to educate Catholics as to the meaning of the
Council. They were left to discern its meaning in just about any way
they could. And if they were reading the New Yorker they got it
from Xavier Rynne, and if they were reading Time magazine they
got it from Robert Blair Kaiser. Some variation on the views of those
two men appeared in most of the secular press. So not only did there
persist a good deal of confusion as to what the Council was all about,
but there was even a completely skewed, even false notion of what it
was all about. Victories that could not be won on the floor of the
Council itself, victories that could not be ratified in the Conciliar
decrees, were won after the Council in terms of what people thought the
CouncilChurch by and large, appeared
to be in a very stable, settled condition, as we talked about in the
first lecture. Certainly in retrospect, if we compare it to what came
later, it appeared to be in a stable and settled condition. On most
moral questions, for example, there appeared to be a broad consensus.
Birth control was just about the only moral issue of any note where
Catholics disagreed with non-Catholics. Planned Parenthood as late as
1964 still said that abortion was the taking of a human life and
opposed it. Catholics were known to be stricter on the subject of
divorce than most other people, but everybody admitted that divorce was
really a very bad thing and
it was happening too often. These moral positions were not seen as
being Catholic doctrine, or even Christian doctrine. They were