2014-10-17 16:10:00

Paul VI and ‘Humanae Vitae’


(Vatican Radio) They say that Paul VI had to steer the Catholic Church through a Council he would never have called. Likewise according to Robert Blair Kaiser ‘Time Magazine’ correspondent during those heady Council days, he also found himself having to steer and implement a ‘Commission on birth control’, set up by his predecessor the See of Peter: “It was John XXIII who started the birth control commission, he had six members who met once for a period of a few days before he died.

Listen to Robert Blair Kaiser, Time Magazine correspondent during Vatican II in a feature presented and produced by Veronica Scarisbrick:

It was a commission, Kaiser says, which was first set up to defuse controversy surrounding this delicate issue because Pope John, now Saint,  feared it would create too much of a diversion so  withdrew it from the Council agenda.

Outside of the Council, yet in the context of the Council, this Commission was amplified by  Paul VI. Fom six members he took it to  seventy-two members, among whom were six married couples as well as experts in theology, demography, sociology, psychology, psychiatry.

All very loyal Catholics who in the course of their four year- long meetings, says Kaiser, moved from the right to  the left and concluded by advising the Pope that he had to change the Church’s teaching on birth control. In the end Paul VI had the last word and signed the encyclical ‘Humanae Vitae’ in the summer of 1968. 








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