Washington D.C., Jun 5, 2006 / 22:00 pm
The notion that the Catholic Church retained the ban on artificial birth control in 1968 because it was afraid that “changing its mind” would undermine Church teaching is a myth, says respected Catholic author and theologian George Weigel.
“The real issue was much graver, and touched virtually every question in the moral life,” he states in his May 26 syndicated column, titled “Afraid of change? More myths of 1968.”
Weigel, who is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., used his column to respond to a recent editorial in the London-based Tablet, which makes the false claim. The notion that the Church holds its stance out of fear, “is a distortion of history and the editors of the Tablet … should know it,” he writes.
In 1967, Weigel explains, the Tablet printed a leaked memorandum to Paul VI from members of the papal commission studying the morality of family planning.