Grimmiges zum Tag

Am Ende des HV-Tags noch zwei Links zu First-Things-Texten zum Thema.

Joseph Bottum: The Anniversary of Humanae Vitae (vom FT-Blog):

Simply as a piece of argumentative prose, the 1968 encyclical was badly constructed. It lacked the romantic elements that Pope John Paul II would later put in his far more persuasive Theology of the Body, and it appealed to the authority of Christian tradition at a moment in which hardly anyone was willing to listen to authority. Still, along the way, Paul VI issued four general prophecies in Humanae Vitae, and on about all four of them, he seems to have been right.

Mary Eberstadt: The Vindication of Humanae Vitae (aus dem aktuellen Heft von First Things), und zwar durchaus mit grimmigem Humor:

Considering the human spectacle today, forty years after the document whose widespread rejection reportedly broke Paul VI’s heart, one can’t help but wonder how he might have felt if he had glimpsed only a fraction of the evidence now available—whether any of it might have provoked just the smallest wry smile.

After all, it would take a heart of stone not to find at least some of what’s now out there funny as hell. There is the ongoing empirical vindication in one arena after another of the most unwanted, ignored, and ubiquitously mocked global teaching of the past fifty years. There is the fact that the Pill, which was supposed to erase all consequences of sex once and for all, turned out to have huge consequences of its own. There is the way that so many Catholics, embarrassed by accusations of archaism and driven by their own desires to be as free for sex as everyone around them, went racing for the theological exit signs after Humanae Vitae—all this just as the world with its wicked old ways began stockpiling more evidence for the Church’s doctrine than anyone living in previous centuries could have imagined, and while still other people were actually being brought closer to the Church because she stood exactly as that “sign of contradiction” when so many in the world wanted otherwise.

Yet instead of vindication for the Church, there is demoralization; instead of clarity, mass confusion; instead of more obedience, ever less. Really, the perversity is, well, perverse. In what other area does humanity operate at this level of extreme, daily, constant contradiction? Where is the Boccaccio for this post-Pill Decameron? It really is all very funny, when you stop to think about it. So why isn’t everybody down here laughing?

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