Pandora's box

There's an interesting piece in today's Daily Mail - an extract (not for the easily shocked) from a book by Dominic Sandbrook, which argues that the 1960s were, for most people, a very conservative decade (morally and culturally), and that the real revolution occurred in the 1970s.

He attributes the opening of this cultural Pandora's Box to a single event - the insistence by the goverment of the day that the contraceptive pill, hitherto difficult to obtain, should be made widely and easily available.

Sandbrook (who makes no mention of religion) chronicles the social consequences of this event (as he sees them), with the moral rottenness at the heart of Oxford, as depicted in Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse novels, and of academia in general, as exposed in Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man), being emblematic of the United Kingdom's Gadarene descent into terminal moral decline.

I've no doubt that Sandbrook's narrative and analysis are highly controversial (and I appreciate that comment pieces in the Mail aren't everyone's cup of tea), but they certainly lend credence to the view that Humanae Vitae was, from a consequentialist point of view, a prophetic document.

(The Church's position is, of course, based on natural law ethics rather than on consequentialist ethics. There is, however, a case for saying that the consequentialist argument may carry more weight with society at large than does the natural law argument.)

Forty years ago the world (and, indeed, large sections of the Catholic Church) chose to ignore Pope Paul VI.

For all the "we must listen to what Pope Benedict has to say to us" rhetoric of certain UK politicians, I'm not convinced that, two generations later, the world is ready to think the unthinkable - that Paul VI may actually have been right.