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[corrected version]
 | | Harry T. Cook |
The early- to mid-1960s was an era marked by an amazement of upheavals for both better and worse.
Quite without the full attention of the nation, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his close advisors were escalating the war in Vietnam. The war would end a long decade later with a remnant of the U.S. diplomatic staff fleeing Saigon through the roof of an embassy annex and on to helicopters. Johnson, having died two years earlier, was spared the much-repeated footage of the frantic exit.
Here at home, it was a victory for the hundreds of thousands of us who had protested the war as best we could: by supporting and counseling those who resisted the draft, by taking to the streets in demonstrations and speaking in public venues about the obvious immorality of what the nation was about in Southeast Asia.
Whilst the war was being waged, an intellectual ferment akin in some ways to the Reformation of the 16th century was under way. The reformers in this case were theologians who had emancipated themselves from ecclesial ideologies and published their research in such books as "The Secular Meaning of the Gospel" (Paul M. van Buren), "The Secular City" (Harvey Cox), "The Secular Meaning of the Gospel" (Thomas Altizer) and "The Death of God" (Gabriel Vahanian).
Empowered by that lot and following them by a decade or so came such scripture scholars as John Dominic Crossan, Elaine Pagels, Paul Fredriksen and the late Marcus Borg. They taught us to regard religious texts as artifacts that deserved the kind of careful excavation an archaeologist worthy of the name gives to any shard in any dig. Crossan and Pagels, in particular, set the pattern I have followed, i.e., taking the text and going where it leads, never mind abstract theological necessities.
With that kind of fresh biblical scholarship soon to follow, the new theological propositions were appearing more or less concurrent with the epoch-making Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the brainchild of the late Pope John XXIII, who clearly thought the church needed aggiornamento, a bringing-up-to-date.
As the mid-1960s began to give way to the decade's final years, the church in most regions of America underwent what can only be described as a revolution as priests discovered the loneliness of rectories without families, as women religious shed the habit and picked up placards denouncing war, etc. Latin was abandoned; priests presided at ritual meals at a table rather than a distant, candle-festooned altar. "Father McGillis" became "Father Bill." Pipe organs fell silent as guitars provided music for mass.
Not long before all that, The Pill had been introduced with the almost instant effect of setting women free in a way they could not possibly have imagined only a few years earlier. Proper and careful use of the oral contraceptive could make a couple's sex life free for love and allow them the choice of when to beget children and when not. The sound waves from that explosion and the related movement known as "women's liberation" have echoed down the years.
Despite Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reiterated the Catholic teaching that contraception by means other than strategic abstinence was a grave sin, Catholic women everywhere took The Pill. They had qualms about it, to be sure.
Had they only known that the Catholic archbishops of Detroit and Chicago -- the late John Cardinal Dearden and Albert Cardinal Meyer -- among others had advised Paul VI that, for all practical purposes, chemical contraception (The Pill) was not essentially different from mathematical contraception (The Rhythm Method), and that, in any event, the issue should be left to what they called an individual's or a couple's "informed conscience."
Cardinals Dearden and Meyer had been deeply affected by the Council's liberalization of the Catholic Church, and understood, perhaps, that new information can legitimate and even require the changing of minds. Not incidentally, the New Testament word for that is μετανοια, often translated as "repentance." It could be said that, in the matter of contraception, Paul VI declined the opportunity to lead the Catholic Church to repentance.
At just about the time the Council was finishing its work in Rome, the American civil rights movement shifted into high gear with echoes of Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech still fresh a decade after Rosa Park's one-woman resistance to second-class treatment on public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama.
On March 25, 1965, the historic march from Selma to Montgomery ended at the state capital. The marchers had trekked through counties in which not one among 80% of the population had been permitted to become a registered voter. The march felt to some who walked in it like a culmination of what had begun December 1, 1955, when Mrs. Parks sat down.
Yet the justice sought in Selma remains in many ways a future-tense thing as we have seen in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York and in too many other places where African-Americans are slain on the spot by white police officers and otherwise routinely marginalized.
Fittingly, then, a guest essay to be posted on this site on Friday, March 20, will carry the byline of the Rev. Fred Fenton, who with his wife and thousand of others marched their way through Alabama into American history 50 years ago.
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