from a friend and Catholic priest:
With regard to theocracy and 'terrorist criticism', perhaps you could point out that it is significant that the Magisterium speaks only of sexual matters in the bicentennial year of the abolition of the slave trade. What role did the Church play in this? The lobbying was initiated and sustained by non-conformist women (esp. Quakers) in the US and the UK throughout the 18c, and eventually found in Wilberforce and Clarkson appropriate moral leaders able to bring about the appropriate legislation in the British Parliament. The Catholic Church played no part in this at all, and has never issued any major statement of teaching on slavery. France, a Catholic country with ideals of liberty equality and fraternity, abolished slavery on ly in 1848, the USA in 1864.
Thank heaven we have the prophetic witness of St Peter Claver in 17c Cartegena (not that anyone knows a thing about him in the Church because they are too busy sobbing over Padre Pio and the Medjugore 'visionaries'). And what was the role of Pope Nicholas V in the sanctioning of the slave trade in the late 15c? What is it saying now about slavery in its various transmuted forms?
In sexual matters, as in other medical issues generally, the Church is reluctant to study and understand modern developments, being basically caught up in a biologistic mind frame and an obsession with the amporphous concept of natural law. Consider the now conveniently forgotten attitude to vaccination when it first appeared on the scene.
The position is not far removed from the outright rejection of medical intervention espoused by by the Christian Scientists, or the Old Testament fear of blood evinced by the Jehovah Witnesses. Indeed, it is the strictures in the Mosaic Law of Numbers and Leviticus that still determine attitudes to many complex sexual issues and the basic horror that is still associated with all bodily fluids, especially the unmentionable semen. Here a basically Medieval attitude that it is the medium of new life in itself still governs underlying attitudes to masturbation and contraception.
see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Claver
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Pietro_Claver
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Claver
