Well, thank you i suppose for at least trying to be sensitive about this. Regardless of whether or not I agree with your points about the breakdown of society, linking children being borne out of wedlock to a social ill just does not sit right with me. It makes me feel very uncomfortable and I can never accept it.
Much of the phenomena that tends to be attributed to out of wedlock births, such as a low income environment, violence and young age among others, are not an intrinsic part of it. I think people get confused amidst all these very different and nuanced issues.
Marriage in itself is not a guaranteed solver of problems. Which is why the Church wont marry a couple just because they are pregnant.
The problems we have in society (and i say this as someone who does not buy the whole ‘prior to the 60s the world was one big utopia’ spiel) I believe can be attributed to shaming, the shaming of single parents and men with virgin/whore complexes, who think they have the right to treat women like dirt just because they are not married to them.
We need to start teaching people that they ought to treat others with respect, just because.
Yes, we must teach people that they ought to treat others with respect. I agree. We must also teach them that respect for others means not using others for sexual purposes.
I realize that this type of discussion can be very sensitive, just because we live in an age when the matters we are discussing have in fact affected a lot of people—probably most people. It’s not like a discussion of nuclear war, something in which we have not participated. But we have engaged in sexual sins; there are children born out of wedlock; there are a million abortions a year; the sale of contraceptives is a huge business. A lot of us have been personally affected.
So a priest giving a perfectly reasonable homily about such matters can expect that many people in the congregation will take it personally or be offended, because they have been affected by such things personally. Perhaps that is why, as Easter Joy mentioned, such homilies are quite rare.
You say that “linking children being borne out of wedlock to a social ill just does not sit right with me. It makes me feel very uncomfortable and I can never accept it.” But without making any judgment on the individuals who may be such children or their parents, the fact is that it is a social ill, with adverse effects on the well being of society. Again, without looking at individuals, statistically such children and such families, overall, have worse outcomes in a variety of categories. There have been a number of books written about this. And the greater the rate of out of wedlock births, the greater the social ills in the population.
The story of Adam and Eve is the first account in the bible after creation itself, and it concerns marriage. When marriage is undermined, individuals and society suffer.
The world was not one big utopia prior to the 1960’s. But the sexual revolution DID have a huge effect on the direction of society, and it was not good. The results are documented and convincing. Mary Eberstadt’s recent book “Adam and Eve After the Pill,” summarizes them quite well. If Paul VI could have lived to see the actual results of the disregard of his encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” he might have stated his case more forcefully. Even so, everything he warned about has in fact occurred.
That made me smile, thanks and well said.
