How American RC colleges and pols sold out in the 1960s
A now-classic story of ‘Catholic’ versus Catholic. Dr Tighe writes:

The complementary aspect that is not dealt with here is how Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, President of Notre Dame University from 1952 to 1987 (and still living at age 91), the man who began the process of “self-secularization” of Catholic universities in 1967, became close to the Rockefeller family in the early 1960s and on two occasions between 1963 and 1967 sponsored at Notre Dame “by invitation only” conferences (funded by Planned Parenthood) whose purpose was to devise a rationale for reversing the Church’s teaching on contraception. (Known conservative theologians were deliberately excluded from these meetings.) Hesburgh arranged a papal audience in 1966 or 1967 with one of the Rockefellers with Paul VI, and at that meeting he even offered to draft a document for the pope by which the Church would abandon its opposition to contraception. The pope refused, with some indignation, and at this point all these folks (the theologians named below in the article you forwarded, plus Hesburgh and other Catholic university presidents and administrators) began their increasingly concerted efforts to create an alternative “academic magisterium” of theologians and “progressive intellectuals” to “blaze the way” for changes in Church teaching on contraception (and sexual ethics generally), women’s ordination and the “primacy of individual conscience” in all moral decision-making (e.g., the decision to remarry after divorce, to practice contraception, to form “same-sex partnerships” and the like). The tragedy is, that for years the American Catholic bishops refused to see the problem, and often treated these dissenting theologians as “respected authorities,” and ignored those layfolk, clergy and even the few bishops who discerned what was going on.

Labels: history, politics, the Catholic faith