The Silent Schism

Pope Francis has called upon Catholics to use what he calls “the grammar of simplicity” when talking with one another and with others outside the church. In this groundbreaking work, Brother Louis De Thomasis and Sr. Cynthia Nienhaus use the grammar of simplicity to describe the current schism happening in the Catholic Church worldwide and offer solutions for how to heal it. Using the grammar of simplicity found in The Message: Catholic/Ecumenical Edition, they demonstrate that Jesus was always less worried about doctrine, dogmas, and dictums and more interested in the radical law of love. They call on both traditionalists and progressives in the church to recapture the mission of Jesus to bring about the reign of God “on earth, as it is in heaven.

This volume explores the critical reactions and dissenting activism generated in the summer of 1968 when Pope Paul VI promulgated his much-anticipated and hugely divisive encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which banned the use of ‘artificial contraception’ by Catholics. Through comparative case studies of fourteen different European countries, it offers a wealth of new data about the lived religious beliefs and practices of ordinary people – as well as theologians interrogating ‘traditional teachings’ – in areas relating to love, marriage, family life, gender roles and marital intimacy. Key themes include the role of medical experts, the media, the strategies of progressive Catholic clergy and laity, and the critical part played by hugely differing Church-State relations. In demonstrating the Catholic Church’s important (and overlooked) contribution to the refashioning of the sexual landscape of post-war Europe, it makes a critical intervention into a growing historiography exploring the 1960s and offers a close interrogation of one strand of religious change in this tumultuous decade.

A series of papers selected from the periodical and other literature of Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland, etc.