In 1968, something terrible happened in the Church

Here's a lengthy essay from L'Osservatore Romano, written by Francis Cardinal Stafford, about the chaos that resulted from Humanae Vitae. The Catholic friend and reader who sent it to me says that this essay "encapsulates the history of Catholic life in America in my lifetime." It is an extraordinary, and extraordinarily personal, reflection by an American cardinal who was a young priest in 1968. Excerpts:

Eight years of priestly ministry from 1958 to 1966 in Washington and Baltimore broadened my experience. It didn't take long to discover changes in Americans' attitudes towards the virtue of purity. Both cities were undergoing sharp increases in out-of-wedlock pregnancies. The rate in Baltimore's inner city was about 18% in 1966 and had been climbing for several years. In 1965-1966, the Baltimore Metropolitan Health and Welfare Council undertook a study to advise the city government in how to address the issue. At that time, the board members of the Council, including myself, had uncritical faith in experts and social research. Even the II Vatican Council had expressed unfettered confidence in the role of benevolent experts (Gaudium et Spes, 57). Not one of my professional acquaintances anticipated the crisis of trust which was just around the corner in the relations between men and women. Our vision was incapable of establishing conditions of justice and of purity of heart in which wonder and appreciation can find play. We were already anachronistic and without hope. We ignored the texture of life.

There were signs even then of the disasters facing children, both born and unborn. As a caseworker and priest throughout the 1960s, part of my ministry involved counseling inner-city families and single parents. My first awareness of a parishioner using hard drugs was in 1961. A sixteen-year old had been jailed in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. At the time of my late afternoon visit to him, he was experiencing drug withdrawal unattended and alone in a tiny cell. His screams filled the corridors and adjoining cells. Through the iron bars dividing us, I was horror-stricken watching him in his torment. The abyss he was looking into was unimaginably terrifying. In this drugged youth writhing in agony on the floor next to an open toilet I saw the bitter fruits of the estrangement of men and women. His mother, separated from her husband, lived with her younger children in a sweltering third floor flat on Light Street in old South Baltimore. The father was non-existent for them. The failure of men in their paternal and spousal roles was unfolding before my eyes and ears. Since then, more and more American men have refused to accept responsibility for their sexuality.

Cdl. Stafford describes a meeting of Washington-area priests, immediately after the encyclical was issued, in which priests were expected to sign their names to a public statement protesting the Pope's teaching reaffirming the ban on artificial contraception:

I could not sign it. My earlier letter to Cardinal Shehan came to mind. I remained convinced of the truth of my judgment and conclusions. Noting that my seat was last in the packed basement, I listened to each priest's response, hoping for support. It didn't materialize. Everyone agreed to sign. There were no abstentions. As the last called upon, I felt isolated. The basement became suffocating. By now it was night. The room was charged with tension. Something epochal was taking place. It became clear that the leaders' strategy had been carefully mapped out beforehand. It was moving along without a hitch. Their rhetorical skills were having their anticipated effect. They had planned carefully how to exert what amounted to emotional and intellectual coercion. Violence by overt manipulation was new to the Baltimore presbyterate.

The leader's reaction to my refusal was predictable and awful. The whole process now became a grueling struggle, a terrible test, a Peirasmòs. The priest/leader, drawing upon some scatological language from his Marine Corp past in the II World War, responded contemptuously to my decision. He tried to force me to change. He became visibly angry and verbally abusive. The underlying 'fraternal' violence became more evident. He questioned and then derided my integrity. He taunted me to risk my ecclesiastical 'future,' although his reference was more anatomically specific. The abuse went on.

Goodbye, Good Men didn't start yesterday. More:

The dissent of a few Sulpician seminary professors compounded my disorientation. In their ancient Baltimore Seminary I had first caught on to the connection between freedom, interiority, and obedience. By every ecclesial measure they should have been aware that the process they supported that evening exceeded the "norms of licit dissent." But they showed no concern for the gravity of that theological and pastoral moment. They saw nothing unbecoming in the mix of publicity and theology. They expressed no impatience then or later over the coercive nature of the August meeting. Nor did any of the other priests present. One diocesan priest did request privately later that night that his name be removed before the statement's publication in the morning paper.

For a long time, I wondered about the meaning of the event. It was a cataclysm which was difficult to survive intact.

In this startlingly candid memoir, Cdl Stafford ties the collapse of the institutional Church's spirit in that moment to the nervous breakdown happening across the West -- including race riots in Baltimore that summer. But he also discerns this:

But that night was not a total loss. The test was unexpected and unwelcome. Its unhinging consequences continue. Abusive, coercive dissent has become a reality in the Church and subjects her to violent, debilitating, unproductive, chronic controversies. But I did discover something new. Others also did. When the moment of Christian witness came, no Christian could be coerced who refused to be. Despite the novelty of being treated as an object of shame and ridicule, I did not become "ashamed of the Gospel" that night and found "sweet delight in what is right." It was not a bad lesson. Ecclesial obedience ran the distance.

My discovery that Christ was the first to despise shame was gut rending in its existential and providential reality. "Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame." Paradoxically, in the hot, August night a new sign shown unexpectedly on the path to future life. It read, "Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered."

The violence of the initial disobedience was only a prelude to further and more pervasive violence. Priests wept at meetings over the manipulation of their brothers. Contempt for the truth, whether aggressive or passive, has become common in Church life. Dissenting priests, theologians and laypeople have continued their coercive techniques. From the beginning, the press has used them to further its own serpentine agenda.

You really should read the whole thing. It's an incredible act of witness, and explanation. For all the agonies the Anglicans and other Protestant bodies are suffering, the Roman Catholics have not escaped them, though the institutional church looks strong from the outside. As I've written before, the Eastern Orthodox Church shouldn't think that it is immune. (Now that I'm Orthodox, there are some things I would obviously change about that piece, but I think the basic point holds up: the storm of modernity that has devastated Catholicism in the West will not spare the East).