The Judas ex-priest, James Carroll is at it again with another Catholic-bashing editorial in the July 24 Boston Globe. As Mr. Carroll states in his article, he was a supporter of contraception and opposed the teaching of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae when it was issued in 1968, while Carroll was still in seminary. While seminarians in Washington, D.C. were required to take an oath in support of Humanae Vitae, “I was grateful that no such oath was required of me, for it would have meant not being ordained. I assumed that the church would soon take into account the voices of its own experts and of the non-celibate laity, inevitably to withdraw the misguided prohibition.

“I was wrong. I went on to be ordained, knowing I would never preach that birth control is intrinsically sinful.”

Mr. Carroll still regards the teaching that contraception is an intrinsic evil as a mistake, and makes no mention of the mountains of sociological evidence that have accumulated since 1968. Being a supporter of abortion, he probably doesn’t see anything detrimental in the causal relation of contraception to abortion . The fact that we have more promiscuity, more STD’s, more divorce, more abuse of women, more government coercion in sexual matters, apparently does not measure on his Richter scale. Does he find striking the fact that these evils were all foretold, explicitly or implicitly, by the pope in Humanae Vitae?

Carroll’s article is not without value, however, as exemplified in this observation: “The issue quickly stopped being birth control and became church authority. Priests, bishops, and the pope entered into a corrupting, if implicit agreement with the Catholic people.

“It said, in effect, that you can ignore this teaching, and we will ignore your ignoring it, but Church authority must not be openly challenged.

“One reliable survey puts the number of American Catholics currently dissenting from Humanae Vitae at 93 percent. Every priest who hears confessions knows this, and so does every bishop. In my experience very few of them believe that the nearly universal acceptance of birth control by American Catholics is wrong.” And for the most part, this is an accurate observation--though the pope has been staunch in his defense of Humanae Vitae. The sad fact is that, in most pulpits it’s as if the encyclical does not exist. Thereby the flock has been left to the wolves.

Many, if not most pro-life legislators will vote for “family planning,” regarding it as a positive good--another casualty of deficient catechesis on this vital matter. Many pro-life groups see nothing wrong in adopting a “neutral” posture about contraception, even though it is a major cause of abortion.

Mr. Carroll continues his article by addressing a variety of society’s major calamities. In typical dysfunctional style--or more accurately, in devilish style--he foists the blame for many of the world’s evils on the moral truths of the Church. He culminates by blaming the rapid spread of AIDS in Africa on the Church’s unwillingness to embrace condom-mania. What he doesn’t say is, had people followed the Church’s teachings in the first place--instead of following the lead of the likes of James Carroll--there would be no AIDS crisis. Carroll notes hopefully, that “the AIDS office of the [South African] Bishops Conference, as reported by Associated Press, is putting forward a proposal to openly and explicitly affirm condom use, a proposal to be debated beginning today.”

His rhetorical climax is to claim that “on Humanae Vitae rests what must be called the Church’s structure of death.” To which we say, “Get behind me Satan!” 

Ironically, regarding condoms, FOX News has this report (July 24, 2001): “A group of doctors Tuesday claimed that the federal government, specifically the Centers for Disease Control, has for at least a year suppressed a study about the effectiveness of condoms and endangered thousands of American lives in the process.

“The doctors claim that the government has known about the limitations of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases but nevertheless mounted a campaign that deliberately misrepresented the risks in sex education curricula and public health programs.

“ ‘The entire public health model developed by the CDC and based on the idea that condoms offer protection, is a lie,’ said Dr. Hall Wallis, a member of consortium. ‘The skeleton is now out of the closet.’

“At a Washington, D.C., news conference, the 10,000-member Physicians Consortium claimed that the CDC has known for years that while condoms are 85 percent effective [for the first year(?) - ed.] in helping prevent the spread of HIV, they offer less protection against sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis and genital herpes.” 

-- Bill Cotter

Annotated Table of Contents                        Home