Afterword—Looking for Love

Abstract

The Afterword reflects on the contributions of this volume, emphasizing the benefits of a comparativist perspective: a wealth of new data about lived religion and ordinary people’s practices and beliefs in the realm of marital intimacy, and about just how powerfully national cultural-political contexts can shape reproductive behaviours; insight into the astonishing variability in the ways State–clergy–laity constellations could play out; and a far more robust grasp of the vigour of progressive opinion within Catholic Europe in the decades between the 1920s and 1970s than either secular historians or current official Catholic accounts might lead one to believe. But the Afterword also reflects on the historical conundrums of causality and contingency, exploring the paradoxical impact of the encyclical and its ambiguous afterlife in our twenty-first-century present.