An Article about Catholics: "Artificial Birth Control: A Battle Lost."

[mdgspencer]

see Artificial Birth Control: A Battle Lost

The battle losses are immense as shown by the precipitous decline of baptismal rates in the US Church to historically low levels: about a 75% plunge from 1950 – 2018.

For approximately the last 50 years, there has been a wholesale adoption by the general Catholic population of a secular, largely pagan mentality regarding the regulating of births. What is this mentality? It is essentially a moral decision made by the individual or couple to remain largely sequestered from any Church teaching of moral dogma.

 

[0Scarlett_nidiyilii]

Who actually lost the battle?

I would argue that the Church has been proven right.

 

[MiserereMeiDei]

The laity and the hierarchy share the blame. Whole conferences of bishops rebelled against the teaching. Many lay people knowing what the church teaches and has always taught feel they are their own authority on the matter.

The faithful don’t have this problem.

 

[vz71]

I would disagree that the battle is lost.

We are today starting to see a resurgence into the church.

The pendulum is starting to swing back.

 

[1ke]

The author states “all data herein from personal compilations”.

The author is using # baptisms reported in the OCD as a proxy for “Catholic fertility rates”. Also using census data and CARA data, as well as OCD, but doesn’t explain statistical methods used or how these sources were used.

While I’m not arguing that some, even many, Catholics use contraception or that birth rates have declined, I do think this article oversimplifies and uses bad survey and sampling techniques to arrive at conclusions.

The author doesn’t account for the fact that across the board men and women are marrying later and starting families later and that too contributes to smaller family sizes.

And the author also doesn’t account for babies born into families that might identify as Catholic in a census but might not bring their child forth for baptism. Nearly all Catholic families had their babies baptized back in the day, now i don’t think that’s the case. I regularly see parents bringing 4, 5, and 6 year olds and wanting to baptize them because they never got around to it or were away from the church, etc.

 

[edwest211]

The massive push for artificial contraception began in 1967 along with attacks on Catholic institutions of higher learning which gradually began to mirror their secular counterparts, which were also under attack by anarchists and radicals. The push to distort the true meaning of human sexuality occurred 24 hours after the release of Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI. Some Catholic theologians, going far beyond their authority, added confusion by "correcting’ the Pope! It was called “… an event unprecedented in the history of the Church.” They claimed that contraception was permissible in some cases. In seminaries in the 1970s, Humanae Vitae was taught along with the lie that the Church would change her teaching about artificial contraception. So, when they became priests and parishioners asked, they told them it was a personal conscience matter.

Catholics should know how we got from point A to point B.

 

[commenter]

One can argue that the Christian battle itself is, in every century, “lost”.
How many Christians take up their Cross daily? How many walk the intense road of conversion called for in the New Testament?

Christ never promised the Catholic Church would “win” in the sense of popularity. The Church would “Lose” if it abandoned Christian truth, as some denominations have done. But it hasn’t, so it’s still “winning” in the only sense that counts.