A “Lambeth Moment” for the Synod

The Catholic Thing ^ | 10/16/14 | Fr. Mark A. Pilon

[marshmallow]

n 1920, the Anglican Church’s Lambeth Conference solidly condemned the use of contraceptives for whatever motives. Ten years later, a new Lambeth Conference gave a restricted approval in Resolution 15 to the use of contraceptives – by married people only, and only for the most serious morally upright motives, not “from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.”

That same year the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Charles Gore, wrote a carefully argued pamphlet refuting the reasoning and the conclusions of Resolution 15. The 1930 Lambeth Conference was a moment of truth for the Church of England, and Dr. Gore was terribly worried that this conference had yielded to the spirit of the world in its half-hearted reversal of the Church’s constant tradition on contraception. His argument is based upon Tradition more than natural law, and he is very appreciative of the Roman Catholic fidelity to the Tradition on this moral teaching.

Dr. Gore realistically read the context within which this acceptance of birth prevention by a major religious communion, no matter how limited in intent, has to be viewed. Already in that time, he and others clearly saw the threat of birth control to marriage itself and to the very existence of civilization. He refers to the threat of what he calls the unbridled “tide of sensualism” in western societies, which can only be made worse by this collapse of moral opposition to one of the key threats to our civilization.

Likewise he refers several times to the threat of national suicide or race-suicide, as he calls it, thus anticipating the demographic suicide that St. John Paul II would later recognize – and is underway in our time. He also anticipates the harm that all forms of contraception do to women, and this was long before the Pill.....

[marshmallow]

But most interesting is the fact that this same Lambeth Conference also dealt with allowing the divorced and remarried to receive Communion, and did so in much the same language we are now hearing from some bishops and theologians at the ongoing Extraordinary Synod on the Family. In Lambeth’s Resolution 11, the wording is interesting: “The Conference believes that it is with this ideal in view that the Church must deal with questions of divorce and with whatever threatens the security of women and the stability of the home.”

Kasper's "serene theology" is little more than recycled Anglican backsliding.

[Ouchthatonehurt]

Great post.
Thanks!