The Only Way to a Clean Heart, by Anthony Esolen

In a recent conversation, I said to someone that the introduction of the Pill into the relations between young men and women raised the sexual stakes to a precarious height. All the healthful and practical delays between a friendly greeting and a night in bed were swept aside. And neither sex knew any longer what to expect from the other.  The result, I have been saying for many years, is loneliness for everyone who does not play the game, and all kinds of moral and personal wreckage for those who do. And perhaps, in the end, an even deeper loneliness, involving a complete alienation from the opposite sex.

How could we have failed to see it coming?  How could Catholics, and theologians and philosophers in particular, have failed to see what pagans like Plato, Aristotle, Zeno the Stoic, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius saw, that setting up vice in fancy-dress would no more alter its effects than would sugar on a dish of poison? …