Fr. Guevin versus Fr. Rhonheimer on Humanae Vitae

Now you can read the debate for yourselves.  Click here.  To get a further sense of the competing positions on Humanae Vitae, click here (the Rhonheimerian view) and here (what I take to be the traditional view, defended by Fr. Guevin, Janet Smith, et al.).

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Fr. Rhonheimer, an Opus Dei priest (!) and professor of ethics and political philosophy at Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, is a very interesting man.  He writes, in a First Things article on the Holocuast back in 2003:

I am a Catholic priest—but I come from a family that is three-quarters Jewish. I love my Church. I believe in the truth that the Church proclaims. I proclaim that truth myself. Yet I also have an emotional bond to Judaism, and to my Jewish relatives. I am pained by unfair Jewish attacks on the Catholic Church. But I am also pained by a one-sided Catholic apologetic that minimizes the injustice done by Christians to Jews in history, or seeks to relegate it to oblivion. I am especially aware of the Jewish sensitivity to topics that Catholics often pass over either too quickly or in silence. Even if some of the Church’s present-day critics are clearly more interested in promoting their own careers or ideological agendas than in seeking the truth, some of the blame for their “success” clearly rests on Catholic shoulders.

Rhonheimer concludes his First Things article with these comments:

Well-intentioned Catholic apologists continue to produce reports of Church condemnations of Nazism and racism. But these do not really answer the Church’s critics. The real problem is not the Church’s relationship to National Socialism and racism, but the Church’s relationship to the Jews. Here we need what the Church today urges: a “purification of memory and conscience.” The Catholic Church’s undeniable hostility to National Socialism and racism cannot be used to justify its silence about the persecution of the Jews. It is one thing to explain this silence historically and make it understandable. It is quite another to use such explanations for apologetic purposes.

Christians and Jews belong together. They are both part of the one, though still divided, Israel. This is why Pope John Paul II has called Jews, in exemplary fashion, our “elder brothers.” Brotherhood includes, however, the ability to speak openly about past failures and shortcomings. This is true, of course, for both sides. But in view of all that Christians have done to Jews in history, it is Christians who should take the lead in the purification of memory and conscience.

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