Word: births
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ordinary Magisterium. Humanae Vitae is addressed primarily to Catholics, but the Pope also appeals to secular governments to seek means other than birth control in solving their population problems. Husbands and wives are asked to live up to the Pope's difficult decision. The clergy are advised to "give the example of loyal internal and external obedience to the teaching authority of the church...
...strongly defended the principle of responsible parenthood and the right of couples to decide for themselves the size of their families. A clear majority of the church's most articulate moral theologians-sometimes with the approving support of their bishops-have publicly argued that couples can licitly practice birth control for reasons of health or economic hardship. The Pope's own commission on the subject in 1966 voted 70 to 14 in favor of relaxing the church's stand on contraception. More significantly, millions of married Catholics, either on their own initiative or with the blessing...
Specific church condemnations of birth control notably increased during the late 19th century, when such technological developments as vulcanized rubber made contraception cheap and easily available to the masses. With the growing acceptance of contraception in the secular world, the papal stance against birth control hardened, culminating in the 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii (On Christian Marriage). Reacting to the acceptance of birth control by the Anglicans' significant Lambeth Conference that year, Pope Pius XI declared, in accordance with the natural-law theory, that since the sexual act had a procreative intent, it was a violation of divine will...
...natural law as e'ther philosophically untenable or inadequate as a way of interpreting God's mysterious ways. Still more insist that natural law must be constantly reinterpreted in light of man's expanding knowledge. Thus, some thinkers contend that the Pope's rejection of birth control because it interferes with procreation is based on a static and incomplete understanding of sexuality as a merely biological function. A complete natural-law theory of intercourse should include its total significance for man within marriage. To most modern couples, it is more important as an expression of love...
Into the Lifeboat. Some argue that the Pope's grudging approval of only one medically inadequate means of controlling birth-the rhythm method-is inconsistent with his acknowledgment that sex is important as an expression of a loving marital relationship. Forcing a man and wife to practice rhythm, says Gunther Mack, ecumenical affairs editor of a German Protestant weekly Sonntags-blat, is "like sending a man on a sinking ship to a lifeboat full of holes...