Hey, Tim Jones, here.
1968 was the year that I “got saved” in the Baptist church and was baptized. I was seven, and at the time I’m certain that I thought everyone was a Baptist.
Even if I had been a Catholic at the time, though, I would have been too young to take note of the portentious “Truce of 1968″. Like the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam, it was one of those historic events of which I was blissfully unaware, but the effects of which would resonate through the rest of my life.
In THIS ARTICLE over at Catholic Exchange, George Weigel explains The Truce;
“In 1968, Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle of Washington, D.C., disciplined nineteen priests who had publicly dissented from Pope Paul VI’s teaching in the encyclical Humanae Vitae. Three years later, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy decreed that Cardinal O’Boyle should lift canonical penalties against those priests who informed the cardinal privately that they agreed that the Church’s teaching on “the objective evil of contraception” was “an authentic expression of (the) magisterium.”
The Congregation explicitly avoided requiring that the priests, who had dissented publicly, retract their dissent publicly. A new biography of O’Boyle, Steadfast in the Faith (Catholic University of America Press), suggests that the decision not to require a public retraction was made by Paul VI himself.”
To many who were adult Catholics at the time, the “Truce” was a watershed moment, in a decade of watershed moments.
At the time, it was one of a number signs that the Church hierarchy lacked the will or the courage to discipline dissident priests and bishops. It appeared to be almost paralyzed with fear of schism.
They appeared to be intensely concerned with keeping the modernists in the Church, with the result that we now have a Church full of modernists, each worshipping his own conscience.
Weigel’s opinion is always worth reading, and for me, learning about The Truce was a valuable history lesson.
