Throughout this academic year, Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University is hosting a series of lectures, billed as the “first interdisciplinary” study to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Blessed Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae. The series promises to examine the “many problems” that have emerged in family life since Pope Paul wrote on the ethics of human love and the morally appropriate methods of family planning. And that could indeed be useful.
Yet the roster of series speakers is not replete with defenders of Paul VI's teaching in Humanae Vitae, and at least one of the lecturers has telegraphed his revisionist theological punch by suggesting that today's “new situation” is quite different from that addressed by Humanae Vitae.
On that, at least, he's right: Today's situation is far worse.
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