Pastoral Mush Mouth

A retired priest from Southern California recently published a column on Substack about a very private and personal issue his mother had with the use of contraception. It still appears to me that Arthur Holquin used his mother’s tragic situation as a device to promote his heterodox views on contraception. When called out on it, Holquin turned on me and suggested I was “attacking” his mother on a very private matter—a very private matter that Holquin advertised to his thousands of followers.

Holquin was not happy I wrote about his column. As I said, he accused me of using his deceased mother as a pretext to advance a position. This kind of accusation is a rhetorical trick of the Left; accuse the other side of doing precisely what you have done. It was odd, too, that in his response, he used his mother once more, or rather her skirts to hide behind, though I predicted that in my column two weeks ago.

As on cue, his thousands of followers gleefully joined in and helped the world understand that I am “hateful,” a “sad little man,” “wicked,” “diabolical,” so on and so lovingly on. Understand this is the part of the Church that prides itself on “love” and “tolerance” and “walking with” and “meeting you where you are,” something they mean in only a highly limited sense. It certainly does not apply to those smelly “conservatives.”

I want to make a few things clear. I did not “attack” his mother. I didn’t even criticize her. My column was not even about her. It was about him. I questioned Holquin’s use of her situation as a pretext to advance his heterodox views on the morality of artificial contraception, something that seems to have been forced on her by her husband, Holquin’s father, a Protestant who said, according to Holquin, the ban on contraception was a “rule without a reason.”

Holquin used her situation to explain how sad he was when Pope Paul VI co-opted the contraception debate for himself and away from a committee of “experts” and the pope determined to uphold longstanding Church teaching. Right there you can see Holquin’s heterodoxy, his dissent from Church teaching. And he was in the seminary at the time!

While pursuing graduate studies, Holquin was happy to obtain a clearer picture of why Church teaching was wrong through a certain professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, then known as a hotbed of dissent. This professor was a priest named Louis Janssens, whom Holquin describes as

an influential Louvain voice in the conciliar-era debates on marriage and conscience—before his retirement. The subject was the history of conjugal morality, and Janssens traced it in the inevitable Louvain manner: patiently, exhaustively, with an eye for every twist and turn, every historical development and every dead end.

Ah yes, every twist and turn, every dead end, every historical development. In his column, Holquin said he came away from Janssens’ class

permanently changed. What had seemed to me, as a younger man, a simple matter of a rule kept or broken revealed itself as a long and intricate tradition—one in which the human person, in the fullness of intention and circumstance, could never be reduced to the bare physical structure of an act.

This is pastoral mush mouth designed to dissent, confuse, and lead astray.

Janssens was highly influential in his day and one of the leaders of the opposition to Church teaching on contraception. Others far more learned than I have addressed his heterodoxy, including Janet Smith, Germain Grisez, William May, and many others.

The Church is right and Holquin is wrong about contraception. Putting aside the conjugal barrier it places between man and wife and the closing off of the lives God wills, the Pill—and all that goes along with it—has been one of the great scourges of our age.

If you consider that the Pill has led many to a false sense of security that often fails and therefore leads to abortion, you can see it has resulted in millions of pre-born murders. Abortion cashes the blank check written by the Pill. The Pill turbocharged the sexual revolution, which has resulted in more deaths than any dictator in history, probably all of them combined. It opened the door to the abomination of homosexual “marriage.” The Pill has turned millions away from the Church and has led millions to live in mortal sin. The Pill is among the greatest weapons against humanity ever invented by the Devil.

My column two weeks ago and this column today are not about the tragic situation of Arthur Holquin’s mother. They are about Church teaching, those who accept it, and those who reject it. It appears abundantly clear that Msgr. Arthur Holquin falls in the latter category. I would be happy to be proven wrong. But please, no pastoral mush mouth.