Updated. See EWTN link below(1). “There’s a style of liberal Catholic argument that denies that it’s seeking real changes in church teaching, that insists that it just wants a different emphasis — less talk about sex, less fixation on the particular evils of unchastity opposed to other kinds of sin, less emphasis on rigid norms and more on complex exceptions.

Here, the liberal perspective seems to me fundamentally anachronistic, wildly disconnected from the fundamental problems of late modern life. There are certainly times and places when Christian cultures fall into the trap of being so puritanical and repressed and “rigid” (to cite a word favored by Pope Francis) that a dose of tolerance, flexibility and realism about human appetites and personal arrangements is essential. And there are still Catholic subcultures today where this point might apply.

But I just don’t see how you can look at the modern world, writ large, and its most developed precincts especially — the world of sex education via ubiquitous pornography, faltering marriage rates, collapsing birthrates, the alienation of the sexes from one another, the rising existential angst attending all these trends and the creep of euthanasia as a “merciful” solution — and say that clearly what the church needs to do at this historical moment is water down or just talk less about its teachings on sex and marriage and family, rather than find a way to reassert them or offer them anew.

If you want to tell me that this reassertion requires some specific adaptations, I’ll listen. If you want to tell me that it must be united to other arguments (about consumerist values, say) that are more associated with the left, I’m open to the case. But don’t tell me that the church should de-emphasize its unfashionable ideas about sexuality just for the sake of reconciliation with our decadent culture, our depressing post-Dionysian world.

Maybe it was easy to believe in such a reconciliation in the 1960s, in the flower of boomer youthfulness and energy. But that was long ago and far away, and now the world that too much of liberal Catholicism wants to marry suffers from a sickness unto death…” Read it all

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(1) The “Smell of Francis?” Grave concerns even more grave now. See this episode of The World Over.