The Pope vs. the Pill

[groovedaddy]

FORTY years ago last week, Pope Paul VI provoked the greatest uproar against a papal edict in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church when he reiterated the church’s ban on artificial birth control by issuing the encyclical “Humanae Vitae.” At the time, commentators predicted that not only would the teaching collapse under its own weight, but it might well bring the “monarchical papacy” down with it.

Those forecasts badly underestimated the capacity of the Catholic Church to resist change and to stand its ground.

Down the centuries, Catholics have frequently groused about papal rulings. Usually they channeled that dissent into blithe disobedience, though occasionally a Roman mob would run the Successor of Peter out of town on a rail just to make a point. In 1848, Pope Pius IX was driven into exile by Romans incensed at his refusal to embrace Italy’s unification.

Never before July 25, 1968, however, had opposition been so immediate, so public and so widespread. World-famous theologians called press conferences to rebut the pope’s reasoning. Conferences of Catholic bishops issued statements that all but licensed churchgoers to ignore the encyclical. Pastors openly criticized “Humanae Vitae” from the pulpit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/opinion/27allen.html?th&emc=th

[CatholicEdHead]

1. ABC.au had a good program on this

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2008/2304911.htm#transcript

Next week, July 25th, marks the 40th anniversary of the single greatest catastrophe to befall the Catholic church since the Reformation, when Pope Paul VI published his encyclical banning the pill, Humanae Vitae, leading to a theological Stalingrad from which the church has been unable to recover.

The overwhelming majority of Catholics have always rejected the basic principles about sexuality which the encyclical lays out, that sex should only take place within marriage, and that it should always be open to the procreation of children, and defending the encyclical has come at great cost. In fact it has contributed to the collapse of the sacrament of confession, the collapse of the priesthood, and the purging of a brilliant generation of liberal theologians.

But above all, Humanae Vitae led to the collapse of the very papal authority it was designed to defend, because everybody knew that the Pope had been talked into rejecting the overwhelming majority advice of his own papal advisory commission.

Veteran Rome journalist, Robert Blair Kaiser had covered the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s in Rome and he also covered the ill-fated encyclical.

[The Brethren]

2. I have no use for either

The Pope or the Pill. Likewise, The Pope could've kept things much simpler if he realized that he had no use for the Pill as well and stayed out of the whole mess to begin with. :-)