Word: seculare
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More and more U.S. Roman Catholic priests are giving up their parishes for secular life. The reasons are many: some have chafed too long under arbitrary authoritarian discipline; others have succumbed to love of a woman. Still others have, in the old-fashioned phrase, simply lost their faith. While the break with the ministry is still an emotionally harrowing experience for most, this growing battalion of unfrocked clerics are finding it easier to marry, raise a family and get a decent job. The ex-priests are no longer the pariahs of Christianity...
Judas Complex. As their numbers grow, former priests are approaching a new life in the secular world with an increasing confidence. In the past, priests who abandoned their vocations felt so disgraced that often they suffered for months and even years from a "Judas" complex-the feeling of having betrayed Christ. Things are more civilized now. Patrick Best, a Detroit priest who left last May and has gone back to school, boasts that "my congregation even gave me a couple of going-away parties." George Frein, a St. Louis priest who married an ex-nun in June, has been hired...
...burned at the stake as a heretic. Taking the chalice as their symbol, his followers founded the Hussite sect, which was based on secular religion and nationalism. In 1618, after Emperor Matthias tried to check the growth of Protestantism, Czech patriots in Prague tossed two imperial officials from the windows of Hradcany Castle. In retaliation, the Habsburg armies crushed the Hussites, executed their leaders, burned Czech Bibles and outlawed the language. Though overwhelmed, the Czechs and Slovaks waged a passive resistance. As Friedrich Schiller later reflected...
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...
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...