The "Good Old Days"...

Remember the "good old days"?

By the way, just when were the "good old days," anyway???

From my perspective, they couldn't have been the 1940s; the conflagration of World War II changed, not only the U.S. of A., but the entire world; it was never the same afterward.

Was it the 1950s?

Maybe.  After all, as far as the Catholic Church was concerned, there were converts by the ton; vocations to the priesthood, as well as religious orders were plentiful.  The sisters and brothers taught in the Catholic schools; the Church was looked upon as a moral and spiritual beacon, not only by Catholics, but by non-Catholics as well.

There was real power in various hierarchy, such as New York's Cardinal Spellman (I remember Cdl. Spellman quite well, as I attended grade school in the early- to late-fifties).  When the good Cardinal approved of a trend or agenda, there was peace and harmony among the general population, but when he DIS-approved, even the secular powers shook in their boots!  Now that's power!

It certainly wasn't the 1960s; that was the spear of the moral and sexual revolution that took the country and the world, in general, by storm.

But how and why did that happen??

A question that has been written about for decades...

Something happened in the mid- to late-sixties (in addition to the Vietnam war; I was directly involved in that war from late 1967, to late 1968).  The then Pope Paul VI, issued an encyclical Humanae Vitae, in which, among other things, condemned artificial contraception.

Unfortunately, when "the pill" came on the market, women of all races and creeds quickly took advantage of this new way to eliminate the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy.  As we now know, it was not always effective; pregnancies did occur.  And when that happened, what was a woman to do?   (The husband or male partner, always seem to be left out of the equation these days when it comes to deciding whether the newly conceived baby is allowed to live or die.)

I just wrote that women of all races and creeds took advantage of the "pill," and that included Catholic women immersed in that same revolution that took the world by storm.

One of the reasons for that, is that some of the hierarchy resisted the constraints of the encyclical; simply stated, they did not support the teaching of Paul VI from the pulpit; there was little condemnation of the use of contraception.  So, in effect, Catholic women did not follow the teachings of the Church, and I would presume, neither did their husbands...

Fast forward to 1973 and the infamous Supreme Court decision legalizing the killing of the pre-born, a right, they said, was found somewhere in the Constitution under the "right of privacy."

Since the disaster of Roe v Wade, it is estimated that 60+ million American babies have been slaughtered in the womb.  I admit that this figure is just a number, as staggering as it is, it doesn't convey the horror of what takes place in such a "procedure"?  

Recent appointments to the SCOTUS give little hope of changing the minds and hearts of those that label themselves "pro-choice," and end the scourge of abortion that has wounded our nation in so many ways: lives lost, and phycological problems galore.

It is my contention that if priests, bishops and cardinals had marched en masse down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capital; demanded to be arrested; went on hunger strikes, by 1974, Roe v Wade would have been a distant nightmare.

But that didn't happen, and the killing continues to this very day with our tax-payer monies.

I also contend that it is the weakness in the human element of the Catholic Church that is vey much part of this ghastly problem.  If Church teaching had been preached from the housetops, we just might have 60+ million more Americans alive in our country.  Who knows what discoveries, scientific advances, and cures for diseases would now be in place, alleviating pain, suffering and misery...

Only God knows the answer to that question.

Pray for our country...

Gene DeLalla