Those of us old enough to remember, can connect the dots. Modern Thomistic theology was revived and fairly popular in the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, that revival ended in the 1960s, post Vatican II, when the influence of Thomism went into decline almost exactly and coincidentally during the decade of the Woodstock concert in New York in 1968. It is no accident that the explosion of the pleasure seeking drug culture began about that time. I remember a young lady acquaintance of mine at the time dismissing natural law morality as a lot of nonsense.
Well, nature abhors a vacuum, as they say. Throw one morality out and another takes its place. Thomism is in decline, and hedonistic pleasure seeking is now the ruling moral philosophy in the Western world. As Pope Francis has complained, we live in a throw-away culture, even to the point of scrapping our unborn children, or maybe removing organ parts of their shredded bodies for Planned Parenthood to sell on the open market.
Hedonism is the view that whatever gives me pleasure, whatever makes me feel good, is right. If it feels good, do it. As one of my friends has put it, the hedonist’s prayer might go something like this: “Hallowed be MY name; MY kingdom come; MY will be done, on earth as it is in hell.”
According to the hedonists, whatever opposes your feelgood sensation is the real immorality. That is why the hedonists will never stop trying to persuade Catholics that they should feel guilty about opposing all their desires for illicit pleasure, as long as their illicit pleasure is self-directed or is between consenting adults.
This is exactly the opposite of what St. Thomas taught, which is that we ought not to be ruled by our passions, but by our built-in and instinctive knowledge of the natural law God has planted in our hearts, which is for our own good, and for our happiness, and ultimately for our salvation.
All of the above is, or should be, understood by every Catholic bishop who has been properly trained in theology. It should not be necessary for the bishops to have to have a synod to re=examine what they already know to be true, and what the Catholic Church has taught regarding natural law since the days of St. Paul, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas.
