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Thomisticinstitute.org. In 1980, David Lodge addressed the controversy precipitated 12 years earlier

by the papal encyclical Humanevite. He wrote, the availability of effective contraception was the thin end of a

wedge of modern hedonism that had already turned Protestantism into a parody of itself and was now

challenging the Roman Catholic ethos.

The ban on artificial birth control, he continued, was the last fragile barrier holding back

the Catholic community from joining the great collective pursuit of erotic fulfillment,

increasingly obsessing the rest of Western society.

Lodge was not unsympathetic to Humanevite's warnings about sexual ethics.

Conservatives in the church, he wrote, who predicted that approval of contraception for

married couples would inevitably lead sooner or later to a general relaxation of traditional

moral standards and indirectly encourage promiscuity, marital infidelity,

sexual experiment, and deviation of every kind,

were essentially correct, and it was disingenuous of liberal Catholics to deny it.

Still, Lodge thought, the conservatives had unknowingly conceded defeat on the contraception issue.

Through acceptance of non-artificial means of birth regulation, the church had already allowed

that sexual pleasure pursued apart from reproduction could be a legitimate function of sexual

intercourse. The erotic impulse was not

alien to purely Christian love, agape. Now Lodge, who passed away last month on January 1st

...