Word: pius
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Within the last three decades, however, the church has significantly qualified the more-is-better ideal in favor of "responsible parenthood." In a 1930 encyclical on marriage, Pope Pius XI declared that Catholic couples had every right to sexual intercourse during times of natural infertility. His successor, Pius XII, defended the right of parents to limit or space their children for medical, economic, eugenic or social reasons. But even as church leaders came to ac cept the idea of family limitation, they held out against mechanical and chemical means of achieving this goal, arguing that they violated natural...
...Broadway, the curtain falls on The Deputy after two acts. Offstage, the bitter dialogue continues over the question raised by Rolf Hochhuth's inquisitorial drama: Should Pope Pius XII, in 1943, have publicly condemned Hitler's campaign to exterminate the Jews? Last week in Rome, Eugène Cardinal Tisserant, Dean of the College of Cardinals, more or less agreed with those Catholics who argue that a statement by Pius would not have stopped the genocide. At the same time, the Frenchman lent support to critics who insist that the Pope, as a moral authority, should have spoken...
Tisserant, 80, recalled a December 1939 meeting with Pius in the Pope's study at which he futilely urged Pius to issue an encyclical on the duty of Roman Catholics to resist the unjust orders of an authoritarian state; Jews were not to be specifically mentioned. Six months after the meeting, Tisserant wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Paris, then Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard, repeating his suggestion. He did not criticize the Pope, Tisserant insisted last week, giving copies of the letter to the press. His target was the Roman Curia, which, Tisserant charged, had a tacit agreement with...
While every episode in The Deputy calls for Pius to speak out in the name of God, the final scene all but denies the existence of God and drains meaning from the rest of the play. "The Angel of Death," a satanic concentration camp doctor who "selects" those who will die from those who will live a little longer, taunts Father Riccardo with the emptiness of his death. His martyrdom will be unknown and unfelt. Is he dying for the Jews, when his own church has, in centuries past, itself persecuted the Jews? If God exists, why does inexplicable evil...
With its crude, inept dramaturgy, The Deputy is no service to playwriting, and as a polemic, it might have been a far finer spur to conscience. Hochhuth affects to attack Pius XII for lacking the power of faith but really attacks him for lacking faith in power...