Yeah, Jack, I gotta agree with you. I was surprised that the Catholic bishops would get their hackles up over gay marriages. It's not like they're being required to perform gay marriages in church, is it? I was also surprised that the U.S. bishops made such a stink about contraceptives being covered by health insurance, since nobody was being forced to practice birth control.

I have a theory on that. There has been a rebirth of conservatism in the Catholic Church in recent years, and conservatives are feeling their oats. They are making issues out of matters that have long been forgotten - and they're having some success at it, since the rules were on the books. They start with little things like the wording of songs, and then move to bigger issues.

And their success does have me worried. We need another John XXIII to be elected this week, and we need him bad.

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So, Bonnie, about this birth control ruling and its effect. I can count.

When I was a kid in Wisconsin, there were three large families in our Catholic school - the Vanderhoofs (17 kids - seemed every parish had one like that), the Kivlins (6 kids), and the Offers (5 kids). All the other families in the parish were smaller. The Vandehoofs seemed to get along quite well, and certainly didn't seem to be suffering. The Kivlins and the Offers were well off, and both seemed to be quite happy families. The Offers had 8 grandchildren, so you can see the next generation had smaller families. Don't know about the Vanderhoofs and the Kivlins. But note that all the other families in the Catholic school were smaller - mostly three or four childrens - in the late 1950s.

In my current parish in California, there are a couple of families with six kids, and they are very conservative. There are two other large families, but their children are mostly adopted.

Yes, here and there you see a suffering, unhappy Catholic woman with more kids than she can handle - and oftentimes, it seems the husband doesn't go to church with her and she's stuck taking care of all the kids. Whether those kids are a result of Humanae Vitae or not, is another question.

Polls show that in the U.S., 98% of Catholics ignore the prohibition against birth control. That about fits with my experience.

-Joe-