When did the Sexual Revolution start?

Divorce: the proto-sin to launch 

a Sexual Revolution – Pope Leo XIII

BY HILARY WHITE

When did the Sexual Revolution start? It seems like a no-brainer doesn’t it? Most people would place it about the early to mid 1960s. The publication of that book by Germaine Greer, or the invention and marketing of The Pill, right?

Given a moment to think about it, most people would probably amend that and say it probably had its roots earlier than that. Maybe it goes back to whenever Germaine Greer and other academic feminists were in university working on their ideas and Dr. Pincus was working on his science project. Nearly everyone would agree, however, that by the time Pope Paul VI issued his famous 1968 encyclical on artificial birth control, Humanae Vitae, no one had seen that horse for a long time and the barn doors had actually fallen off.

But how did the doors get opened in the first place? How could an entire civilisation’s sexual mores be so radically altered in a single generation? Was there one, “proto-sin” that launched the whole business? What allowed these things to gain a foothold after centuries in which all the Christian world, since the fall of the Roman Empire, founded its daily life and polities on the solidity of marriage and the generation and raising of children?

Even a brief glance at history will show that the frenzy of sexual disorderliness that so characterises our times did not start in the 20th century at all. The first legal steps in creating the destruction we see today was the loosening of the divorce laws in the 19th century. Without the legal bastion of indissoluble marriage, the supports that held everything else in place with regards to the family were, one by one, eroded and finally abandoned. And the Church had been warning against it for a while.

Paragraph 29 can perhaps give us a hint about the origin of the social catastrophe we currently find ourselves in. Leo clearly equates the protection of the family with the protection both of women and children and of the state. He writes, “Truly, it is hardly possible to describe how great are the evils that flow from divorce.”Pope Leo XIII, one of the towering figures of Catholic history, published the encyclical “Arcanum divinae sapientia” (The Mystery of Divine Wisdom) on marriage in 1880, his fourth out of an enormous final total of 85. Popes don’t choose their encyclical topics at random, and it is clear from its early appearance in his papacy that he was seriously worried about the state of marriage, the protection and nurturing of which he linked to the inherent dignity of women.

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