2015-01-16 17:01:00

Pope Francis mentions Blessed Paul VI's encyclical 'Humanae Vitae'


(Vatican Radio) On Friday 16th of January while speaking to families in the Filipino capital Manila, Pope Francis mentioned Blessed Paul VI’s 1968  encyclical ‘Humanae Vitae’ on birth control. This is what he said: “I think of Blessed Paul VI in the moment of that challenge of population growth, he had the strength to defend openness to life. He knew the difficulties families experience and that’s why in his encyclical (Humanae Vitae) he expressed compassion for specific cases and he taught confessors to be particularly compassionate for particular cases. And he went further, he looked at the people on the earth and he saw that lack (of children) and the problem it could cause families in the future. Paul VI was courageous, a good pastor - and he warned his sheep about the wolves that were approaching.  And from the heavens he blesses us today”.

Listen to a feature presented and produced by Veronica Scarisbrick:

In an effort to find out more about the background to this document Veronica Scarisbrick once turned to Robert Blair Kaiser ‘Time Magazine’ correspondent in Rome at the time of the Second Vatican Council who explained how : “ Paul VI  found himself having to steer and implement a ‘Commission on birth control’, set up by his predecessor the See of Peter.”

In fact 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. 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. From 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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