Catholics, beware! The bishops are coming! With radical changes! The United States Catholic Bishops, finally, after 44 years of sitting on their hands, are coming out swinging against their very own, who, they fear, have fallen victim to moral decay.
In the document "Marriage" (www.usccb.org/laity/LoveandLife), promulgated at last November's meeting in Baltimore, the bishops are finally taking a moral swipe at every Catholic who's fallen victim to contrary conventional wisdom.
Paraphrasing their message: "Heads up, ladies and gentlemen, you can no longer have it both ways either publicly practice the teachings of our Church or stop calling yourselves Catholic.
"In case you don't know, here's what the Church has to say about an issue that affects everyone - marriage, a lifelong commitment of one man and one woman to each other. Call the alliance of two males/females anything but marriage. Why? Because it's intrinsically incapable of procreating other humans.
"Having kids is not an option, as many think. What's more, every sexual union must be natural and open to life. That is, excluding any artificial contraceptive, be it pill, condom, tied tubes, you name it. No artificial insemination, either. Every contrary act is gravely evil, which, if persisted in and unforgiven by our all-merciful loving God, has dire eternal consequences.
"That does not mean God wants us to be irrational rabbits. Procreation must be human, that is, guided by our higher faculty of reason rather than below-the-belt animality. Our loving Designer knows couples need freedom to enjoy sex without conception - that's why He's equipped the female body with extended monthly time-outs of natural infertility. He's also telling us that great rational and emotional joy can be achieved through so-called NFP (Natural family planning), wherein temperature-monitoring can yield morally-acceptable results far more reliable than, for instance, risk-of-rupture condoms."
Formerly, our grandparents agonized over so-called "rhythm," a very erratic version of NFP, predicting infertility by calendar counting from a woman's monthly "clean-out." But, regularity was so thrown off by variables like emotion or a cold that most grandparents alive today were probably unintended 'oops.' Parents like mine didn't ditch their children, thank goodness. Most embraced their initially-unintended babies as gifts from God and devoted all their energies to raising 6, 8, 10 and 12 kids, which, in those days, provoked anything but today's all-knowing raised eyebrows. In fact, just one kid might have.
Failing miserably in their practice of rhythm, Catholics stormed confessionals every Saturday to seek forgiveness so they could receive Holy Communion with their clueless-offspring at next morning's mandatory Mass. In some parishes, four and five priests routinely heard long lines of confessions every weekend.
Just after Vatican II, a bogus approval of artificial contraception leaked to the public from a secret papal commission. Overnight, the Catholic world underwent a blast far greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and the resulting multi-millions of unborn casualties exponentially dwarf those horribly-incinerated Japanese thousands. Pope Paul VI's nay-sayings in the encyclical Humanae Vitae two years later didn't matter - no one listened nor cared. John-Paul II's roaring pleas had little effect, either; ditto for Benedict XVI, so far.
So, now, two generations later, maybe one priest hears a handful of confessions in the fewer and fewer churches still remaining. Unfazed and unafraid, Catholics, like everyone else, decide if and how many kids they want, and hardly a priest or bishop has ever said 'boo.'
But, as Bob Dylan intoned way back, "The times, they are a-changing," finally. Now, the emboldened U.S. Catholic bishops are prepared to insist on no more contraception, no more same-sex "marriage," no more unmarried cohabitation, no more divorce. No more, "Two kids are plenty. From now on, we contracept."
Two kids may be plenty, as each family decides what it can handle intelligently and morally. No kids may be plenty, if one or the other spouse is infertile and they choose not to adopt. Temporary and permanent separation of married spouses or annulment is still available, but, no second marriages as long as earlier bonds still exist. Every sexual union must be free of contraceptives and open to life, as it was for Sarai and Elizabeth, the elderly mothers respectively of Isaac and John the Baptist.
Teeth-gnashing disaffected Catholics are readying their bellicose taunts, as the ex-thumb-twiddling bishops, instead of wimping out behind the inexcusable but numerically-miniscule clergy-abuse scandal, are finally displaying the far-too-long-absent intestinal gumption proper to the male species. No more Joe Biden-speak that Vatican II taught us to think and act like adults. Vatican II taught us adults to think and act like docile children who willingly embrace Church teachings on our own, not simply because Mom says so.
The same goes for all woefully-misinformed free-wheeling Pelosis, Kerrys, Coakleys, Kennedys and their legions of admirers. While we're at it, fellow God-fearing Americans, let's join those ex-twiddling prelates in praying that President Obama, too, will see abortion for the profound evil it really is and never again label the unwanted pregnancies of his lovely daughters as, in his words, a punishment from God.
Roger Reidy lives in Framingham.
