We seem to have forgotten what it means to exercise freedom together with moral responsibility

Letter from Rome: 

Religion and Liberty at the Family Synod

by Kishore Jayabalan

Dear friends of Istituto Acton,

Nearly ten years ago, while preparing for an interview on the life and legacy of Pope St. John Paul II, CNN’s Richard Questasked me which aspects of liberty are of interest to the Acton Institute. He seemed rather disappointed that it was the economic rather than the sexual kind and then proceeded to accuse me on-air of calling the late pontiff a free-trade ideologue and, horror of horrors, a capitalist. (See the interview here.) Something tells me he would have reacted differently if we promoted women priests, contraception, divorce, homosexuality and abortion instead.

Some things never change. Religious and secular progressives held out similar hopes that the recently-concluded Extraordinary Session of the Synod of Bishops on “Pastoral Challenges to the Family in the Context of Evangelization” would be the first step towards allowing Catholics the same types of sexual license that are now commonplace in the Western world. It’s as if we’re back in 1968, just before the publication of Blessed Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae and maybe, just maybe, the pope isn’t Catholic after all.

What is it about sex and the Catholic Church that commands so much overheated attention? Progressives have achieved nearly all their objectives when it comes to sexual liberation, short of requiring men to bear children. But until a 2,000-year-old divinely-founded institution comes to worship at the altar of libido, the war is not yet won. Strangely enough, I hear fewer people question fundamental mysteries of the faith, such as the Resurrection or the Trinity, than express strident disagreement over the Church’s teachings on human sexuality, which are easily accessible to anyone who’s willing to think a little bit about the matter.

It’s pretty clear that many people would rather not think about sex at all – just do it and get over whatever hang-ups we may have about it. The kind of talk you’d expect to hear from teenagers who want to escape the prudery of their oppressive parents, without stopping to consider that they resulted from their parents’ own sexual activity. What is perhaps more surprising is that some Catholic bishops are included in the many.

To paraphrase what I heard from a few evangelicals at a course I was teaching in the UK last week, what in the world is happening when the Catholic Church doesn’t stand up for marriage and family anymore, or at least not in ways recognizable to anyone born before 1980? Just as Richard Quest mistook economic liberty for sexual license in the Acton name, we seem to have forgotten what it means to exercise freedom together with moral responsibility; turning Lord Acton’s dictum on its head, we want to do only what we want, not what we ought.

The problem of “ought” is of course related to a larger crisis of authority and growing individualism....

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