When a great revolution takes place, there will be the makings of a counter-revolution. For there will always be many people who dislike the revolution, even hate it with a passion.
When the great French Revolution took place, it was hated by many people, e.g., most of the nobility and all ardent Catholics (most French Catholics then, like most American Catholics today, were not awfully ardent). When the Bolshevik Revolution took place, many people living in the immense Russian Empire hated it. When the Nazi Revolution took place in Germany, many Germans hated it.
And when the Sexual Revolution (SR) took place in America, a revolution that began in the 1960s and continues to this day, many American Catholics and Protestants hated it.
Haters of revolution, if they are well organized and well-led, can become a significant, perhaps even a successful, counter-revolution. Hence, those leading the revolution have little choice but to crush the budding counter-revolution.
In France, the counterrevolution was crushed with the guillotine and the war in the Vendée. In Russia, the counter-revolution was crushed with a civil war and a homicidal dictatorship. In Germany, there was no need for a civil war; a homicidal dictatorship was sufficient. In all such cases, a vigorous propaganda campaign is an important element of the repression, a campaign that stresses the goodness of the revolution and the wickedness of its opponents.
In the case of the American Sexual Revolution, the revolutionaries have not (at least not so far) used violence against their Christian foes. They have largely limited themselves to the use of propaganda, important elements of which have been satire and mockery. The revolutionaries make great fun of pro-chastity Christians, for instance, as if chastity, so far from being the admirable thing that Christians from the age of the Apostles have always thought it to be, is a thing that quite naturally provokes hilarity in people of good sense.
In this propaganda war, America’s great secular propaganda machines – the entertainment industry (movies, TV, popular music), the journalistic media (both print and electronic), the publishing industry, our leading colleges and universities, many of our public schools, and the Democratic Party – have been ardent supporters of the pro-SR cause.
As a result, the pro-chastity party – a party almost wholly composed of old-school Protestants (not liberal Protestants, who have accommodated to the sexual revolution) plus old-school Catholics (i.e., strictly orthodox, church-going Catholics) – has pretty much been laughed off the stage.
Of course, there were, and still are, millions of Americans who hate the SR. But they have never been very well led or very well organized.
The Catholic bishops of the United States missed a golden opportunity early on in the SR. A potential counterrevolution had tens of millions of potential supporters. But it lacked effective leadership. Protestant Evangelicals like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell offered themselves as leaders, and they had limited success. But they were unable really to do the job that needed to be done. For one thing, they offered a leadership that Catholics would be unable to follow since these “leaders” came from a wing of Protestantism that had always made a great point of despising the Catholic religion.
If the American Catholic bishops had spoken with one voice, however, one very loud voice, and if they had utilized the many thousands of parish pulpits at their disposal, might have weakened the SR and blunted its disastrous impact on American society. But the bishops have done too little.
From time to time they issue quiet pro forma denunciations of abortion, and some of the more courageous among them occasionally denounce homosexuality and urge Catholics to avoid participation in PRIDE celebrations. But their parish pulpits rarely preach about sexual sin and virtue, and little effort has been made to construct an anti-SR alliance with old-school Protestants.
If the bishops had stood forth and declared, “We will lead the counter-revolution,” they would have found many followers among old-school Catholics and Protestants. But they didn’t. A golden opportunity missed.
This brings me to Fiducia supplicans (FS), the recent Vatican declaration telling priests that it is unobjectionable – in certain circumstances – to bless homosexual couples.
Not being a theologian, I will not comment on the theological merit (or lack of merit) of this document. And not being a Francis-ologist (if that be the correct name for those who have expert knowledge of Pope Francis and his way of thinking), I will have nothing to say about the long-range vision of Pope Francis.
But I’m an ex-politician and a rather careful student of American culture and politics. And so I will be to my last and will offer some comments on the political and cultural impact FS is likely to have in America.
The first thing we have to note is that most Americans who have heard of FS – whether Catholics or Protestants or non-Christians, and whether they be pro-SR or anti-SR – perceive FS as a significant victory for the LGBTQ+ movement, a movement which, as I see it, has as one of its aims to undermine and destroy the Christian ideal of sexual morality, hence Christianity itself.
Most people see FS as the Catholic Church giving ground to the LGBTQ+ gang. They see FS as a sign that Catholicism, like liberal Protestantism, will eventually remove homosexual practice from its list of serious sins. Defenders of FS can tell people, all they want, that they are mistaken to see things that way; all the same, that’s how they see it.
Second, the American Catholic bishops are once again offered a golden opportunity to put themselves at the head of the SR counter-revolution. But to do this, they will have to do something that is almost a psychological impossibility for a Catholic bishop: they will have to make a public declaration of their disagreement with the pope.
That being a great improbability, FS, I fear, will provoke an acceleration of Catholicism’s downhill slide both here and abroad.
