Philip Shenon
speaker
84 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Philip Shenon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Well, if you decree that priests can't marry, they can't have kids, the money goes to the church. And over the history of the church, many priests, many bishops had come from families of great wealth or royalty, in fact. And if you decree that they can have no family to leave their wealth to, That wealth comes to the church.
So Gregory's decision promised a vast new source of income for the church.
Certainly in the last 150 years, there's been a true crisis created by the shortage of priests. Many priests, especially beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, decided they couldn't live this life of celibacy and they left to marry and have families. And there are stories told about huge stretches of South America, for example, where
where there simply were no priests, that Catholics who wanted to make a confession or who needed to organize a funeral or a christening, there was no priest to help them. And there was pressure at the Second Vatican Council to eliminate the doctrine of priestly celibacy, to allow priests to begin to marry, to encourage more men to enter the priesthood.
Well, for generations, for centuries, you know, Catholics understandably wanted to control the size of their families. But the church opposed birth control and put that into writing in the 1930s, the pope at the time. decreed that birth control was a sin and therefore was banned for all Catholics.
And that was issued in response to what was the sudden availability of reliable birth control in the form of latex condoms. And priests at the time were And in the decades that followed, commonly heard from women and from married couples that this was a terrible burden on them. They needed to be able to control the size of their families. They needed to be able to feed the kids they already had.
And theologians will tell you there's actually not much justification for the ban. The New Testament says almost nothing about birth control. And by the time the Second Vatican Council was underway, there were many priests who intended to make sure that the ban on birth control was lifted. It remains in effect today, remarkably enough.
There were several. I mean, the Vatican II, it really was a revolutionary gathering, even though I think to this day, most devout Catholics, including lots of devout Catholics I know, can't really tell you what happened at Vatican II, in part because it was conducted in Latin. There's still a lot of confusion about exactly what happened and when. But since the 4th century,
The church had decreed that all worship services be conducted in Latin, even though over the centuries, Latin became sort of a dead language to the world. Certainly by the 20th century, most Catholics didn't speak it. Even most bishops didn't really understand it.
And there had been an effort over the centuries, and certainly in the 20th century by many theologians, to try to convince popes to allow the mass – to be said in the vernacular, in local languages. And popes had resisted that aggressively. Second Vatican Council, this question came before the world's bishops.
And it was clear that most of them were eager to see an end to the Latin mass, at least an end to the exclusive use of Latin. And something that I learned in the course of this that I hadn't really understood before is that, you know, Jesus did not speak to his disciples in Latin. He spoke to them in Aramaic, which was similar to Hebrew.
And then for 300 years after the crucifixion, the language of the church was Greek. And it's only in the fourth century when church power moves to Rome that Latin is introduced. So you can argue that Latin really hasn't been the appropriate language for hundreds of years. And this move to the vernacular becomes very popular.
And today, all Catholics can see and hear the changes of Vatican II for themselves by hearing the Mass performed in languages they understand.
The church until the early 1960s, as I said, was a closed fortress. It wouldn't really have dialogue with other faiths. It was seen as sinful, blasphemous to have communication with other faiths. As a result of Vatican II, the church sort of embraced the modern world again and embraced dialogue with other faiths, and especially with Judaism. In the 2,000 years since the crucifixion,
The Vatican sort of, its formal doctrine was that all Jews, those ancient Jews who were responsible for Christ's crucifixion, Jews of the 20th century and Jews yet to be born, were all held responsible for Jesus' death. And it took John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council to end that, to exonerate Jews and to open dialogue with them, really, for the first time in 2,000 years.
Peter Robinson In 1962, Pope John sets up a secret commission that will determine whether or not the church should lift the ban on birth control. He is open to the idea of lifting the ban. He dies shortly after the opening of the councils.
But the commission continues to meet, and on this commission are some of the most respected theologians in the church, lots of very prominent lay people, lots of important bishops, influential bishops. And in 1966, it recommends to the pope that the ban be lifted.
So here we have a group of the most important theologians, some of the most influential churchmen, lots of prominent laymen from around the world who debated for four years this question and overwhelmingly conclude that birth control is not a violation of the church's teachings, that Catholics around the world should be allowed to engage in family planning.
And the pope simply refuses to accept it. And that decision just horrified lots of very prominent churchmen. It horrified all of the members of that commission. And really, for the rest of his papacy, he was under siege for what people considered a disastrous mistake.
And you've got to say the last several years of his papacy were painful for him because he just felt that he had lost the support of much of the church.
Showing 21–40 of 84 · page 2 of 5
← Previous
Next →