Contraception: Confessions of a Boomer Priest

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rev-know-it-all.com/2012/2012—03-04.html

You gotta read all three pages. It’s an astounding confession and an amazingly insightful analysis of where the church has been since the publication of Humanae Vitae and the rebellion it sparked by a priest who was in the thick of it all along.

Must read for all catholics. (and I don’t say that every day)
 
*The pill gave us recreational sex that hasn’t really been as much fun as we had hoped, especially for women who now go to the same dreary jobs that men go to because the tax man demands a double income just to keep a roof over her head and that of 2.3 children. If daddy bails for the trophy wife, then mommy will just have to get a second job. *Women can now be lawyers and senators and brick layers and waitresses and anything they want except mothers.
**
Just tell someone you’ve got eight children, and see the look they give you. It says “Don’t you know that children are a form of pollution, burdening the planet with their disposable diapers and green house gas emissions? Have you no self respect?” or my favorite usually addressed to full time mothers: “You mean you’re just a mom? Don’t you have a real job?”

I am bookmarking this. Thank you SO MUCH!!!

:yup::love::clapping:

The prevailing sentiment is that children are a disease, preventable through birth control, curable through abortion. Dear Lord Jesus, forgive us!
 
TheRealJuliane said:
The prevailing sentiment is that children are a disease, preventable through birth control, curable through abortion. Dear Lord Jesus, forgive us!
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True enough. And judging by the priorities implicit in Obamacare HHS rules, it’s a worse disease than diabetes or cancer! (nobody that I’m aware of is proposing giving away medicines that treat those, but contraception MUST be ‘free’).
 
This essay is an absolutely SCATHING condemnation of the last 40 years of Catholic watered-down theology. I mean, we all suspected this was going on, but we have never heard it from an insider.

(some of us weren’t even in the Church at the time, but looking back, we can now see how the Church went so far astray.)

God bless him. God keep him. I wish he was MY priest.
 
Thank you, Manualman, for bringing this to our attention. I am looking forward to part 4. I am from the generation of “follow your conscience”. We need to pray for the priests and the laity formed during those years.
 
Reading it just made me sad. His dismissive tone towards women like me - a woman with a career I’ve worked hard for, that helps me live out the Gospels as best I can, that doing is a kind of prayer for me, and a woman with a husband and family I love and honor more than I can begin to articulate - makes me wonder if there’s a place for me in his Catholic world. To him I’m just a “working drone” who doesn’t define herslef solely by her kinship relationships. And who colors her hair.

Wow.

This Lent I’ve been asking myself some pretty hard questions about my faith and if there’s a place for me at the Catholic table. And I feel as if Fr. Simon just pointed me towards the exit.

Luna
 
Luna, you have to understand his viewpoint. He’s not aiming this at individual women, but at the whole societal shift from women fulfilling their roles as wives and mothers to working women who use contraception to keep children from interfering with their careers. He’s telling us the history of how his part of this societal shift came about, from the inside. It’s not meant to insult any woman, just make us think about what used to be valued and treasured and isn’t any more.

Why would you leave Jesus?
 
This really spoke to me, "Women can now be lawyers and senators and brick layers and waitresses and anything they want except mothers. "

Maybe I’m just reading it through my own lens, but it seemed more like a condemnation of society than of those of us who work. I’m in the process on re-arranging things so that I can quit my very demanding but very lucrative job at the end of the year. Universally, my friends and family think its a terrible “waste” for me not to work - even my own mom who was a sahm. People can’t seem to see the non-material value I can add to my family by staying at home.

I think every family should make the decision that works best for them, I just wish society would value each decision equally.
 
Luna, you are not alone in feeling off-put by this priest’s confession. It’s not his fault in ignoring Humanae Vitae that women now have the option to go to college, pursue a professional career and earn an income that could support themselves and/or a family. Instead of trying to shame women for also identifying themselves by what they do and not just “whose (wife, mother, daughter) they are,” why are we not lamenting that too many men do not see being a good father as their highest calling, as God and nature has designed?
 
Thanks so much for posting this. I will be sharing it with my husband to read. I’ll be waiting for the next part as well.
 
Luna,
I think you should copy your post and send it to Fr. Know-It-All and see how he responds.

I have to say, I did find his viewpoint interesting, and I felt he really nailed it with the part about people saying large families are a drain on resources and then described the huge carbon footprint left by even the smallest of affluent families. I thinks he’s 100% correct that our society in the US values “stuff” over children. And I fear that’s true of me personally. A lot to think about.
 
StJudePray4Me said:
Luna,
I think you should copy your post and send it to Fr. Know-It-All and see how he responds.

I have to say, I did find his viewpoint interesting, and I felt he really nailed it with the part about people saying large families are a drain on resources and then described the huge carbon footprint left by even the smallest of affluent families. ** I thinks he’s 100% correct that our society in the US values “stuff” over children**. And I fear that’s true of me personally. A lot to think about.
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Of course that is true! Look at all the tallying up of what it “costs” to raise even one child now days! It just SCREAMS, “Children are a poor investment!” Much better to just work your rear end off and pile up money and toys and have a self centered life! I am always tempted to tally up the REWARDS of having children to counter those ridiculous cost-of-raising-a-child news reports.

I would have more children, if it had been up to me. As many as God would have given me.

😦
 
Luna_Lovecraft said:
Reading it just made me sad. His dismissive tone towards women like me - a woman with a career I’ve worked hard for, that helps me live out the Gospels as best I can, that doing is a kind of prayer for me, and a woman with a husband and family I love and honor more than I can begin to articulate - makes me wonder if there’s a place for me in his Catholic world. To him I’m just a “working drone” who doesn’t define herslef solely by her kinship relationships. And who colors her hair.
Click to expand...
Luna, it’s easy to read things into statements when you expect them to be there. But sometimes, they actually aren’t. Fr. Simon isn’t denigrating women who choose to have careers. He’s decrying a culture in which women have joined mysoginist men to say that that portion of your life is what DEFINES you rather than being simply what you do to support the ACTUALLY meaningful portions of your life: spouse, children, faith and community. Men for hundreds of years have made this tragic mistake. Women have only recently joined us. It’s not that work/career aren’t important. You have to feed your family, after all. It’s just that no matter how good a lawyer, doctor or welder you end up being, it’s all going to be forgotten by the world 5 years after you retire. But raising up a strong and healthy family is forever. That’s a message men have needed to learn for many generations. Women generally comprehended it far better until the last two or three generations. That’s why he’s sarcastic about “progress.” Going backwards isn’t progress.

Again, it isn’t the idea of women working that he finds so sad. It’s the idea that women have joined men in fundamentally misprioritizing the importance of what they invest themselves into in our culture. Work isn’t supposed to be who you ARE for women OR men. Read it again and you’ll see him say that pretty clearly. It’s when work becomes the major focus of your life that you are a loser “drone.”
 
manualman said:
Luna, it’s easy to read things into statements when you expect them to be there. But sometimes, they actually aren’t. Fr. Simon isn’t denigrating women who choose to have careers. He’s decrying a culture in which women have joined mysoginist men to say that that portion of your life is what DEFINES you rather than being simply what you do to support the ACTUALLY meaningful portions of your life: spouse, children, faith and community. Men for hundreds of years have made this tragic mistake. Women have only recently joined us. It’s not that work/career aren’t important. You have to feed your family, after all. It’s just that no matter how good a lawyer, doctor or welder you end up being, it’s all going to be forgotten by the world 5 years after you retire. But raising up a strong and healthy family is forever. That’s a message men have needed to learn for many generations. Women generally comprehended it far better until the last two or three generations. That’s why he’s sarcastic about “progress.” Going backwards isn’t progress.

Again, it isn’t the idea of women working that he finds so sad. It’s the idea that women have joined men in fundamentally misprioritizing the importance of what they invest themselves into in our culture. Work isn’t supposed to be who you ARE for women OR men. Read it again and you’ll see him say that pretty clearly. It’s when work becomes the major focus of your life that you are a loser “drone.”
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When we stopped welcoming children and started trying to prevent them from being conceived, it all went horribly wrong.

Also, I found it very sobering to consider the demographics of entire societies dominated by males since the females are being aborted or left to die…He mentions a society of “old men.” The problem is, those males are young, virile, and malcontented on the way to becoming old men…A very unstable situation. One way to re-set the balance is to have wars…thus sending the young men away on a quest that many of them will never return from…But there is no society on the earth that is aborting male babies and keeping the females…So there will be no way to re-balance the lack of females in the near future. In the meantime, we have every chance of simply running out of time to fix this.
 
I went back and checked my impressions for Luna’s sake. Here’s the quote that seems to have offended her the most:

“Women used to define themselves by their relationships. Now they are working drones just like men who define themselves by their dreary jobs, not by their relationships. When asked the question, “What are you?” We answer that we are lawyers or shop clerks or firemen or firewomen, bricklayers, soda jerks, whatever. We are not mom and dad, or spouses and lovers. We are our jobs, not our loves. This is the victory of feminism?”

Is this the ranting of a man who is denigrating women or the lament of a man who realized that the “progress” of the last 50 years was actually the transition from a society in which one of the two genders generally had a healthy perspective on the priorities of life to a case where both now have a warped sense of where our focus and priorities should be?
 
manualman said:
I went back and checked my impressions for Luna’s sake. Here’s the quote that seems to have offended her the most:

“Women used to define themselves by their relationships. Now they are working drones just like men who define themselves by their dreary jobs, not by their relationships. When asked the question, “What are you?” We answer that we are lawyers or shop clerks or firemen or firewomen, bricklayers, soda jerks, whatever. We are not mom and dad, or spouses and lovers. We are our jobs, not our loves. This is the victory of feminism?”

Is this the ranting of a man who is denigrating women or the lament of a man who realized that the “progress” of the last 50 years was actually the transition from a society in which one of the two genders generally had a healthy perspective on the priorities of life to a case where both now have a warped sense of where our focus and priorities should be?
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I think you are spot on. I also think anyone looking for an excuse to leave the Church will find one.
 
manualman said:
Luna, it’s easy to read things into statements when you expect them to be there. But sometimes, they actually aren’t. Fr. Simon isn’t denigrating women who choose to have careers. He’s decrying a culture in which women have joined mysoginist men to say that that portion of your life is what DEFINES you rather than being simply what you do to support the ACTUALLY meaningful portions of your life: spouse, children, faith and community.
Click to expand...
And here as an adult woman, I thought I had the perspicacity, prayer life, and brain power to define for myself what the meaningful parts of my life are. But apparently not.

And I think that’s the crux of my problem with the essay. In 2012 some of us are still trying to tell women where their place is, whether it’s people who denigrate SAHMs who make tremendous financial and lifestyle sacrifices only to be told they’re wasting their lives to others who seem to think that the reason I have a career is because some wacko feminazi shoved the Pill down my throat and enrolled me in college and made me waste my vocation.

Hyperbolic and over-reaching? Obviously yes, but no more hyperbolic and over-reaching that referring to working people as"drones."

Luna
 
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