Posted on 03/09/2018 6:16:02 AM PST by ebb tide
The siege on Paul VIs 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae has racked up two new assaults in recent days. But also an energetic counterattack.
The first and more authoritative assault bears the signature of Cardinal Walter Kasper. In a booklet released contemporaneously in German and in Italy he exalts the paradigm shift inaugurated by Pope Francis with the exhortation Amoris Laetitia. A paradigm shift - Kasper writes - that does not limit itself to allowing communion for the divorced and remarried, but concerns moral theology in general and thus has effects on many analogous situations, including none other than recourse to artificial methods of birth control.
Kasper does not find in Amoris Laetitia the passage - in effect nonexistent - that would explicitly legitimize the use of contraceptives. But he points out that Francis, when he cites the encyclical of Paul VI, encourages the use of the method of observing the cycles of natural fertility, but does not say anything about other methods of family planning and avoids all casuistic definitions. From which Kasper deduces that in Amoris Laetitia even that which is not said may say something, meaning that it may give the go-ahead to contraceptives, entrusting the use of them to the deliberate decision of conscience of the individual.
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The second assault is less noble and not authoritative at all. And it is the acrobatic review, given a full page in the Sunday, December 4 edition of the newspaper of the Italian episcopal conference, Avvenire, with the byline of its specialist on questions of family morality, Luciano Moia, of the following important book, just off the presses:
Among the documents published for the first time in this book, Moia isolates a letter written by Karol Wojtyla to Paul VI in 1969, after numerous episcopal conferences had spoken out critically against Humanae Vitae. In that letter the archbishop of Krakow asked the pope to publish urgently an instruction against the harmful opinions that were circulating, reiterating even more forcefully the teaching of the encyclical.
Paul VI did not do what Wojtyla had asked him. It was enough for him to hold firm what he had written in Humanae Vitae, without retreating one step. But by capitalizing on this silence of his, Moia contrasts Wojtylas rigidity with the presumed openness of Paul VI to the objections of various episcopates, all of them characterized - according to Moias prose - by respect, acceptance, and comprehension.
In reality, the erudite book by Galuszka documents not only Wojtylas important contribution to the drafting of Humanae Vitae, but also the extraordinary expansion that he offered afterward, as pope, to the comprehension of that encyclical, both with the cycle of catechesis on the theology of the body from 1979 to 1984, and with the encyclical Veritatis Splendor of 1993.
An expansion, that offered by John Paul II, which Benedict XVI has also recognized in this sincere autobiographical note of his, in the book-length interview published after his resignation from the papacy:
In my situation, in the context of the theological thought back then, Humanae Vitae was a difficult text. It was clear that what it was saying was valid in substance, but the way in which it was presented to us, at the time, even for me, was not satisfactory. I was seeking a broader anthropological approach. And in effect, John Paul II afterward integrated the encyclicals natural law style with a personalistic vision.
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And here we are at the counterattack in defense of Humanae Vitae, which has been expressed both with the publication of the book mentioned above and with the presentation of it that was made on Wednesday, March 7 at the Pontifical Lateran University by Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, the Polish philosopher Stanislaw Grygiel, and the Italian theologian Livio Melina, in addition to the author of the book, Pawel Stanislaw Galuszka of Poland.
Melina, formerly the dean of the pontifical John Paul II institute for studies on marriage and family, is also the author of the preface to the book. His contribution on March 7 is reproduced in its entirety on another page of Settimo Cielo.
And these are his parting shots, in which he immediately takes aim at both Kasper and Moia, after which he makes an interesting reference to the letter Placuit Deo published a few days ago by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, with the approval of Pope Francis.
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THOSE WHO MANIPULATE PAUL VI
by Livio Melina
Today one hears ambiguous talk of an epochal paradigm shift, which it is alleged must be applied to Catholic sexual morality. In order to impose it there is also underway a questionable attempt at historical reinterpretation, which contrasts the figures of Paul VI and John Paul II, seeing in the second an intransigent and rigid traditionalist who is thought to have compromised the open and flexible attitude of the former.
In reality, this crude and arbitrary falsification is made only to serve an ideological manipulation of the magisterium of Pope Paul VI. Putting between parentheses the teaching of Saint John Paul II on the theology of the body and on the foundations of morality, his catecheses and Veritatis Splendor, in the name of the new pastoral paradigm of case by case discernment, does not bring us a step forward, but only a step backward toward casuistry, with the disadvantage that at least that was sustained by a solid ecclesial and cultural context of Christian life, while today it could not help but result in the total subjectivization of morality.
Pope Francis recently approved the publication, by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, of the letter Placuit Deo, which among other things warns against a resurgent neo-Gnosticism. Is not this perhaps the poison that is hidden in these self-proclaimed reinterpretations and implementations of Humanae Vitae, which beyond the outmoded letter would like to grasp the spirit, or which, presumptuously denying its normative pertinence (The problem of Humanae Vitae is not pill yes or pill no), extol it for a vague and empty anthropological propheticalness, an affirmation of values that are then left to subjective interpretation, according to the circumstances?
Against these tendencies, the book by Pawel Galuszka is a potent medicine, which allows us to breathe the good moral theology of Karol Wojtyła, a devoted and faithful son of Paul VI first and then his great successor on the see of Peter.
(English translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A.)
Humanae Vitae explains all that is going on right now regarding cultural promotion of and confusion with sexual perversion,feminism and what Tucker is headlining regarding the crisis of masculinity.It was prophetic.
Of course its under attack. In Christianity and in war thats a sign of being in the right place
If the bishops had accepted it and promoted it like they do non catholic causes like global warming and the invasion they call immigration, the Church would be a refuge for so many more people.
But they didnt. They rejected it.
It was published by the Vatican endorsed/written by the pope (Paul IV) post Vatican II in 1968
Pope Paul Vi not IV
Frankie gives us the Joy of Love.
For those of you who participated in any post-Vatican II high school catechisms you remember cutting out the pictures of "joy" and "love" and bringing them to class so that they could be placed on the collage of every students cut-outs where you all could stand back in rapturous exaltation.
Frankie is the post-Vatican II collage pope.
Great way of putting it!
One of the embarrassing things about Frankie is that his stupidity means he doesnt even realize what an elderly fool he looks like, acting as if its 1965 all over again or maybe it never ended...
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