In August, the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, based in the United Kingdom, published a report in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of “Humanae Vitae,” the papal encyclical that upheld the ban on the use of contraceptives. The statement, signed by more than 150 Catholic scholars, argues, “The choice to use contraceptives for either family planning or prophylactic purposes can be a responsible and ethical decision and even, at times, an ethical imperative.” On Sept. 20, another group of theologians released their own statement, signed by more than 500 scholars, which was presented at a press event at The Catholic University of America. It argues that those who are pushing for the church to lift its ban on artificial contraception have failed to take into account findings from the past five decades that show contraception harms women and destabilizes relationships. “The widespread use of contraception,” it continues, “appears to have contributed greatly to the increase of sex outside of marriage, to an increase of unwed pregnancies, abortion, single parenthood, cohabitation, divorce, poverty, the exploitation of women, to declining marriage rates as well as to declining population growth in many parts of the world.”
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Pope Leo said that if the teen “had come all the way to Rome, then (the pope) could come all the way to the hospital to see him.”
A Reflection for Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time, by Molly Cahill
As emergency workers searched for survivors and tried to recuperate the bodies of the dead, Pope Leo XIV offered his prayers for people impacted by the latest shipwreck of a migrant boat off the coast of Yemen.
The Archdiocese of Miami celebrated the first Mass for detainees at “Alligator Alcatraz,” the Trump administration’s controversial immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades.
- Humanae Vitae is an unenforceable edict about a good doctrine
- Ordinatio Sacerdotalis is an enforceable edict about a bad doctrine
- As edicts, both are contaminated with patriarchal gender ideology
When are we going to recognize the conflation of patriarchal gender ideology (and the patriarchal priesthood we inherited from the Old Law) and our sacramental theology under the New Law?