Free love, baby! The so-called ‘sexual freedom movement’ ushered in in the 1960’s was supposed to make everyone more happy.
Women, especially, were supposed to be liberated from the shackles of antiquated norms of raising children. Marriages were supposed to be strengthened with the introduction of contraception. Children raised in this new environment were supposed to be better off, while those born to poverty were to cease.
Life was supposed to be just grand. The pill was promised to be a great panacea for all mankind. At least, those were just some of the promises of the sexual freedom movement. Ever since the birth control pill was introduced and promiscuity became hip, has any of those marvelous fortunes come to pass?
No, just the opposite.
What follows is an excerpt from The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church
CARDINAL RATZINGER
“We will atone in our day for the consequences of a sexuality which is no longer linked to procreation…”
“The issue is the rupture between sexuality and marriage. Separated from motherhood, sex has remained without a locus and has lost its point of reference: it is a kind of drifting mine, a problem and at the same time an omnipresent power.
“After the separation between sexuality and motherhood was effected, sexuality was also separated from procreation. The movement, however, ended up going in an opposite direction: procreation without sexuality. Out of this follow the increasingly shocking medical-technical experiments so prevalent in our day where, precisely, procreation is independent of sexuality.
“Biological manipulation is striving to uncouple man from nature (the very existence of which is being disputed). There is an attempt to transform man, to manipulate him as one does every other ‘thing:’ he is nothing but a product planned according to one’s pleasure.
“At the end of this march to shatter fundamental, natural linkages (and not, as is said, only those that are cultural), there are unimaginable consequences which, however, derive from the very logic that lies at the base of a venture of this kind.
“It logically follows from the consequences of a sexuality which is no longer linked to motherhood and to procreation that every form of sexuality is equivalent and therefore of equal worth. It is certainly not a matter of establishing or recommending a retrograde moralism, but one of lucidly drawing the consequences from the premises: it is, in fact, logical that pleasure, the libido of the individual, become the only possible point of reference of sex.
“No longer having an objective reason to justify it, sex seeks the subjective reason in the gratification of the desire, in the most ‘satisfying’ answer for the individual, to the instincts no longer subject to rational restraints. Everyone is free to give to his personal libido the content considered suitable for himself.
“Hence, it naturally follows that all forms of sexual gratification are transformed into the ‘rights’ of the individual. Thus, to cite an especially current example, homosexuality becomes an inalienable right. (Given the aforementioned premises, how can one deny it?) On the contrary, its full recognition appears to be an aspect of human liberation.
“There are, however, other consequences of this uprooting of the human person in the depth of his nature. Fecundity separated from marriage based on a lifelong fidelity turns from being a blessing (as it was understood in every culture) into its opposite: that is to say a threat to the free development of the ‘individual’s right to happiness.’ Thus abortion, institutionalized, free and socially guaranteed, becomes another ‘right,’ another form of ‘liberation.’
YOUR TURN
What do you think of the future Pope Benedict XVI’s words?
Do you agree he has summed up the prevailing error of our day?
Please leave your comments below.
