Word: dissention
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While the encyclical reiterates the pope's conservative stance on issues of sexuality, it will prove far more controversial for the position it stakes out on the role of the Catholic clergy in stifling dissent. According to the Times report, "The Pope tells the bishops that they have a 'grave obligation to be personally vigilant' and must take 'appropriate measures to insure that the faithful are guarded from every doctrine and theory contrary' to official church teaching...
...Catholics, who have a tendency to view the Catholic church as some sort of authoritarian Stalinesque entity, may be surprised that an edict ordering clergy to stifle dissent will cause such commotion. There is a tendency to judge Catholicism from what the pope says, rather than from what the majority of American Catholics do. Yet consider, for example, the following responses to Humanae Vitae...
This is not to suggest that Catholics are as flexible as Unitarians. The response of the American bishops read, in part, that dissent was permissible "only if the reasons are serious and well-founded, if the manner of the dissent does not question or impugn the teaching authority of the Church and is such as not to give scandal." But the very possibility of dissent is herein assumed, as indeed it was in Vatican II, which affirmed the "primacy of conscience...
...most of the last 25 years, such dissent has expressed itself mostly in the reluctance of many Catholic clergy to discuss birth control with their parishioners. As Father Richard A. McCormick, a prominent liberal theologian, put it: "The uneasy silence [has] continued, abetted by the fact that many bishops and priests just [do] not have their hearts...
...always sufficient. If the Soviet Union had not wasted its resources on subversion abroad, unilateral arms buildups and aggressive international mischief, it might have sustained its oppressive empire for many more years. The unrelenting pressure from the U.S. and NATO that forced Moscow into bankruptcy opened the way for dissent that swelled to overwhelming dimensions. A whole realignment of the geopolitical stars brought Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat to their fateful accord: the end of the cold war eliminated superpower rivalry for the affections of Arab states, and made Israel realize that it could not count on a strategic alliance...