Word: vaticaners
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...many liberal Catholics, July 25, 1968, was the day the music died. Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, published 40 years ago today, reaffirmed Catholicism's absolute ban on birth control. Coming on the heels of the Second Vatican Council's unprecedented opening of the Church to modernity three years earlier, the Vatican's decision to stand by a doctrine that ever fewer Catholics were obeying would reverberate far beyond the bedroom...
...Progressives saw the encyclical as the ultimate proof that the Church was bound to remain out of touch with contemporary reality. Traditionalists, instead, can mark it as the beginning of their return to favor, when the Vatican undertook to stand firm against the forces of secularism blowing through the West - and within the Church itself. Today, the traditionalists clearly have a Pope after their own hearts in Benedict XVI. But he's not one to take their positions for granted...
...Vatican's chief of orthodoxy, Ratzinger continued to engage the secular world. Inducted in 1992 into the prestigious French Academy, the epicenter of Enlightenment thought in Europe, Ratzinger gave a discourse about the challenges of democracy and relativism in the modern world. In 2004, he took part in a sort of Ali-Frazier showdown of European intellectual heavyweights when he publicly debated fellow German Jürgen Habermas, considered by some the preeminent leftist philosopher of his generation...
...suggested a way to find moral common ground with non-believers, suggesting atheists behave "as if God existed." Benedict even praised Karl Marx in his last encyclical for his "incisive language and intellect ... precision and great analytic skill," before dissecting the errors of his ideology. Next year, the Vatican has slated special conferences to confront the ideas of Galileo and Darwin...
...broadcasting has caught on in some unexpected places. Republican Congressman John Culberson of Texas recently filmed and broadcast 25 Qik videos, including one meta-video: live footage of the Phoenix Mars landing from the Jet Propulsion Lab control room in Pasadena, Calif. H2o News, which broadcasts events for the Vatican, has streamed dozens of Qik videos so far, including some documenting the Pope's travels. But even for more mundane occasions, Qik's early fans say it's satisfying to know you could broadcast anything to anyone in the world at a second's notice should the need arise. Digg.com...