Fifty-five years ago, St. Pope Paul VI promulgated Humanae Vitae, a papal encyclical that unequivocally clarified the Church’s perennial opposition to artificially contracepted sex. Although this teaching faced resistance from several theologians and even bishops at the time, it has been reaffirmed and further developed by subsequent papal teaching, from St. John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae to the current version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church recently revised by Pope Francis, which describes the practice as “intrinsically evil.”
Now, a Vatican institute, ironically first created by the late great Polish pope and saint, is pushing for a “paradigm shift” in moral theology that would include departing from established teaching on contraception, but also euthanasia and forms of artificial conception—and supporters of this “radical change” are urging Pope Francis to follow suit with an encyclical affirming this radical break from five decades of post-conciliar magisterial consensus.
The revelations are included in a recent text issued by the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL), an ecclesial thinktank established by St. John Paul in 1994 to study and provide guidance “on the principal problems of biomedicine and of law, relative to the promotion and defense of life, above all in the direct relation that they have with Christian morality and the directives of the Church’s Magisterium.”
PAL describes Theological Ethics of Life: Scripture, Tradition, and Practical Challenges, a 528-page synthesis of the proceedings of a 2021 PAL-sponsored theological seminar, as “a contribution that elaborates a Christian vision of life by expounding it from the perspective of an anthropology appropriate to the cultural mediation of faith in today’s world.”
The text’s introduction, written by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the Academy’s president since 2016, describes the “paradigm shift” in moral theology it introduces as “both descriptive and conceptual, as it follows a pattern that is both argumentative and narrative, theoretical and sapiential, phenomenological and interpretative.”
“The text carries out a radical change, moving as it were, from the sphere to the polyhedron,” wrote Archbishop Paglia. “This is not a handbook of formulas or catalogue of cases that can be taken out of the context of the overall argument. Rather, it is a fundamental exposition of the Christian vision of life, illustrated in its existential aspects that are most relevant to the dramatic nature of the human condition and addressed from the perspective of an anthropology that is appropriate to the cultural mediation of faith in today’s world….”
The above comes from a July 13 posting in the National Catholic Register.
These corrupt clerics are really trying to get the schism to be out in the open
You keep asking for schism and civil war, so why are you complaining?
Read about the unshakable kingdom in Hebrews 12.
Seems to me there’s a whole lotta’ shakin’ goin’ on.
That’s as horrible a word salad as Kamala Harris serves up.
Except Kamala doesn’t have such sophisticated words in her vocabulary. But it’s true that they both use words to pretend to communicate and to sound like they know something.
Yeah, and the ellipsis implies that that crazy last sentence runs on even longer!
When discovering my Catholic patrimony as well as becoming a husband and father of two boys, HV was my lodestone. Every thing said there rang true to me a a Catholic father and husband.
Today’s “radical change” and “paradigm shift” is really giving up.
The things written about in HV have come to pass, IMO.
Humanae Vitae is a hidden gem of the Church. Archbishop Pagllia has destroyed the John Paul II Institute on the Family, and now he’s out to destroy the Church. What has been written about in Humanae Vitae is now coming to pass. These false shepherds are destroying the Church. It’s a blow to the laity, a blow to the Church, and the destruction of the world. They are cowardly men exalting the world and condemning their souls.
There is no such thing as a “paradigm shift” in our Church’s moral teaching. And Christ’s moral teachings have nothing to do with the pagan secular culture. A Christian is called to bring the Light and Truth of Christ to the fallen world. The moral law is the same in all ages. How tragic, that the Pontifical Academy of Life even included support for pro-death– euthanasia– in their unChristian “non-life supporting” advocacy. The gay-promoting Abp. Paglia should tear down that famous, filthy, homoerotic mural in his Cathedral, that he commissioned.
You used to be able to get a dispensation to use birth control if another pregnancy would endanger the life of the mother. I think that is what is being talked about here.
but either way, it does not change church teaching.
Contraceptive pills (birth control pills) also endanger women’s lives — can lead to breast cancer, blood clots and many other medical problems. Read label.
Prolife female doctors say the child can be delivered early before the mother is endangered, by induced labor or caesarian, and steps taken to save a child instead of deliberately killing it, thus saving both mother and child.
Taking out a fallopian tube in an ectopic pregnancy to save a woman’s life is not considered an abortion as both mother AND child will die if the tube is not removed. In rare cases the child can be saved after the tube is removed.
This was before birth control pills. So the man took responsibility. It was a situation where the woman almost died (blood loss, I think) having her 6th child. The child died. They were told by the doctor that another pregnancy would probably kill the woman so their priest said they could do that.
On my other side, my cousin’s mother died giving birth to her 5th child. The child lived.
If she had taken the birth control pill, she might have died at the same age or even earlier by a medical condition brought on by the pill. No one knows for sure. Natural Family Planning is the best method for such situations. It has been far more modernized. There are also kits now to tell a woman when she is in her fertile time, so the couple can avoid those times.
I can tell that you are Catholic. There are lots of methods of birth control.
I do not know much about it. And you are right, abstinence is the holiest option when you cannot risk a pregnancy.
Not many married men want to go without for 15 to 20 years, though.
Most physicians now are not taught how to save both the mother and child as they once were but rely more on just aborting the child by tearing it apart or burning it to death by saline in the womb. Many people are making more money from the contraceptive and abortion industry to care about saving the children. It is all about making money not saving lives.
The pope said that Pres. Joe Biden’s stance on abortion is a matter between his conscience and his pastor. The pope considers Biden’s stance on abortion “incoherent” for a Catholic. Abp. Vigano urged the USCCB to excommunicate pro-abort Joe Biden, and all others like him.
The gutting of the JP II’s PAL comes courtesy not of Paglia but of Francis. The fruits of Francis’ swath of destruction are now witnessed today. The target seems to be Humanae Vitae, a true gem of the Church, as Wheels noted. The advance of the LGBTQ+ agenda depends on the repudiation of this encyclical. When it goes (or better, if it goes) all bets are off on what will replace traditional Catholic sexual ethics.
Another one bites the dust.
And even HV was a capitulation to concupiscence.