Boston College Magazine on the Catholic Contraceptive Sellout

The teaser line for the article summarizes it nicely: “When the Massachusetts legislature voted in 1966 to end the last all-out ban on contraceptives in the nation, it was with the approval and assistance of the Boston Archdiocese.”

Catholic World News gave a short writeup of this in December of 2003, but Boston College Magazine — by no means a traditionalist think-tank — gives the pre-history of what amounts to a Catholic conspiracy to undermine Catholic teaching and public morals.  (By “Catholic” in the first instance of the last sentence, I mean, “official,” or “bureaucratic,” or “institutional” Catholicism.) Note the involvement of the nefarious Rev. John Courtney Murray, S.J., and Cardinal Cushing’s hopes that this undermining of Catholic moral teaching would have the at-least-implicit sanction of the pending Vatican II document on religious liberty. As CWN pointed out, Cardinal Cushing was the author of the “personally opposed, but…” line that pseudocatholic pols would use, and are using, to ensure that God and politics have as little to do with each other as possible.

It is very sad to read of clandestine meetings joining Planned Parenthood agents with representatives of a Catholic Archdiocese, but this history ought not to be whitewashed, no more than that of the Renaissance papacies should be papered over. Fifteen or so years before, it was this same Archdiocesan establishment, working with the Society to which Rev. John Courtney Murray belonged, that did in Father Feeney.

Consider this with the “hermeneutic of continuity”: Undermine dogma, and eventually you undermine morals; undermine them both, and you’re working for the enemy, which is exactly what Boston College Magazine documents in sickening detail.