at a very vulnerable age. Both of them seemingly made sure this pressing problem was not addressed by the almost 2,500 bishops assembled at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Moreover, Paul VI knew he would likely lose the “power of infallibility” if he approved, as he should have, of birth control in 1968. The prohibition of birth control had only been “infallibly” decided 38 years before by Pius XI in 1930. If Paul VI reversed Pius XI, any continuing claim to papal infallibility would likely have been mortally undercut.——————————————————————————-
Paul VI shamefully decided to protect papal power in 1968, a decision that has contributed to misery for millions of couples worldwide since then, as the Vatican lobbied, and still lobbies, against goverments helping to make effective contraception options accessible to all couples, from those in Latin America, Africa, the Philippines, to even the USA under Obamacare. To make Paul Vi a saint just makes a further mockery of the concept of a saint. But Pope Francis and his desperate cardinals will likely do it anyways. It is also unlikely Francis’ Vatican will adequately address the reports of Paul VI’s relationship to a male actor, that Paul VI himself publicly denied, see the sources cited by Richard Sipe here
Most couples will continue to make their own child choices in good conscience, thank God, but Paul VI’s “sainthood”, will just further erode papal credibility even further, again thank God.
|