Word: xii
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...would be left to his successor, Richard Cardinal Cushing, a man of simpler style, and Pope John XXIII, successor to Pius XII, to paint a picture of Catholicism which was inconsistent neither with the times nor the experiences of 20th century Americans of all faiths living in an age of rapid social change. The election of John F. Kennedy '40 to the presidency in 1961 did not so much prove that a Catholic could be president as show how little being a Catholic had to do with being president at all. These developments raised the nation's consciousness and provided...
...complications even today. The Pope, adored in the streets and hailed as a media phenomenon, is scarcely the slicked-down, "with-it" Pontiff one might think the 20th century requires. Indeed, he has been called by some social critics within his own church a throwback to the frosty Pius XII. His pronouncements, shaped by the rigors of his Eastern Catholicism and his perception of a world in moral drift, have served to defend the eroding frontiers of faith and practice. He is both personable and tough-- a difficult combination to defeat, and, in these soft days, to understand...