From the conclusion of Souls and Bodies: The Birth Control Controversy and the Collapse of Confession by Leslie Woodcock Tentler (in Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity, Lacey and Oakley, eds. 2011):
Authority, however, can be undermined in multiple ways. Refusing to engage in honest dialogue, keeping silent when social developments cry out for a wise and nuanced response–such things condemn an institution to irrelevance. Irrelevant institutions, by definition, lack authority. When it comes to sex, I very much fear, the Catholic Church has drifted into irrelevance with near-disastrous consequences. The hopes of the 1960s had to with more than a change in the teaching on contraception; they centered on the fuller development of what had already emerged as a rich and positive theology of marriage, a theology to which sex was integral but of which it was only a part. At what time in our history have lay Catholics been in greater need of such theological development than the decades since the council? What greater service could the Church have performed for those numerous societies, including our own, where marriage is a rapidly eroding institution? Not that innovative theological development would have solved all problems, most notably those posed by homosexuality and, given the demographic realities, premarital sex. Nor would Catholics, in all likelihood, have been spared rising rates of divorce, although such are not beyond the influence of church or synagogue. Still less would Catholics have continued to confess at the rates of the 1950s, for–at least in preconciliar form–the sacrament has clearly ceased for most Catholics to be an adequate means of spiritual discipline and moral growth. (Would the revised rite of penance have fared better, one wonders, had the postconciliar laity been less alienated?) But the Church would surely have earned the respect of a great many Catholics and a voice in our national conversation about the purposes of sex and marriage. Even the young, who clearly hunger for greater stability in marriage than their society appears to support, might have heard that voice and found it worth listening to.
Please discuss.
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