Conscience and Catholic Education: Theology, Administration, and Teaching brings together essays that focus broadly on issues of conscience encountered in the educational field. The essays are uneven but important.
Pope Paul VI was the kindly priest with a liberal heart and a conservative soul, an irreconcilable duality, as was his dual role as pope and as presider over the final three sessions of the reforming Second Vatican Council.
The Field Hospital: Deacon Don Zirkel wrote to Bishop Barres of Rockville Centre, New York, suggesting they go on the road around the diocese, talking up responsible parenthood and the joy of marriage.
From Where I Stand: Amid sex abuse revelations, the cry for reform gets louder by the day. And while some reform of structures is imperative, it's the theology that counts.
In tackling clergy sex abuse, the "Authentic Reform" schedule includes such topics as "Humanae Vitae as a Charter for Reform," "Purifying the Clergy" and "The Problem of Homosexuality."
Michael Sean Winters rounds up political news and commentary:Humanae Vitae and the McCarrick scandal; a missed chance to subpoena Cardinal Dziwisz; Kiribati's present, Miami's future.
Half a century after Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, church leaders in Eastern Europe continue to vigorously defend the encyclical, in contrast to many commentators in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Distinctly Catholic: Though it was reduced to "Pope Bans Pill" the second it was issued, Humanae Vitae is actually a powerful reflection on the dangers to human life posed by the lingering Malthusian temptation to view human life as something we can exert mastery over.
Documents in the Vatican Secret Archives and the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith prove it was a "myth" that Blessed Paul VI largely set out on his own in writing Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical on married love and the regulation of births.
