Robert Hoyt, NCR founder, dies at 81
In April 1967, NCR attracted national and international attention when it published the secret reports of the majority of a special commission appointed by Pope Paul VI to review the church’s teaching that forbids the use of artificial means of contraception. The majority of the commission recommended revisions in the teaching. However, a year later, the pope rejected those recommendations and issued Humanae Vitae, commonly known as the birth control encyclical, which upheld traditional teaching.Publication of the secret report was seen as scandalous in some circles and the action was among the reasons Bishop Charles H. Helmsing of Kansas City, Mo., who originally had encouraged the development of the paper, issued a condemnation of NCR and demanded that it remove the word Catholic from its name.
The paper largely ignored the condemnation. The Catholic Press Association said in a statement that the dispute arose out of a difference of opinion regarding the function of the press, while dozens of Catholic editors signed a statement disagreeing with the condemnation based on its “underlying definition of the legitimate boundaries of religious journalism in service to the church.”
Those boundaries are still in dispute, or at least in flux, in some areas of Catholic journalism. But Hoyt and others were acting on an understanding of the role of the press as expressed in a talk given earlier by noted Jesuit theologian Fr. John Courtney Murray during a Rome symposium sponsored by the International Union of the Catholic Press.
Considering the number of articles from this rag floating around in the aftermath of John Paul II's death, it might be a good idea to ping this golden-oldie thread...