Church Urged to Review Dogma
The Roman Catholic Church should study its ban on artificial birth control and consider allowing Catholics who divorce and remarry to receive communion, an Austrian archbishop said today.
On the third day of a two-week synod called to assess the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, Archbishop Karl Berg of Salzburg, Austria, asked that “more reflection be carried out on how responsible parenthood can be reconciled with the progress of modern medicine.”
“In this context there should be a deepening of the understanding of the word ‘natural,’ ” Vatican spokesman Diarmuid Martin quoted Berg as saying.
The remarks clearly referred to the church’s total ban on artificial birth control, a prohibition that is widely ignored by Catholics in most developed nations.
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