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Shock with the appointment of Danneels to a Synod on the Family - and the memories of a 2010 tape

Kasper's presence is sad, but unsurprising. Danneels' is shocking and distressing. He is a one-man symbol of all that is wrong and wicked with the Hierarchy, the epitome of the worst meaning of the word "clericalism", the opposite of anything that could represent authentic reform and restoration -- a man who abused the spirit and annihilated Belgian Catholic families, and protected those who abused the bodies of children, a man who after leading Catholicism in his country into the ground should have been relegated to degradation and penance for the rest of his life yet still receives papal honor to influence a Synod on the Family!

How did it come about that the Archdiocese of Chicago undercut Catholic legislators resisting contraception programs targeted against Chicago-area African-Americans?

Again, we have to turn to our declared enemies—in this case a journal trumpeting the contraception and abortion line—for a candid account of the betrayal of our cause by our own leaders.

Illinois Aid Commission Article
Drew Pearson, March 3, 1963

In 1963, the non-Catholic governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner, appointed a non-Christian millionaire, auto-parts industrialist and art connoisseur Arnold Maremont, to chair the Illinois Public Aid Commission, successor to an Emergency Relief Commission created in the Depression.

Maremont was adamant that contraceptives be provided at State expense, explicitly targeted at African-Americans, first in the Chicago area, with plans to go statewide later. In this he was resolutely opposed by Catholic lawmakers—a majority of whom were Democrats—who passed legislation in the Springfield statehouse outlawing the plan.

But defeat was suddenly snatched from the jaws of victory (to mix up a metaphor) when, after a confidential meeting in the back of a proverbial, black limousine between a high official of the Archdiocese of Chicago and a population-control official, the Church inexplicably okayed Maremont's plan.

Confused Catholic lawmakers went along with this stark reversal of the continuous course of Church teaching since the beginning. Today, two generations after the detritus of the sexual revolution has settled down, the proportion of European-American children born to single mothers stands at about 40%, the same as the rate of non-marital births during the 1960s to African-Americans. Thus we see that, in the treatment of our society's less privileged members, "what goes around comes around".

We might expect that members of ecclesial communities who have departed from the Catholic fold would fall for this, especially after the confusion sewn by the 1930 Anglican Lambeth Conference permitting contraception within marriage .

But in acquiescing to the spirit of the age—an evil spirit, as Pope Paul VI warned—officials of the Archdiocese of Chicago shirked their duty and paved the way for the organized and coordinated dissent on the part of 600 Catholic "Theologians"—many of whom weren't theologians at all —against Humanae Vitae, the Church's 1968, authentic reiteration of its ancient, ordinary magisterial teaching on the inviolability of the transmission of human life in the marital embrace. The Chicago Archdiocese's arrogant cowardice would bear bitter fruit a decade later, in the Roe and Doe decisions which have cost the lives of more than 50 million American children.