Word: pius
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...attacks by otherworldly heretics. But contraception did not become a serious issue until the 20th century, when improved techniques-and laxer morals-led to widespread use of birth control devices. By 1930 the Anglican Church hierarchy at the Lambeth Conference reluctantly accepted birth control. Reacting to this, Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical Casti Conubii (On Chaste Marriage), declaring that "the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children. Those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious...
...successor Pius XII in 1951 approved the "rhythm method" of birth control. Pius XII also stated that "medical, eugenic, economic and social" motives could justify couples in limiting the size of their families. Nine years later the approval for marketing birth control pills raised the hope that such biochemical controls would be regarded as "natural" by the church. Pope John XXIII appointed a special commission to examine the matter. Its confidential, but later leaked, majority report to Paul VI in 1966 warned against avoiding childbearing for selfish reasons. Going beyond Pius XII's position, however, the report called...
Garry Wills, columnist and author of Inventing America: John Paul has attracted a large crowd. He doesn't want to lose it, so there will undoubtedly be some pressure on him toward liberalization. On the other hand, the same pressures were there for Pius IX, Pius XII and Paul VI. The history of the recent papacy is not very promising. Almost all Popes come in as reformers, and all of them get more rigid and not more loose as they stay in office. What signals he has given show that he is quite reactionary, surely as reactionary as Paul...
...spectacle was a startling confirmation of the substantial changes that have occurred in American attitudes toward the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy. One has only to imagine the nation's furious reception if Pope Pius XII had appeared in America 30 years ago: Congressmen would have introduced resolutions denouncing the visit; angry pickets would have greeted the Pontiff at every stop. It would have seemed un thinkable to invite him to the White House...
...hordes of the ignorant and illiterate with their allegiances to a sinister wizard who dwelled in Rome surrounded by the skeletons of Borgias. (The Catholic immigrants, flocking together in a consciousness of their own differences, and with some desire to preserve them, seemed to confirm nativist fears.) When Pope Pius IX in the 1840s followed the example of European monarchs and sent a block of marble for the Washington Monument, a mob threw it into the Potomac. Through the 1850s, the violently antipapist Know-Nothing Party flourished, to be supplanted in succeeding generations by the Ku Klux Klan, which went...