Steven, I don't think there's anything particularly unique about the Philippines when it comes to the Catholic Church and sexual politics. From a year ago review of a Gary Wills book, partners.nytimes.com
In 1864, Pius IX denounced those who dared assert that ''the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile
himself to, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization.'' Lord Acton -- like
Wills, both a distinguished historian and a scholar quite able to meet the Vatican's theologians on their
own ground -- realized that Pius was making Catholicism look ridiculous. So Acton did everything he
could to persuade the First Vatican Council not to give Pius what he most wanted -- ratification of the
doctrine of papal infallibility. Acton lost that fight, but only after Pius had used every trick in the book to
whip the conciliar fathers into line.
Pius IX is, Wills says, ''a presence in the Vatican to this day.'' Present-day papal deceitfulness and
arrogance are, for Wills, most vividly illustrated by Paul VI's taking the question of birth control out of the
hands of the Second Vatican Council. Paul, he says, was terrified that the fathers would repudiate the
anticontraception pronouncements of Pius XI, who in 1930 had announced what Monty Python called
the ''every sperm is sacred'' view. (''The Divine Majesty,'' Pius XI wrote, ''regards with greatest
detestation this horrible crime,'' that is, spilling one's seed upon the ground, or into a condom.) So Paul
decided that it would be better to make life miserable for further generations of Catholics than to allow
the Council to admit that a predecessor had goofed. Wills says that ''Humanae Vitae,'' Paul's 1968
encyclical reaffirming the ban on contraception, ''is not really about sex. It is about authority. Paul
decided the issue on that ground alone".
The current Pontiff's apparent approach to his predecessors' various pronouncements on the subject is to canonize them all, and fix the various goofy doctrines as firmly in concrete as possible. |
