Both sets of my Catholic grandparents, as well as all their siblings, remained (so far as I know) monogamous throughout the entirety of their (oft very long) marriages.

My parents generation? Not so much. Every last couple of that generation did not last... Some remarried, others did not. My parents, in particular, were torn between the Catholic teachings they received and the so-called 'counter-culture' preaching 'free-love' and other nebulous concepts.

So, I'm not certain it's entirely fair to say the Catholic Church remains the entire villain of the piece. Sure, the Church can be viewed as repressive, but the counter-culture can, just as easily, be viewed as libertine and narcissistic--that is to say, unbalanced in the other direction.

In the absence of the 'counter-culture' my grandparents and their siblings, made happy lives for themselves. Alternately, their children, in the presence of other voices, did not. Isn't it as much to say that the 'counter-culture' is responsible for their misery? Were my grandparents repressed, even if they didn't have much of a conception of repression?

Were my parents set free or were they imprisoned when given the 'gift' of the knowledge of their own supposed repression?

I've been reading, recently, of the economist John Maynard Keynes, who spent a great deal of his early adulthood with the Bloomsbury group, a bohemian circle in pre-WW 1 England, devoted to the arts, who deliberately engaged in non-conforming sexual practices. They were, for the most part, riven by equal parts jealousy and exhaustion. Dorothy Parker later quipped that "they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles."

So, I guess that I agree that the Church may be repressive, but wonder if the alternative is all that better?