Word: vaticans
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...resign as Nicaragua's Education Minister. Jesuit officials in Rome cited a 1983 canon law that forbids priests to hold posts that carry civil powers. In a 19-page open letter, Cardenal defended his job as a "pact with the poor." There was no word from the Vatican on the three other priests in the Nicaraguan government, including Foreign Minister Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann...
...only have the Bishops faced well-organized opposition from a group of affluent Catholic businessmen, but they've encountered accusations of overstepping their religious bounds, skepticism from a philosophically conservative Vatican, and growing estrangement from this country's faithful...
...series of discourses this year on birth control at the Pope's weekly general audiences. The aim: to underscore the church's ban on artificial methods. In official policy, abstinence during a woman's fertile time is the only acceptable means of preventing conception. As the Vatican's chief delegate said at the International Conference on Population in Mexico City last August, Roman Catholic teaching not only is unchanged but "has been reaffirmed with new vigor." Despite the hopes of some liberals that the Vatican would eventually downplay or even soften the birth control ban, John...
Paul VI based his pronouncements on "natural law," principles built into creation by God that humanity can learn through reason. John Paul's teaching is based on natural law plus divine law, which is part of "the moral order revealed by God." For John Paul, explains one Vatican theologian, the question of contraception "takes us to the center of Christianity." The Pope also puts his teachings within the new context of his "theology of the body," which stresses human dignity and the beauty of sexuality...
There may be an additional reason for the tougher Vatican stance. The Pope's advisers believe that recent events have strengthened their case. They argue that natural methods have achieved greater reliability in preventing conception, that there is a bit less doomsaying about the population explosion and mass privation, and that health questions about artificial methods have been raised. To conservatives, the casual attitude in Western society toward sex provides an additional reason for concern...