Of Human Love: Catholics Campaigning for Sexual Aggiornamento in Postwar Belgium

Abstract

In postwar Belgium, progressive personalists began calling for the revision of highly restrictive and overly physiological views on conjugal morality. In the course of the 1950s, the Catholic University of Leuven became an intellectual nerve centre of a transnational push for sexual aggiornamento. Punching above its weight, the so-called Squadra belga was a pivotal force of reform at the Second Vatican Council. At this time, linguistic politics were undermining the hierarchy’s moral authority at home. Humanae Vitae worsened a turn away from a church that many Catholics perceived as authoritarian and incapable of keeping up with a world with which it appeared increasingly out of sync.

My sincere thanks to the Belgian American Educational Foundation and to the Research Foundation—Flanders for making this research possible.