Word: pius
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...rebuttal a minority of commission members (estimated to number around 15) insisted, quoting Pope Pius XI: "No reason, however grave, may be put forward by which anything intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good." Carried to its logical conclusion, say some critics, such a doctrine might even support Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse to receive blood transfusions. Aware of that problem, the minority took pains to point out that it was not condemning the application of technology and science to other natural processes-only to any interference with procreation...
Catholics & Conscience. The pill poses two grave moral problems. The first affects Roman Catholics and, for different theological reasons, the smaller number of Orthodox Jews. Not until 1930 did the Vatican modify the Augustinian rule that sex must be for procreation, when Pope Pius XI approved the rhythm method. The Vatican has banned all mechanical and chemical contraception. But Dr. Rock, an unswerving Catholic, has been arguing ever since he sired the pill that its use imitates nature-which occasionally, but only occasionally, makes a woman skip ovulation-and that it should therefore be approved by the Vatican...
...thus rejected, for the present at least, the recommendations submitted last June by his pontifical commission on birth control. A majority of the commission, headed by seven cardinals, proposed that the church take a new tack in its theology of marriage that would sidestep the natural-law approach of Pius XI and Pius XII. Under their norms, any means of birth control apart from the rhythm method and sexual abstinence was said to violate God's inflexible rules for human behavior by frustrating the principal purpose of the sex act, procreation...
...Nazi archives, when taken at face value, tend to undercut this rationale. Nazi diplomats kept reporting back home that Pius had "affection" and "respect" for the German people. Shortly before the fall of France, Diego von Bergen, the German Ambassador to the Vatican, wrote to Berlin that high-placed officials of the Holy See had assured him that they wanted the Allies to accept a negotiated peace on the Western front. In August 1943, the new German Ambassador to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, told Berlin that in Rome, "Bolshevism is the greatest cause of concern." Friedlander is aware...
...German diplomats whose reports are so crucial to his thesis. Von Bergen, for example, was an ambitious professional diplomat who hoped for promotion in Germany's foreign service. Von Weizsacker was an anti-Nazi Protestant who apparently wished to prevent Hitler from taking any action that would harm Pius personally...