This blog is maintained by the Ruth Institute. It provides a place for our Circle of Experts to express themselves. This is where the scholars, experts, students and followers of the Ruth Institute engage in constructive dialogue about the issues surrounding the Sexual Revolution. We discuss public policy, social practices, legal doctrines and much more.
by Jennifer Roback Morse
This article was first published at The Blaze on April 12, 2016.
Non-Catholics may be wondering why Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation, “Amoris Laetitia” or “The Joy of Love,” has Catholics in an uproar. Has the Pope changed Catholic doctrine? Has he left the doctrine officially intact, but changed pastoral practice so much that the doctrine is annulled? Now that I have taken the weekend to read it, I am convinced that Amoris Laetitia is a gift to the Church and the world.
What the Catholic Church does is important to everyone, no matter their faith. The Catholic Church is the largest institution still standing against the ideological fraud known as the sexual revolution. Everyone who is trying to deal with the fallout from this massive social upheaval has a stake in what the Catholic Church says and does. If Pope Francis were to change Catholic teaching, the purveyors of the revolution would be dancing in the streets.
And meaning no disrespect, but speaking bluntly: If the revolutionaries take down the Catholic Church, they will squash the rest of you like bugs.
So let me assure you: There is no change in official Catholic doctrine in Amoris Laetitia.
As for pastoral practice, Pope Francis is encouraging pastors to treat the lost, the wounded, the confused with as much sensitivity as possible. He intends it as an open invitation to the millions of souls who have been harmed by sexual sin, whether Catholic or not, to come home to the Catholic Church and draw closer to Jesus.
I can relate to the need for something like this document. Let me share a bit of Catholic “inside baseball.” I am what we call a “revert.” I was raised Catholic but left the Church for a period of time, and came back. So, I can’t be called either a “convert” or a “cradle Catholic.”
When I returned the Church after my prodigal period, my canonical situation was pretty simple. (By “canonical,” I mean what “canon law” or church law, would say about my situation. More inside baseball.) I was only on a second marriage.
But I had a whole pile of sexual sins. Like the Prodigal Son, by the time I finally came to my senses, I was desperate. I confessed having an abortion to Fr. Bob Cilinski, the chaplain of the campus ministry program at George Mason University at that time. (By the way, priests are not permitted to tell what we say to them in confession. But we can say anything we want! Let me say, how grateful I am to Fr. Bob and all the other confessors I’ve had.)
Fr. Bob was the first person who understood why I was upset about having an abortion. I had spoken to numerous therapists. Not one of them even considered the possibility that abortion was related to my emotional distress.
During that first confession in 12 years, Fr. Bob did not go down a checklist of possible sins. “Now, I cannot give you absolution unless you are sorry for all these sins.” I shudder to think what would have happened if he had. I would have freaked out and run out of there, more upset than before. And I certainly was in no position to have a theological discussion about each and every aspect of Church teaching.
I didn’t ask. He didn’t ask. He gave me absolution for the big sin I came in to confess.
He did tell me I should come to Mass, but not receive communion. He helped me seek an annulment. But I could not go to Communion, unless and until I received a declaration of nullity. (A declaration of nullity is an official finding by a church tribunal that my first attempted marriage had never been a valid marriage.)
In other words, he did not move the goalposts to make it easier and more “pastoral” for me. He stood by the Church’s teaching in every particular way and he set me on the path to a closer encounter with Jesus. Along that path, I eventually came to see that the Church was correct about premarital sex, cohabitation and contraception too. I confessed those sins too, in due course.
By the way, this confession took place in 1988, during the pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II. According to the sexual revolutionaries, those were the dark days of doctrinal rigidity and all-around Catholic meanness. The fact is, Catholic priests have been quietly accompanying people in a pastoral manner for quite some time. Priests know better than anyone the wreckage left in the wake of the sexual revolution. Even the ones who don’t preach about it as much as I would like are still guiding people toward Jesus.
While I do wish Pope Francis had been more clear on some points, I consider Amoris Laetitia a gift to the Church and the world. No matter your faith tradition, I urge you to read the document. Start with chapters 4 and 5.
You will find Pope Francis to be like a wise grandfather or great-uncle sitting across the kitchen table. You can imagine him sharing a cup of coffee or bouncing a baby on his knees. He invites all of us to love one another, and teaches us how. That is gift enough.
Chastity, not just a list of "don'ts" but a positive "to-do" list, with serious benefits.
So says, Samantha Schroeder, a 2012 graduate of ITAF= "It Takes a Family to Raise a Village," The Ruth Institute's national student leadership conference. I'm so proud of her!
In an age when morality is known more for its rules and regulations than for the beauty of a morally excellent life, our focus should be not on what chastity forbids but on the positive human values that a chaste life affirms: personal discipline, a confident sense of self-worth, psychological wholeness, freedom from disease and fear of pregnancy, and an increase in marital stability and satisfaction, to name only a few.
This article was published October 13, 2015, at ReligionNews.com.
Longtime Cosmo writer reveals how she hijacked the women’s rights crusade
SAN FRANCISCO – The 1960s women’s rights movement has had a profoundly adverse impact on women throughout the United States, including Sue Ellen Browder, a former ardent propagandist for sexual liberation who wrote stories meant to soft-sell unmarried sex, contraception and abortion as the single woman’s path to personal fulfillment as a longtime freelance writer for Cosmopolitan, one of the most highly regarded and influential women’s magazines.
Browder’s personal story of how she helped the sexual revolution hijack the women’s movement — and its effects on her life and the future of America — is chronicled in her enthralling new book, SUBVERTED.
She recounts why, as a Cosmopolitan journalist — her dream job — she was a dedicated follower of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and fabricated numerous stories, with the approval of her editors, to sell the casual-sex lifestyle to millions of single, working women.
Browder admits she was guilty of promoting a distorted feminism, and exposes how women were turned into commodities during the profane alliance between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution through in-depth research, probing analysis and honest self-reflection. Browder’s determined search for truth, integrity and justice for women that led her into journalism in the first place eventually led her to find forgiveness and freedom in the place she least expected to find them, the Catholic Church.
“SUBVERTED offers a window into our uniquely disturbed historical era,” says Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., founder and president of the Ruth Institute. “Generations of readers will turn to SUBVERTED when they want to know what turned the tide.”
by Jennifer Roback Morse
This article was first posted October 22, 2015, at crisismagazine.com.
Let’s face it: The 2015 Synod on the Family is a mess. I was one who gave Pope Francis the benefit of the doubt. I now have my doubts about him. And I have no doubt at all that some of the men surrounding him are either heretics or lunatics or both.
The real question for us as lay people is this: what exactly can we do about it? We do not have full information about what is going on over there. Giving advice to cardinals and bishops is not likely to work. Screaming at them even less so.
As faithful lay people, we believe all that the Church has taught about marriage, family, and human sexuality. We do not want to see the Church water down that teaching, or surrender to the Sexual Revolution. It would be tragic indeed, if she did so now, right at the moment when the wisdom and beauty of her ancient teaching is becoming daily more evident from experience.
So what are we, as faithful lay people, to do about this? What has the best chance of cutting through the noise and having an impact?
To answer this question, let’s back up a minute. The Sexual Revolution has harmed millions of people. Just to take one of the issues most immediately before the Synod: divorce and unmarried parenthood.
We now know that kids are not “resilient.” They do not “get over it.” We know this from decades of careful research. We know if from experience. In fact, according to Judith Wallerstein, author of a 25-year study on the long-term legacy of divorce, the impact of divorce on children does not diminish with time. It “crescendos” in young adulthood, as they try to form relationships and marriages and families of their own.
Kids need their own parents. I learned from my experience as an adoptive mom, a foster mom, and a birth mom, all kids want the same thing. They want their parents to be there for them, and be appropriate parents. No matter how old the kids are, no matter what their parents have done, all kids of all ages, long for their parents to get it together and be good parents.
The Sexual Revolution has taught us that adults are entitled to have the sex lives they want, with a minimum of inconvenience. What we never hear anyone come out and say is: “And kids have to accept whatever the adults chose to give them.” You don’t usually hear people blurt out that last part, because we would be too ashamed of ourselves.
The Sexual Revolution promised fun and freedom. It delivered hurt and heartbreak. With the possible exception of a handful of predatory Alpha Males, everyone in society has been harmed: men, women and children, rich and poor alike.
I will let you in on a secret: the reason kids keep getting separated from their parents is because the victims, the kids, are not allowed to speak for themselves. As children, their parents expected them to accept whatever was going on around them, without complaining. And children, eager to please their parents, fearful of losing the parents’ love, kept quiet. Even as adults, the children of divorce and the children of unmarried parents, are expected to keep quiet, and go along with the program.
Silencing the victims has been crucial to the success of the Sexual Revolution. If you doubt me, consider these facts:
The solution is for all the victims of the Sexual Revolution to speak up, and tell the truth about how they were harmed. Telling that truth is the first step away from being a victim, to becoming a survivor. Anyone of us can take that step.
What does this have to do with the chaos over at the Synod? Most of the bishops know perfectly well that the Church’s teachings are good and humane. But they too, have been reluctant to speak out, and to preach this good news. Why? Because they are afraid of us, the laity!
True enough, many faithful people have been trying to support them all along. But look at it this way: if the souls wounded by the Sexual Revolution were visible, we wouldn’t be having this fight at all. All decent people would abandon the Sexual Revolutionary ideology in a heartbeat.
While it is awful that so many people have been harmed by the Sexual Revolution, we are undaunted. We are turning that very horror into an advantage: millions of us can testify about the false promises of the Sexual Revolution.
The elites in media, academia, law, and government cannot silence all of us. If everyone who has been harmed by the Sexual Revolution spoke out about it, we would change the world.
And eventually, even the most reluctant of the Catholic bishops might get the hint that the Church has been right all along, and find the courage to say so.
An interview of Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse by Austin Ruse
This article was first published at breitbart.com on March 23, 2015.
Sex in her 18-year marriage had gone routine and stale. What’s more, forty-something “Robin Rinaldi” wanted a baby, something her husband was adamantly against. So she proposed a limited open marriage, a 12-month sexathon with strangers, and she has written a book about it.
In The Wild Oats Project, Rinaldi writes, “Stuck in a rut — our once-a-week sex life was loving but lacked spontaneity and passion — I was craving seduction and sexual abandon.”
Since motherhood was closing for her, Rinaldi rushed toward what she calls, “this whole other outlet of heightened female experience — taking lovers.” She and her husband came to an arrangement. She took an apartment where she lived and cavorted during the week and on the weekend came home and lived as a wife.
She placed an ad on a hip sex site called nerve.com where she made it clear she was not interested in any kind of lasting relationship, only action and plenty of it. No more than three encounters per guy, and even a few gals. She got dozens of responses in the first few hours.
Rinaldi took workshops at something called OneTaste, a “sexual-education center” that she calls “a sex-friendly yoga retreat” where she learned “orgasmic meditation.” She says, “The lessons I learned weren’t purely physical. They were about growing up, making mistakes, learning to live without so much fear, owning up to my dark side and, eventually finding out the difference between being a ‘good girl’ and a good person.”
In a video, now blocked, attached to her column in the New York Post she insists the reader will be surprised at the ending to her 12 month sexual odyssey.
What she found was that coming back to her full-time marriage after a year “proved more difficult than I had thought.”
She found out her husband wasn’t playing the sexual field like he was supposed to; he had found one person to be with sexually for that year. And Rinaldi found herself drawn to one of the men she met through her original nerve.com ad, a writer with whom action “in the bedroom was mind-blowing.”
The big surprise — that she and her husband both found other lovers and divorced after 12 months of an open marriage — is likely not a surprise to anyone except Rinaldi.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, an economist who runs the Ruth Institute in California, writes frequently about what she refers to as the “victims of the sexual revolution” and she would include Rinaldi and her husband as among those “victims.”
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Roback Morse, says: “I knew people back in the 70’s who experimented with open marriage. I know of no one for whom it actually worked. I know of an out-of-wedlock child that wasn’t supposed to happen. I know of a suicide. I know of several divorces. No surprise that the ‘Wild Oats Project’ ended in divorce.”
“I am appalled that the elites of this culture continue to encourage ‘experimentation,’ when the experiment has already been conducted and has failed,” she said.
Roback Morse points to the results of the sexual revolution, including an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases that come from unbridled sexual experimentation, the hook-up culture in colleges, the commonality of out-of-wedlock births and the poverty that come with it, and the general degeneration of family formation and divorce.
She dismisses Rinaldi’s Wild Oats Project as “so twentieth century.”
