Contraception and the Doctrine of Discovery, by Dr. Jeff Mirus

Religion’s Decline is Reason’s Decline, by Auguste Meyrat
August 4, 2022
Biden Signs Executive Order to Help Women Get Abortions Out of State Through Medicaid, by Melanie Arter
August 4, 2022

Photo by Sharon Waldron on Unsplash

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture, Aug 03, 2022

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org.

 

My title may seem like an odd pairing, but both parts of it come from the news of the past few days, and both were alluded to in Pope Francis’ latest press conference, held as usual in flight, this time on his way home from Canada. It is important, I think, to consider both the potential development of doctrine on contraception—recently called for in the results of a conference held by the Pontifical Academy for Life—and the abrogation of the “doctrine of discovery”, demanded by those protesting the Canadian residential schools which were used to break up families and erase the culture of the indigenous peoples there.

The problem, as so often, is that people don’t know what they are talking about, and this seems to affect scholars as much as political activists. That’s reason enough to clarify these two points. …