I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article. That isn't mentioned in either of the two sources noted here, that being Ms. Blanton's blog (which is quite good, I might add) or Reddit. I unfortunately can't find the link to the article.
Anyhow, let's start with an upload of the photograph on Ms. Blanton's blog:
Blanton with the top part of the "Miss March" centerfold. This is directly linked to her blog. I'm using the fair use and commentary exception to copyright, but I don't own the rights to post this and will immediately take it down if asked.
Miss March holding her own centerfold?
No, Miss Blanton, then a high school student, holding the centerfold of "Fran" "Gerard", who was actually one Francis Anna Camuglia, who is apparently a legendary centerfold.
The story is related on the Blanton blog, and it is really amusing. Her resemblance was immediately noted in March 1967 by the boys in her high school, which I don't doubt. She's almost a dead ringer for Gerard, save that, if anything, she was actually prettier in this photograph. Their nose structure and generally their facial features are amazingly similar. Blanton relates that she used this to play a joke on her mother, holding the centerfold like depicted and briefly fooling her mother into thinking that she'd posed for Playboy. Apparently Ms. Gerard was extremely top heavy, and when folded out it becomes apparent that Gerard and Blanton are not the same person.
So why am I posting this here? Cute story?
I suppose it is a cute story, and Blanton really had a sense of humor and still does. But we're posting this for other reasons.
Gerard is apparently a famous playboy centerfold, for the very reason noted. The 1960s was before silicone and she was very top heavy, in an era when Playboy centerfolds were all pretty top heavy. That she still has a following is remarkable, particularly since she died in 1985.
And that's the reason we're noting her.
She was born, as noted, Francis Camuglia, and as her find a grave entry shows, she was from a large, almost certainly Italian, and almost certainly Catholic, family. By the time she was photographed in 1966 or 1967, she'd already been married and maybe divorced, and was off to a rocky start in life. If she wasn't yet divorced, she soon would be. She'd marry one more time, and go on to a life in California, working for an astrologer.
In 1985 she killed herself at age 37.
Blanton, in contrast, when on to high education, a successful life, and retired to Mexico. She's travelled all over the world, as her blog demonstrates.
At the time of the photo, Blanton and Gerard really weren't very far apart in age. Camuglia was born in May 1948, in which case she was a mere 19 years old when she appeared in Playboy, and only barely 19 years old at that. Blanton was younger, but not by much, probably only one or two years at the very most.
Blanton went on to success. Gerard was reduced in the public mind to her naked visage, a cute girl with (apparently) large assets.
The 1960s, while there was still open, and sometime legal, opposition to it, was right at the height of public acceptance of Playboy. In the 1970s you'd still go into grocery stores and it was available the way other magazines are now, on your way to the checker. It retained an image of "dirty" and glamourous all at the same time.
What the public didn't know was the long lasting effects pornography would have on the American public and psyche and how damaging it would be. Nor did it know about the horrific abuse so many of these young women went through. Not only did it basically brand them, to a degree, for life, making them something like harem slaves in a way of prior eras, valued for their physical assets and little else, they were often subject to horrific physical abuse.
I don't know about Gerard and I'm not going to look it up either. Entering her name would no doubt provide piles of pornographic links. That she was somebody who killed herself I already knew. There's a really good documentary, Secrets of Playboy, that really dives into what happened to so many of these people. Playboy left a pool of drugs and blood on the floor that we're still trying to mop up.
Her headstone is marked "Our Bubbie - Beloved Daughter and Sister".
Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.
And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.
Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944. This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions. Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine. The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture. This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.
This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text. And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.
If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.
This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time. Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.
This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.
At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.
That's a phenomenal observation.
And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it. That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't. It's been wholly destructive.
We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe. Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.
Lauren Bacall, 1943.
The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did. La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s. But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.
Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s. Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage. Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm. Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.
Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology. That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.
Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell. Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex. It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was. That really started to break down during the 1940s. I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.
From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions. This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is. The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.
Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong. Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it. Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.
By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile. There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.
Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution. I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.
And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.
We've lost a lot here. A massive amount. And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality. And we're still slippping.
On "X", fka "Twitter" a man who was the father to a large family of daughters (it was either 7 or 9), and who is very conservative, posted an item expressing relief for Taylor Swift.
His points were really good.
Populist right commentators are all up in arms about Swift right now, for reasons that are darned near impossible to discern. It seems to stem from her expressing support for Democratic candidates in the past, including Joe Biden in 2016. Well, guess what, she has a right to do that. You have a right to ignore it.
She also expressed support for abortion being legal. I feel it should be illegal. That doesn't mean she's part of a double secret left wing conspiracy.
But, and here's the thing, there are real reasons to admire her, or at least her presentation, and the father in question pointed it out. He'd endured taking his daughters to Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, "Lady Gaga" etc., and found them disturbing.
Indeed, they are.
Miley Cyrus went from a child actress to being a freakish figure posed nude on a ball, looking like she was a meth addict who was working in a strip club. Ariana Grande has at least one song that's out right graphic about illicit sex. Lady Gaga has made a career out of being freakish, until she couldn't any longer, and like Madonna is another woman who was the product of Catholic Schools who took to songs that are abhorrent in terms of Christian, let alone Catholic, morals.
Swift, in contrast, can only be criticized a bit for dressing semi provocatively on stage, but only somewhat so. Off-stage, she's always very modestly dressed. Indeed, she's a throwback, with her ruby red lipstick and classic nearly 1940s appearance.
And in terms of relationships, it's noted that she's dating a football player.
Now, we don't know what their private lives are like, but they're admirably keeping them private. It's hard to know what Swift's views are on most issues. And we really don't need to. But in their visible relationship, made visible to us only because of media fascination, they're quite proper. As the poster noted, the football star is "courting" her.
It's not that there's nothing to see here. There's nothing to see here which any conservative in their right mind wouldn't have an absolute freak out about. They're behaving exactly the way in public that supposedly Christian conservatives want dating couples to do. No piercings, no weird tattoos, no scanty clothing.
Which would all suggest all the angst is about something else, and what that is probably about is the secret knowledge that huge numbers of real conservatives can't stand Donald Trump and won't vote for him.
The Andy Griffith Show
I was at lunch two days ago at a local Chinese restaurant, and across the way an all adult family was discussing the plot of the prior night's Andy Griffith Show rerun. It struck me that that may not have happened since the 1960s.
It's interesting.
The Andy Griffith Show went off the air before the Great Rural Purge in Television, but not my much. It ran from 1960 to 1968. It was consistently focused on the rural South, and it felt like it depicted the 1950s, which it never did, save for the fact that what we think of as the 60s really started in about 1955 and ran to about 1964. Indeed, while the show was in tune with the times in 1960, it really wasn't in 1968.
But that in tune with the times is what strikes me here. The family was speaking of it as if it was a currently running show, not like it was something from 60 years ago. That suggests that in some ways people have groped their way back in the dark to idealizing the world as it was depicted then, rural, lower middle class, devoid of an obsession with sex (although it does show up subtly in the show from time to time), and divorce a rarity.
Now, the world wasn't prefect in 1960 by any means. But the show didn't pretend to depict a perfect world, only one that was sort of a mirror on the world view of its watchers. To some degree, that world view had returned.
Epilog
The Taylor Swift story also appears on the most recent entries for City Father and Uncle Mike's Musings, both of which are linked in on this site.
Marjory Taylor Greene, left, Howler Monkey's right (By Steve from washington, dc, usa - howler monkees doing their thing, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3963947). One of these examples is shameful, and it ain't the one on the right.
This is an interesting and in my view largely correct, insightful blog entry by Robert Reich:
It also comes, I'd note, on the same day that a Wyoming Republic commentator made what are somewhat similar comments, calling a member of the GOP Central Committee a hypocrite in no uncertain, and indeed highly crude, terms, although if true, they'd be deserving ones.
And hence, I guess, my comment.
While I think that what Reich is complaining about is in fact shameful, which starts with Marjorie Taylor Greene acting like a Howler Monkey during the State of the Union Address, how the crap can anyone on the hardcore political left sincerely make this claim? The hard left in the country has spent the last 50 years totally dismantling any concept of shame in absolutely everything whatsoever.
And that's a lot of the reason why we are exactly where we are.
Do we have no shame?
Of course not. We were told that nothing is shameful.
And indeed, this tracks well into the purpose of this blog, looking at then. . .and now. And, moreover, we often fail to note this trend, i.e., descent, in literature, as we assume that everyone in the past was living in the sewer or wanted to be like us, in the sewer.
That's truly not how it was.
I'll admit that I am torn in how to present this post. When I started drafting it, I found I went into detail on where shame has exited. I hadn't intended in the first place that the thread be a catalog of things formerly shameful, and now no longer shameful. And in looking at it, I don't think that's the correct approach. Maybe I'll expand on individual items later.
But what I will note, is there are a lot of things that were once regarded as highly shameful, in the arena of personal conduct, that no longer are, and in some instances, left-wing social engineers have gone so far as to impose shame on anyone commenting on them, or not engaging in them. Shame hasn't really left in that sense, it's been transferred.
Taking what is a short arch of history, but a long one in terms of individual lives, since World War Two, and really, since the late 1960s, a massive effort has been expended on this by the left. Even as late as the early 1980s, for instance, many things that are now not shameful, were.
Sex outside of marriage, particularly for women (or girls) was shameful.1 Having a baby out of wedlock was shameful.2 Homosexuality was shameful.3 Men dressing in women's clothes or affecting a female appearance was shameful. Prostitution was shameful4 . Avarice was shame, including avarice in these areas.5
Even into the 1970s, being divorced conveyed an element of shame.6 Living with the opposite gender and not being married was shameful.
Well beyond that, having a child and not supporting the child economically, even to the point of your own well-being being impaired, was shameful.
While it was definitely changing during the 60s, putting yourself on display, i.e., being an "exhibitionist" was shameful.
Pornography, even after Playboy, and its consumption, was shameful.
All this started getting ripped down in the late 1940s, it accelerated in the 60s and 70s, and it's gone on to really stretch the balloon in our present age. The results have quite frankly been a disastrous assault on nature.
Now, I don't wish to suggest that every conveyance of shame was warranted or a good thing. There were some really bad results. The high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s were partially due to it being simply too shameful in many people's minds to bear a child out of wedlock, with the shame being imposed both on the young woman, but also on her family. That this has ended is a good thing.
But the Me Generation's deep dive into themselves, and "if it feels good, do it", as the ethos, has been hugely destructive. The KIA, MIA, and WIA of the Sexual Revolution has caused a limping society. The focus on "me" lead to a focus on "mine", destroying community and boosting greed.
And in no small part, it's lead to where we are in things like Reich has complained about, and not just in this post. It's all sort of the same package. If the whole world is about me, me, me, and my needs, needs, needs, I really don't need to care what anyone else thinks or even reality. The difference, therefore, between Marjorie Taylor Greene howling for attention and a transgender advocates demanding that a man be viewed as a woman, as he wants to be, are really thin. Likewise, the difference between a AoC and Elon Mus isn't all that much.
Also, really thin is the difference between individualized self-expression, including pantless individualized self-expression, and Harvey Weinstein pulling the latter off of somebody else. It all just goes together. In a way that they likely couldn't recognize, Hugh Hefner, Harvey Weinstein, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are all fellow travelers on the same destructive cultural bus.
Reich cites to shame being a necessary social engine, and it is. But you can't partially restore shame, really, as it has to be based on a larger something. You can't just say "bad", and it's bad, because it's bad. Bad things are bad, but due to something else making them bad.
We've been seeing a lot of this recently, interestingly, and some of that's a good sign. The Me Too movement is an effort to restore shame where it had once been. At least up into the 50s, if not beyond, men who expected women to put out were called "wolves", and to be tagged that was shameful. While the name was no longer around by the late 70s, early 80s, the same conduct was still not admired at that time, but Hefner and company were ripping it down, and in deed, raping it down, basically. Hollywood, where actress self prostitution was pretty common all along, was interestingly the first to really say "enough", on an individual level, and try to reverse it.
But you really have to restore the metaphysical basis for why that's wrong, to really get anywhere.
Young people, left without the guide rails of the culture that was torn down, have partially restored it as well, although groping for a basis for it remains. And in some odd ways, as we recently addressed, even the transgender movement, deep down, is an effort to reach out to get back to a less material, less perverted, time.
So here we now are. Having become comfortable with a Quasi Judaical Dictatorship that's suddenly betrayed autocracy and restored democracy, the left finds itself now championing what it had become comfortable omitting, and here at last, its rediscovered, shame.
So is this a "everything was better in the past" post? No it isn't.
But shame exist for a reason, and excising it wholly was a mistake.
Footnotes.
1. People will instantly claim that there was a double standard, and to some degree that was true, but not to the degree that people commonly imagine. It is true that it's becoming public knowledge that a girl had sex outside of marriage would tarnish, and often severely, her reputation, and if it was a case of multiple men, it would put her in a category that would be difficult to ever get out of, but men who were multiple standard violators likewise got tagged with a permanent, indeed lifelong, reputation they couldn't get out of either. They had greater leeway than women, but not absolute leeway.
2. As noted in later in the thread, this probably partially lead to the high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s. It also, however, lead to a lot of children being given up for adoption in a process in which the pregnant girl often absented herself, or her family absented her, for a period of time so that the pregnancy would not be discovered. I know at least one person who experienced, this, later going on to a very respected adult life and the pregnancy not being discovered until after she had died. As there was a high demand for healthy infants to adopt, and frankly white healthy infants (and there still is), this often worked out well for the adopted as well. Again, I personally know one such person whose mother was a college student when she became pregnant and the father never knew.
Indeed, that latter item is surprisingly common. You'd think the distressed young woman would have always told the father, but often, they didn't. This is because they didn't want, quite often, to be faced with the choice of marrying the individual, which also often occurred. Such marriages usually happened quickly before the woman "showed". In cases in which the women were in their 20s, they often just didn't want to be married to the man in the end, and for teens, their families didn't want to put them in that spot, quite often. And of course, date rape wasn't really a concept at the time, and therefore in cases in which that resulted in pregnancy, not wanting to marry the man made sense.
3. This tended to have an arresting influence on open displays of homosexuality, and it also led to quite a few homosexuals simply suppressing it individually, or even refusing to acknowledge it in any sense.
4. It still mostly is, of course, but there are ongoing efforts to break this down.
The degree to which prostitution is shameful, although not really being a prostitute, tends to change by era. In rough and ready frontier areas, the institution tends to exist pretty openly, and it also tended to very much be associated with certain armies, sometimes by compulsion. That doesn't necessarily mean that the individual shame associated with it evaporates, but rather the tolerance of it is pretty open. In other eras, there's very low tolerance for it.
There tends to be a myth that prostitutes were the founding women in a lot of regions of the frontier, which is just flatly false. I've heard this myth associated with one local, now long deceased, historian, but as I've never read his work, and for acquired bias reasons I'm unlikely to, I don't know if that's really true. Be that as it may, the most typical fate for prostitutes was early death, due to the lack of protection from disease.
5. But not just in these areas. Being "greedy" has been something that's always been around, but which wasn't tolerated in the way it now is until after the Reagan Administration came in.
Americans have always had a very high tolerance for the accumulation of wealth, but not to the present level. Simply being wealthy is not a sign of avarice, but having wealth was at one time very much associated with a social expectation of charity. Quite a few wealthy people still exhibit that trait today.
"I pay my taxes", while something nobody likes doing, was actually something the very wealthy used in their self-defense at one time, as the upper tax rate was extremely high.
6. Fault, of course, had to be demonstrated for divorce up until nearly everyplace, or maybe everyplace, adopted "no-fault divorce".
Divorce is really regarded as being routine today, but even into the 1970s it was a mark against a person.
So runs an opinion headline in the Washington Post.
Well, as the sage Bart Simpson would have it, au contraire, mon fraire.
Or more accuaratley, I suppose ma soeur, as the author is Karen Tumulty.
The article by Tumulty is completely unoriginal, I'd note, with no brilliant insights whatsoever. Rather, it follows the standard line of thought on this noting John F. Kennedy's 1960 address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, who were all Southern Baptists. Kennedy, as Tumulty and others have noted, famously stated:
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
This speech has been hailed again and again as brilliant strategic move by Kennedy, which it truly was. But the overall impact, on a really cosmic scale, has rarely been analyzed.
It may have been good for Kennedy, but it was a disaster for Catholics, and continues to be. What the US Bishops are doing in some ways is reacting to that disaster, but only at the pint at which they almost have no choice but to do so.
Let's start with Kennedy himself. He was a Sunday and Holy Day Mass going Catholic and part of an extended Catholic family, but not too surprisingly his own family bore little resemblance to the the Irish Catholics of the Catholic Ghetto who identified with him due to his Irish surname. The Kennedy's were, and are, extremely wealthy and while as Catholics they were on the periphery of American life, they were on it in the way that wealthy Catholics could be as any member of a minority who was wealthy could be. I.e., they were part of the in crowed in significant ways.
And as a member of that elite group John F. Kennedy carved for himself liberties that the Catholic faith never sanctioned, and he did so promiscuously literally. Kennedy had a string of affairs that went beyond that which a person might normally be tempted to somewhat trying to excuse away. He wasn't Franklin Roosevelt with a long time paramour, something inexcusable but at least not libertine.
Indeed, under modern definitions, at least one of his affairs in the White House started with what moderns would be tempted to regard as a sort of rape. It's debatable whether this category is truly applicable or not, but it was shockingly disgusting. His behavior here, however, didn't stop with that, in regard to this individual, who descended pretty quickly into shocking behavior more expansively.
We'll forgo detailing this more as its not necessary to this entry. The point is that knowing what we now know about Kennedy, his willingness to make such a statement really ought to be put in a different light. If he was declaring that he'd never let his religion directly dictate his actions, well, he wasn't in regard to personal behavior in a significant way, already.
This isn't an attempt to judge the state of Kennedy's soul at the time of his death. We don't know that. But what we can say is that in regard to his overall character, Kennedy really wasn't whom he seemed to be.
And frankly, the statement wasn't that bold. Catholic leaders of numerous nations had been in power in various places (including, we might note, Rome) since before the time of Constantine the Great. The Church had never laid claim to a right to tell leaders how to rule, which was the real fear that the Southern Baptists at the time had. Much has changed in regard to how Protestants view Catholics since 1960s, but some evangelical Protestants at the time, and now, held highly erroneous views of how the Pope's relationship to average Catholics, including politicians, worked. Indeed, the political cartoon with the Pope directly pulling the strings of American Catholic politicians was a common feature of political debate up until the mid 20th Century.
The irony was that in 2020 the average Catholic is a lot more in tune with the Pope's views, in knowing what they are, than in 1960s, even though the way the Church actually works seems to be no more clear now than as opposed to then. The current example is a good one in this regard. The Pope seems concerned that the US Bishops are going this direction. The US Bishops are going this direction anyhow. The Pope hasn't stopped them. This is pretty typical over the ages. When the Pope actually acts in regard to local Bishops, something has usually gone wrong on an extreme level.
And so too with politicians, as for the papacy. And this overall situation is highly instructive.
Since the Second World War there's been a lot of attacks on the Papacy of Pope Pius XII, even though the actual historical record shows him to have done a remarkably good job during the crisis and the attacks against him unmerited and, to some degree, to have originated in a post war Communist smear campaign. The Pope did speak against the Nazis during, and before, the war, in the form of proclamations on moral matters with the most noted being Mit Brennender Sorge. Often forgotten is that some of the most direct attacks on the Nazi regime, however, came from the German Catholic Bishops themselves, one such example resulting in the White Rose movement.
What the Church didn't do is to issue a list of instructions to Catholics in power on "do this". It did provide stout moral guidance, however. It is of note here that in both the White Rose instance, and the July 20 plot, the prime movers were Catholics and Catholics were heavily represented.
How's this relate to what we're now seeing?
Well, pretty heavily.
In 1960s, when Kennedy gave his speech, the social issues that exist today and which are so much in the forefront, didn't. No fault divorce didn't exist until 1970. Abortion was just coming in as a state issue and didn't become the forced law of the land until 1973's Roe v. Wade. The millennia old definition of marriage was completely unchallenged anywhere.
Things were moving, to be sure, and that should have been a warning. The Kinsey report started being popularized right after World War Two and was given serious treatment even though the statistical methodology was grossly inaccurate and the conduct used to generate the badly skewed data heavily skewed. This played right into the hands of a new breed of pornographer lead by Hugh Hefner. Starting in the 1950s an assault on conventional sexual morality commenced that would explode in the 1960s, but this wasn't obvious to most Catholics. The warnings were there, but they were not fully nor naturally appreciated.
Given this, in the enthusiasm that there might be a Catholic President, most Catholics joined the bandwagon and the Church didn't pull Kennedy in and say "be careful". After all, he wasn't really saying anything that generally shocked Catholics in any fashion in the context of the times. Charles DeGaulle was a sincere and devout Catholic, for example, and nobody had any thought that the Bishops in France or the Pope was running France.
This would have been harmless enough, and still would be, but for the fact that very rapidly Catholics adopted, due to Kennedy and his speech, something that many evangelical Protestants never did, which was the concept of a completely personal separation of Church and State. Where as everyone agrees that there should be no state church, many in the evangelical Protestant community do believe that a person's faith should fully inform their political conduct. Many Catholics do as well, with most sincere ones believing that, but Kennedy's massive popularity, combined with the concept of his being an Irish Catholic, caused average American Catholics to believe that a full separation was a okay. I.e, as long as I don't personally engage in . . . . it doesn't matter what others do.
The Church has never believed that in any form. The declarations during World War Two show that. It was never the case that the Church took the view that individual Germans could participate in the atrocities of the Third Reich and have a clean moral conscience as long as they had purity of heart. Knowing that is what caused some to attempt tyrannicide. But in the United States, which had no such overarching moral issue at the time, and where Catholics were on the side of liberal civil rights efforts, it was easy for things to became blurred pretty quickly.
By the 1970s there were liberal Catholic religious in political office. And liberal Catholics began to side with things that seemed to square with at least some aspects of Catholic thought. Where as some Catholic clerics had urged Catholics to participate in the fighting in Vietnam in the U.S. military early on, as it was a struggle against Communism, some Catholic clerics were openly opposing it by the late 1960s. And you can see how either view can be squared with the Faith.
But what never could be were developments in social issues that attacked marriage and the nature of sexual conduct, and which were contrary to Catholic views on the sanctity of life. None the less, acclimated by the 1970s to a personal separation of Church and State, and being Catholic only on Sunday, lots of Catholic politicians went right along with these developments. Pretty soon, in the tumult of the times, and with other developments inside the Church itself in the 1960s, average Catholics also did.
Unexercised muscles atrophy. But failing to exercise for somebody who has, doesn't come overnight. Any single man who used to have an exercise routine is probably aware of that. The pressures of life and busy schedules, and just the thought that you'll stay home and watch TV lead to a situation sooner or later in which the former athlete has put on fifty pounds and is pretty tired just getting through the day.
Moral authority works the same way. Things that should have been said decades ago weren't, and after awhile an entire body of Catholics convinces themselves that they're really good and observant Catholics even while omitting anything the Faith that's personally difficult. Any Catholic with Catholic associates knows this.
At some point, however, there's a point at which you reach that you have no choice. A person has a heart attack and is sent home with doctor's instructions. People who smoke are told to knock it off. You get the point.
And with moral authority, you reach some point where you have to exercise it as you have no other moral choice. That's where we are, and that's what I noted the other day in this entry:
Lex Anteinternet: A Corrective Warning.: We started off to comment on a couple of newsworthy items from the Catholic news sphere the other day but like a lot of things here, we only...
The Pope is saying be careful. He isn't saying don't. That's up to the Catholic Bishops in the United States. And looking at where we are now, they really have no choice but to act.
Individual Catholics, of course, also have individual free will. The history of the world shows that people make difficult choices only when somebody is backing them up, and only when others are obviously doing the same. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are heroic for that very reason, they're exceptions against the tide. Observant orthodox Catholics have nearly been that exception for some time now, but things seem to swinging around to them.
Standing in their way, really, is the generation that came up in the 1960s, or just behind them. A lot of them have had nice lives riding the high point of American economic exceptualism, an era that's now really over, and are really not in tune with the world as it is. They're comfortable with the American Civil Religion, which is basically Christian as long as it isn't too hard, and which still, in spite of the Trump assault on democracy, holds that God basically listens to our vote on thing where we find it too hard. As Catholics, they've acclimated themselves to the erroneous belief that they can omit big chunks of the Faith, as they have for so long.
That isn't Catholic, however.
The Church never acts very quickly. So what the US Bishops will do, they won't do until fall. That gives Joe Biden, who attends Mass every Sunday and on Holy Days, and who is openly Catholic, lots of time to comport his conduct to the tenants of the Faith. But like men who go home from the hospital with instructions not to smoke, not to drink and exercise, that won't be easy. Physicians state that most people don't actually clean up their personal health issues, but simply carry on. And that doesn't involve the issue of pride that comes with decades of going down a certain political path that now needs to be corrected.
