‘What If the Sexual Revolution Didn’t Make Women Happy?’

WASHINGTON — While the U.S. bishops press for legal and legislative remedies to the federal contraception mandate, opinion surveys confirm that many practicing Catholics ignore Church teaching on birth control.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, in a published interview last week, acknowledged the failure of many bishops to defend and promote Humanae Vitae (“On the Regulation of Birth”), Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, which ignited a firestorm when it was issued in 1968.

The encyclical “brought such a tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval of the Church, that I think most of us — and I’m using the first-person plural intentionally, including myself — kind of subconsciously said, Whoa. We’d better never talk about that, because it’s just too hot to handle.