Opponents Tried to Put Pressure on Pope
The 3 Panels Paul VI Turned to When Writing "Humanae Vitae"
ROME, JULY 18, 2003 (Zenit.org).- Next Friday will mark the 35th anniversary of the promulgation of Pope Paul VI's encyclical "Humanae Vitae" (Of Human Life), in which he reaffirmed the Church's teaching on contraception.
Bernardo Colombo, professor emeritus of demography at the University of Padua -- brother of Bishop Carlo Colombo (1909-1991), a trusted theologian of Paul VI in the years of the Second Vatican Council -- has just published an article in Theology, the review of Milan's School of Theology, in which he tells of the writing of the encyclical.
Sectors opposed to the Church's teaching on contraception contend that Paul VI published "Humanae Vitae" in opposition to the majority vote of the members of the preparatory commission.
In April 1967, an article published in France in Le Monde, in Great Britain in The Tablet, and in the United States in the National Catholic Reporter stated that 70 members of this commission favored the pill while only four members opposed it.
Those numbers turned out to be false, Colombo found in his research. The articles, in fact, were published to exert pressure, he said.
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