Word: within
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thus, instead of solving a troubling question of personal morality for Catholics, Paul has, in fact, brought into the open a much more profound question: Where and what is authority in the church? Ironically, the Pope, who has worried so much about the spread of dissension within Catholicism, has really created the conditions for further revolt...
...expanding knowledge. Thus, some thinkers contend that the Pope's rejection of birth control because it interferes with procreation is based on a static and incomplete understanding of sexuality as a merely biological function. A complete natural-law theory of intercourse should include its total significance for man within marriage. To most modern couples, it is more important as an expression of love than as a method of procreating children...
...encyclical: "Why, in a subject that concerns marriage and the family, is this addressed to 'Venerable Brothers and Beloved Sons'? Where do the women come in?" More seriously, assailants of the encyclical were disturbed that it was a one-man decision reflecting a minority view within the church and not a consensus of the faithful. Father Joos Arts, editor of the radical Dutch Catholic newspaper Nieuwe Linie went so far as to warn that "the Pope is isolating himself from the church...
Pyramid of Wisdom. The likelihood that Humanae Vitae would prove to be a dead letter within months after its publication raised a far more fundamental ecclesiastical question, the role of papal authority in the church. Many theologians contend that there has been an unhealthy overemphasis on the teaching voice of Rome since the definition of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870. In effect, the church has been a pyramid, with all wisdom flowing downward from the top. Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council suggested the possibility of a more democratic, decentralized concept of Catholicism. Paul...
Jesuit Biblical Scholar John McKenzie of Notre Dame believes that "with this pronouncement on birth control, the papacy is going to lose its leadership, which will take 200 years to recover-if ever." Although the downgrading of papal authority would unquestionably lead to a period of confusion within the church, some progressive Catholics contend that dissolution of the papacy as an absolute monarchy would lead to a new and healthier concept of what authority is. The church of the Bible, they argue, was not an authoritarian state but a community of shared decisions, which were not made by the hierarchy...