Following the money on population control
At the Catholic News Agency, Kevin Jones argued that the Humanae Vitae controversy “cannot be understood” without its financial context. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, whose 50th anniversary falls on July 25, was opposed by a “well-funded advocacy network” which resented Pope Paul’s reaffirmation of Church teaching on contraception.
Many members in the network had a “neo-Malthusian” agenda of population control, according to the historian Simon Critchlow. For instance, the businessman Hugh Moore, a population control activist, responded to Paul VI’s encyclical by publishing full-page ads in the New York Times and other newspapers, organising petitions of priests, and sending bishops anti-Humanae Vitae material in three languages. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation arranged for Catholic leaders to meet senior figures in Planned Parenthood and the Population Council.
Politeness and the Spanish slavery debate
At the Christian website Mere Orthodoxy, Catherine Addington asked how we should engage in debate, and looked at an example from the mid 16th century. Two Spanish theologians, Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, argued over whether the Spanish could reasonably enslave the indigenous people of America.
Las Casas, himself a former slave-owner, campaigned passionately against slavery, controversially refusing the sacraments to slave-owners. Sepúlveda, who was close to the Spanish Crown, argued that the conquerors had “a perfect right” to rule the “barbarians”: after all, “there exists between the two as great a difference as … between apes and men”.
Las Casas replied aggressively. According to Addington, he said Sepúlveda’s words would embolden Spanish troops abroad: “these brutal men who are hardened to seeing fields bathed in human blood”. Sepúlveda’s thought, argued Las Casas,” would “encourage oppressors” and lead to “many crimes and lamentable evils”.
Sepúlveda believed Las Casas was getting too personal: “I direct all my energies toward the attainment of virtue and the defence of religion.” But Las Casas “was operating on the correct assumption that the urgency of combating an attempt to justify indigenous enslavement outweighs intellectual politeness”.
Did the Argentines break a vow to Mary?
At Crux, Inés San Martín said some Argentines have a theory about their national team’s long period without winning the World Cup.
In 1986, some of the players “went to visit the Virgin of Tilcara [a shrine] and promised her that, if they were to win the World Cup, they would go back on pilgrimage to thank her.” The team did win the tournament, but “after victory they didn’t go back, and some Argentines firmly believe that ever since, the team has been on Mary’s bad side.” The players have dismissed this story – but earlier this year, nine of them went back to the shrine, saying it was “to give thanks.”
✣ Dominican sisters in Mexico are helping to save a much-loved species of salamander from extinction. The axolotl, which are revered by Mexicans for their healing properties, have almost vanished from their freshwater habitats. Now conservationists are working with the Sisters at the monastery of Our Lady of Health in Pátzcuaro to ensure their survival.
The Sisters are expert breeders of the axolotl, as for decades they have used them to produce cough medicine. The nuns are now working with Chester Zoo, according to BBC Radio 4’s The Sisters of the Sacred Salamander, broadcast last week.
Gerardo Garcia, a conservationist at the zoo, said the role of the nuns would “modify completely the game” and their axolotl could be used to repopulate the species in the wild.
Sister Ofelia Morales Francisco said: “If we don’t try to save this species, then nature will be lost. I feel they need our care and protection. And that is exactly what we are doing.”
✣ A huge landslide which swept down a mountainside in northern Italy stopped just a few yards from a historic church. The church in Valle Spluga was built in 1492 after two young girls claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary there. The priest said “the provident hand of God” saved the church.
Attending Mass on Sunday is a solemn and binding obligation
Archbishop Leo Cushley says missing Mass is a grave sin
Pastoral letter, Corpus Christi
Not a moment to celebrate, but rather to pause and be thankful for the lives this judgment will save
Northern Irish pro-life group Both Lives Matter after the Supreme Court dismissed an attempt to overturn the law
Press statement
The disappointment is great for many
Bishop Gerhard Feige on the Vatican Communion letter
katholisch.de
4.9m
Catholics in places, mostly in China, from which Rome has ‘no regular information’
Source: The Vatican
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