William Kilpatrick – July 20, 2022
In a recent article I made the case that the main thrust of the Francis papacy is to deemphasize sin. Whatever he might say about a moral issue such as abortion, same-sex marriage, or adultery, Francis has consistently given his support and praise to those on the permissive side of the issue.
By contrast, his harshest criticisms have always been reserved for traditional Catholics who worry about moral decay in the Church and society. Francis frequently attacks these “rigid fundamentalists” as the modern-day counterparts of the pharisees.
Judging by Francis’s actions, one might think that the Church was just emerging from a long dark night of narrow-minded puritanism—a real life Handmaid’s Tale. But the opposite is true.
Starting in the early sixties, Church leaders increasingly took their moral cues from secular sources—particularly from psychologists. Middle-school religious studies texts were peppered with the theories of humanistic psychologists. In California, an entire order of 600 nuns left the Church in search of self-fulfillment. With the coming of the self-esteem movement, feelings of guilt were replaced with feelings of OK-ness. Almost overnight the long lines outside the confessional booths disappeared. Newly enlightened Catholics couldn’t think of any sins to confess. The new gospel was all about self-acceptance and self-love.
Many couldn’t think of any reason to attend Mass, either. The Son of Man came to save sinners; but since the label “sinner” no longer applied to those who had learned to esteem themselves, thousands upon thousands simply stopped going to church.
This doesn’t mean that they lost their faith entirely. Many simply re-adjusted their faith to bring it into conformity with the changing times. One Catholic writer recounts that until her mid-twenties, “I saw God as a permissive parent who was too ‘loving’ to enforce His own boundaries.”
This slide into permissiveness was slowed during the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI; however, the Church, at least in the West, continued to lose members.
