Sexual misconduct has been and will be a problem for Church and society until the Second Coming.
But one has to ask, and no one seems to be asking it, how much has the sexual revolution of the 1960's contributed to the relaxation of restraints on the various temptation to one's disordered libido?
Who has been the primary culprit in the relaxation of the libido and any constraints that men and women might have exercised prior to the revolution?
Obviously it is the media, movies and television and the printed media. It is also the Playboy mentality that has infected us and was the precursor in the 1950's to what has happened since.
Think of all the media moguls in very high places facing their "MeToo" moments, not to mention what is happening in the Church.
Priests and bishops are affected by the loss of regulation, constraints and impulse controls as dictated by the media.
4 comments:
Another element, it seems to me, that contributed to the "Sexual Revolution" was the fact that sex and sexuality was rarely, if ever, discussed openly, even between husbands and wines and between parents and children.
Never - not once - did my mother talk to me about the "Birds and the Bees." I do recall coming home from school and finding a little booklet, "A Story About You," in my desk drawer. I was probably in 6th or 7th grade. I remember being very skeptical when an older kid in the neighborhood explained to us just how babies were made . . .
I recall that once - only once - the boys and the girls were separated and we went to different location in school to see a film.
The lack of honest, open, appropriate discussion of sex and human sexuality sort of underpins the "revolution." Had we been less skittish and less inclined to hide human sexuality, society might not have erupted so disastrously when sex came into the open.
Anon 12:20
Stuff and nonsense. Society erupted disastrously since the 1960s because sex is the most powerful of human motivators and the sensible rules that Christian Churches taught, at least in the 20th century, were suddenly and summarily cast aside. We have endless discussions about sex today, pornography is ubiquitous and social disarray is on display everywhere. We just learned of two priests in Florida doing it in a car but virtually on open display.
The whole thing happened because the pill was invented and women had no longer faced total ruination if they would engage before marriage in unprotected sex. Then came surgical abortion and in the last decade or so Plan B. The welfare state also made its contribution when women found that they need not have a husband to support child rearing because Uncle Sam, poor dunce, will foot the bills instead of the party of the second part responsible for the fertelization.
In fact today, procreation and rearing of the next generation, is not the prime objective of sexual activity. It may not even the second or third objective, since we get immigrants to take up the fertility slack of the native population. O course immigrants must be integrated into the receiving culture. That takes time 1 to 20 years at least or maybe even never if new arrivals profess a radically different religion and a radically different culture that blends as oil in water. That is what they are finding in Europe as waves and waves of humanity invade a tired and defunct western Europe.
See, how multi faceted a problem we have on hand. I am sure your Mom had not failed you utterly just because the neighbor kid was your first sex educator.
Finally, until about 1900 most people lived on farms. They learned about sex from watching the livestock reproduce year after year. By the first grade all of them had a PHD in matters of reproduction.
The question by the mid 1960's was "What is wrong with having unmarried sex?"
No one could answer that with apodictic certainty, other that from the religious sphere such as "Because God says it's wrong."
By then, the Church herself had abandoned Thomistic philosophy which was able to give an intelligent answer to the question, in favour of la Nouvelle Theologie which had no answers, and still does not. But by then too, the Church was throwing out everything that went before scandalising the faithful, and precipitating a massive loss of faith in Catholics. Without grounding in revelation you cannot ground any ethical issue in certainty, as ethics is a practical science, not a rigid mathematico-empirico science which predicts with considerable certainty events in the future. The sexual revolution was nothing more than a return to paganism, that is to say, a loss of Christian faith, and what that faith requires of a Christian.
Philip Larkin wrote in 1974 concerning the 'sexual revolution':
ANNUS MIRABILIS
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Larkin was, of course, being ironic. He never married, but had sexual relationships with a number of women from 1945 onwards.
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