BOOK

Unhappy revolution

For Catholic leaders, the problem with the Health and Human Services mandate that would require Catholic employers and insurers to provide contraception (and abortifacients and sterilization) is not sex; it is the fact it violates constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom rights. 

A corollary, though, has been in public discourse a renewed focus on — and disdain for — Church teaching on contraception. But half a century after the availability of “the pill,” that teaching deserves a closer and clear-eyed look, as Mary Eberstadt persuasively argues in “Adam And Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution” (Ignatius, $19.95). 

Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, pulls together undisputed scientific findings and commentary to show “first, and contrary to conventional depiction, the sexual revolution has proved to be a disaster for many men and women; and second, its weight has fallen heaviest on the smallest and weakest shoulders in society — even as it has given extra strength to those already strongest and most predatory.” Some of those effects include the “paradox of declining female happiness,” the “prolonged adolescence” of men, a sharp rise in pornography addiction, an assault on the taboo “against sexual seduction or exploitation of the young,” and the “feral rates of date rapes, hookups and binge drinking” on public university campuses. 

Eberstadt asks her readers to “bring ... the same spirit with which the pages ahead were written: that of seeking sincerely and without cant to understand something of the manifold and unprecedented fallout of what may yet turn out to be the most consequential social revolution of all.”

MUSIC

Alternative rockers

Three Catholic brothers from California have hit the alternative rock scene. 

Seamus (18), David (17) and Aidan (16) Blackwell, who formed Canto in their parents’ basement in 2009, performed last month at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. They’ve earned accolades for producing music that’s mature beyond their years. 

A listen to their hard-charging self-released CD, “Ha Ha Ha” reveals those claims to be accurate. Not many teens, after all, would title a song after a 16th-century composer. Yet Canto features “William Byrd and His Contemporaries.” 

See www.myspace.com/canto33 for information.

EXHIBIT

Robe draws pilgrims to German cathedral

Thousands of pilgrims are expected to descend upon the cathedral in Trier, Germany, to view the garment believed to be worn by Christ at his crucifixion. The Holy Robe, or Heiliger Rock, is on display through May 13. This year is the 500th anniversary of the first public display of the seamless tunic. 

Pilgrims view the Holy Robe in Trier, Germany. Reuters photo

Tradition states that St. Helena found the tunic during her pilgrimage to Jerusalem and gave it to Trier’s archbishop.  

In an April 6 message to Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Trier, Pope Benedict XVI said the seamless tunic represented the Church. “The Church Fathers saw in this the unity of the Church, founded as one indivisible community by the love of Christ. The Savior’s love brings together that which has been divided. Moreover, the Robe of Christ is ‘woven in one piece from the top’. This too is an image of the Church, which lives not thanks to her own efforts but because of the action of God. As one indivisible community she is a work of God, not the result of man’s abilities. At the same time, the Holy Robe is a monition to the Church to remain faithful to her origins, in the awareness that her unity, consensus, effectiveness and witness ... can only be a gift of God.”