85th Anniversary of Casti Connubii

Seeing that some, departing from uninterrupted Christian tradition, have recently judged it possible to declare a different doctrine, the Catholic Church... through Our mouth proclaims anew: any use whatsoever of matrimony to exclude deliberately its natural power to generate life is an offence against the law of God and of nature...
Casti Connubii, n. 56

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The moral chaos that afflicts the modern world began, in a sense, on 14th August 1930 when the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Church asserted the licitness of contraception. Before that date Catholic and Protestant had been united in their opposition to the perversion of the marriage act.

So urgent did Pius XI see the need for a response to this error he did not allow the year in which it was propounded to end before he had condemned it. No vacillating by this pontiff, no referral to a committee of 'experts' for their report ; no years of silence in the face of calls for alteration of the Church's teaching ; no compromise of Catholic principle. He published Casti Connubii on the year's last day (http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121930_casti-connubii.html).

Eighty five years have passed. Just how far men have wandered from principle may be seen in the contrast between current 'wisdom' over marriage and a comment taken from an editorial of the Washington Post on on 22nd March, 1931, respecting adoption of the Lambeth decision by a committee of the US Federal Council of Churches endorsing “the careful and restrained use of contraceptives by married people”.

“Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee's report… would sound the death knell of marriage as a holy institution by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be 'careful and restrained' is preposterous.” [ 22nd March, 1931 ]

The prophecy has been fulfilled. Marriage is no longer regarded as a holy institution by the vast majority of people but something of human contrivance: secular. God has been systematically excluded from men's minds by fifty years of Masonic protocols, of whose proponents Leo XIII remarked :

“[Their] fundamental doctrine... is that human nature and human reason ought in all things to be mistress and guide. Laying this down, they care little for duties to God, or pervert them by erroneous and vague opinions. For they deny that anything has been taught by God ; they allow no dogma of religion or truth which cannot be understood by the human intelligence, nor any teacher who ought to be believed by reason of his authority.” [ Humanum Genus, 20.4.1884, n. 12 ]

As a consequence of the systematic imposition of their program the posited laws of nations assert the state to be the source of the right to marry. When the authority of God is excluded, what is left but man ? And if man is the source of marriage's legitimacy, why man can dictate its terms ! He can, via the state, change its very nature so as to extend it by legislation to any coupling, or any perversion of the natural order.

One of the Anglicans opposed to the Lambeth resolution was their bishop Charles Gore. He warned that the acceptance of contraception would open the door to acceptance of homosexual sodomy. Once deprived of its procreative effect, preoccupation with the vehemently pleasurable was inevitable. It was only a matter of time before men moved to try and justify their perversion.

Not the least of the contributors to the chaos, a chaos which has burgeoned over the last fifty years, have been the bishops of the Catholic Church. They are the shepherds, the Church's leaders, but where is the care for their flocks ? Where is the leadership ? Does one ever hear any bishop publicly berating the government of their country over the error in the claim in its laws about marriage ? Does anyone ever hear of a bishop, or even a pope, mentioning the principles set forth in Casti Connubii ?

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There is a marvelous irony in the way those countries whose members have abandoned moral principle in favour of contraception and abortion (its logical consequence) are being flooded now with refugees. Having abandoned the end for which the marital act was ordained by God and despised, or murdered, the children they ought to have reared and educated, they now find themselves inundated with the children of others, the majority of them infected with the Mohammedan virus. Having sown the wind, they are reaping the whirlwind. It goes without saying that they are quite incapable of seeing the logical connection. The inevitable consequence of abandonment of moral principle is a blinding of the intellect.

God send us another pope like Pius XI, or Pius X, or Leo XIII, a pope who instead of attempting to compromise with secular principle, will take to task the legislators and governments of the world, a pope who will demonstrate to them the folly of denying God's authority over the creature He made in His own image and likeness.

Michael Baker
31st December 2015