Praise be Jesus and Mary, and the Lord be with you.
Today's Gospel presents to us the parable of the landowner who goes out searching for workers for his vineyard.
Our Lord is still searching for new vineyard workers, new laborers, who often find themselves tossed about in the sea of darkness and confusion, which is our modern world today.
One of the greatest forces of the Tempest is the new gender theory movement, which we've been talking about in our recent reflections, and we'll continue talking about that today, taking a bit of a break from our Franciscan spirituality series, which we will get back to in a short while.
In our last reflection on the roots of gender theory, we began to speak about contraception being the behavioral, practical cornerstone of our present gender confusion.
We spoke of Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement that she founded in the first half of the 20th century.
The birth control movement, according to Sanger, was begun to liberate women from the responsibilities of childbearing.
It was founded to liberate sexual desire and expression, and it was founded to purify the human race from people deemed to be deplorable or degenerate, or feebleminded, as Sanger herself would call them.
In the heyday of Sanger's birth control movement, the 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglicans decided to permit married couples to use birth control in, quote, extreme cases, unquote, as a way of showing, quote, compassion for families.
And this seems actually to have been a first in Christian history, that birth control became morally permissible for Christians to use for the first time, the 1930 Lambeth Conference.
Before that, it was essentially always considered a sin, except maybe among some heretical groups.
And most likely, the 1930 Lambeth Conference concession was just the Anglican bishops caving in to a practice that was already pretty widespread among Christians, certainly in Europe, at least.
There was already a lot of use of birth control in Europe by that time.
Historically, ironically, the Anglican Communion, or the Anglican Church, began 400 years prior to that, when you think about it, right?
And why did it begin?
It began because the bishops at that time caved into their kings, their own kings, to sexual intemperance and unfaithfulness, too.
So it was the Anglicans who, on the religious front, officially licensed or unleashed birth control onto the American population.
So if you don't stand up to the king in a monarchy in the name of what's right, I guess you won't stand up to the people in a democracy in the name of what's right, either, too, right?
History seems like it's repeating itself in these things.
Even the reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, Martin Luther called contraception worse than incest or adultery.
Calvin labeled it an unforgivable crime.
But the old truism is true.
You give them an inch, they take a mile, right?
After that, after the Anglicans said yes to contraception, one by one, each of the Protestant churches felt like dominoes pretty rapidly, actually.
Mary Eberstadt, in her book Adam and Eve After the Pill, she writes this.
She said, by giving benediction in 1930 to its married heterosexual members, purposely seeking sterile sex, the Anglican Church lost, bit by bit, any authority to tell its other members, married or unmarried, homosexual or heterosexual, not to do the same.
To put the point another way, once heterosexuals start claiming the right to act as homosexuals, it would not be long before homosexuals started claiming the rights of heterosexuals.
Thus, in a bizarre but real sense, did Lambeth's attempt to show compassion to married heterosexual couples inadvertently give rise to the modern gay rights movement?
Notes Eberstadt.
Again, this is part of the domino effect, right?
Separate sexual activity from openness to procreation, and the dominoes fall one by one.
The most recent one to fall is the notion of sexuality itself.
If we fast forward a bit from 1930, what happens in the 1960s?
Oral contraception becomes available.
Margaret Sanger here was instrumental in developing this as well.
So now birth control is as easy as just taking a pill.
But, of course, when that fails, you need to have plan B, right?
That's the thinking.
So a decade later, what happens?
Abortions legalized.
Contraception is fed the belief that sexual activity is primarily recreational, not procreational.
So the belief and the practice that sex should be without permanent consequences and without permanent responsibilities or commitments.
So who you have sex with, how many people you have sex with, is inconsequential to the contraceptive culture.
And the body becomes, in essence, just an instrument of pleasure at that point.
The god of pleasure reigns in the land of contraception.
And he's actually a tyrannical god who demands many ugly sacrifices.
I won't get into that too much.
The conceptual and practical divorce between marriage and sexual activity and procreation, in particular now with the widespread use of oral contraception, has even caused many people to think that sterility is the normal or it's the healthy reality for people, especially in particular for women.
As one theologian says, if fertility no longer matters, it doesn't matter whether the bodies are male or female either.
They're all just raw material for anonymous couplings, unquote.
In many ways, the modern-day college campus facilitates and plays out this belief system basically every weekend.
It's what they call the hookup culture.
That's what it's all about.
It's part of the reign of the god of pleasure, with a lot of ugly consequences, too.
In the contraceptive mentality, because bodily fertility threatens, in particular, a woman's autonomy, threatens their freedom, then the natural connection between sex and procreation has to be cut off in that mentality.
Again, contraception equals no natural consequence for my choices or my behavior.
Hence, again, Plan B, the need for abortion when contraception fails.
Pro-pleasure and pro-choice, too, actually go hand-in-hand when you think about that.
When you think about it, if you're contracepting, if you're enjoying sterile sex, responsibility-free pleasure, how can you tell other people, married or unmarried, that they can't do the same thing?
You realize you can't really do that, right?
You begin to even think, well, why can't people of the same sex enjoy the same freedom, too?
Why do I say that they can't do that?
One step further, who am I to say anything about anyone's sexuality or perceived gender identity?
So as pleasure and this notion of freedom and sexual license has taken priority over marriage itself and over procreation, then the walls around sexuality have logically crumbled.
And that collapse has been greatly facilitated by contraception and encouraged by feminist thought, which we will speak of in our next reflections.
So the practical pillar, the behavioral pillar of the gender ideology in many ways, really is contraception and its foreseen and oftentimes unforeseen consequences.
Sin produces what's called the darkening of the intellect.
And the sin of contraception has blinded many people in many ways.
And gender ideology is just one of the most recent examples of this spiritual blindness.
So let's ask Our Lady for the grace to get Catholics at least back on track regarding the rules of contraception and help them to realize that if they don't abandon and repent of that sin, their eternal salvation is very much in jeopardy.
Not only the culture is crumbling, but also, in particular, their salvation.
Very, very much in jeopardy.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Amen.