First shots, garbage.
This war went hot at the Lambeth Conference, with Pius XI rolling out the big gun and effectively going nuclear not much later with Castii Connubbii (too many doubled letters there—don’t know which ones to cut out off hand)
St. John XXIII essentially gave a free pass for friendly fire within the ranks of the Church, and after St. Paul VI ordered the dropping of another bomb and nearly everyone in the Church said “we don’t think you are authorized to use the launch code” fragging on this issue was tolerated nearly universally.
St. Paul VI said “forget this” on writing Encyclicals, never bothered to write another (since people weren’t bothering to read them anyway) but did write a nice apostolic letter on Dante. While doing that he gained an appreciation for poetic justice, and eventually kick Bugnini “upstairs,” making him Archbishop of DIocletianopolis and sending him to Tehran. He made no comments on fragging that were effective and after Humanae Vitae, on this issue, was a little more effective than a social worker would have been at Omaha Beach.
While JPII and BXVI continued to tolerate fragging, they at least threw the occasional grenade themselves in the right dirction and did give general encouragement to people who were doing the right thing.
If Pope Francis is willing to stop, or at least tone down, his own fragging, and share a stage politely with someone who speaks the truth on the issue, it seems that we may be able to escape rock bottom, but who am I to judge?
But first shots, no.
I would be surprised to see Pope Francis doing any shooting on this subject—I’d sooner expect to see Franky Goes To Hollywood. But who am I to judge?
But do you think a “wink wink” confusion of teaching might be possible? Francis saying I can’t change this church teaching but not everyone can live up to it - the result being that those using contraception find no reason to repent and continue to live with the pie in the sky expectation that the Church will change an unchangeable teaching.