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Document Details :

Title: On the Humanae Vitae Process
Subtitle: Ethics of teaching Morality
Author(s): RIGALI, Norbert J.
Journal: Louvain Studies
Volume: 23    Issue: 1   Date: spring 1998   
Pages: 3-21
DOI: 10.2143/LS.23.1.542267

Abstract :
In the three decades since the publication of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae theologians have presented innumerable critical analyses of its doctrine on the regulation of birth, but only infrequently and fleetingly has theological attention been paid to the way in which the document originated. There are, to be sure, fine accounts of how the encyclical came to be in Robert Blair Kaiser’s The Politics of Sex and Religion: A Case History in the Development of Doctrine, 1962-1984 and in Robert McClory’s Turning Point: The Inside Story of the Papal Birth Control Commission, and How Humanae Vitae Changed the Life of Patty Crowley and the Future of the Church. As their entitlement implies, however, these are journalistic works. Of theological-ethical reflection on the encyclical’s genesis there has been scarcely more than the theologian’s faulting of the process because the pope did not follow the report on the morality of birth regulation of the commission he himself had established.


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