Quote:
In 1968, Cardinal Patrick OBoyle of Washington, D.C., disciplined nineteen priests who had publicly dissented from Pope Paul VIs teaching in the encyclical Humanae Vitae. Three years later, the Vaticans Congregation for the Clergy decreed that Cardinal OBoyle should lift canonical penalties against those priests who informed the cardinal privately that they agreed that the Churchs teaching on the objective evil of contraception was an authentic ex-pression of (the) magisterium. The Congregation explicitly avoided requiring that the priests, who had dissented publicly, retract their dissent publicly.
The Truce of 1968 taught theologians, priests, and other Church professionals that dissent from authoritative teaching was, essentially, cost-free.
The Truce of 1968 taught bishops inclined to defend authoritative Catholic teaching vigorously that they should think twice about doing so, if controversy were likely to follow; Rome, fearing schism, was nervous about public action against dissent.
The result was that a generation of Catholic bishops came to think of themselves less as authoritative teachers than as moderators of an ongoing dialogue whose primary responsibility was to keep everyone in the conversation and in play.
And Catholic lay people learned, as I wrote, that virtually everything in the Church was questionable: doctrine, morals, the priesthood, the episcopate, the lot.
Thus the impulse toward Cafeteria Catholicism got a decisive boost from the Truce of 1968:
. . . if the bishops and the Holy See were not going to defend seriously the Churchs teaching on this matter, then picking-and-choosing in a supermarket of doctrinal and moral possibilities seemed, not simply all right, but actually admirable an exercise in maturity, as was often suggested at the time.
More . . .
If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain. --Maya Angelou
