Subverting Church Teaching?

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The Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life is turning away from its original purpose and embracing the Culture of Death.

Church Militant's Rodney Pelletier explains how a tweet from the academy over the weekend is revealing terrible doctrinal problems.

The Pontifical Academy for Life is claiming Pope Paul VI didn't believe his 1968 encyclical banning artificial birth control was infallible.

After massive outcry by faithful Catholics — including theologians — the academy doubled down in a letter on Monday, adding, "As regards the specific question of contraception, when the moral theologian of the Pontifical Lateran University ... Msgr. Fernando Lambruschini ... presented Humanae Vitae ... he stated [it] is not to be considered part of the infallible pronouncements."

Lambruschini, the letter claimed, said the encyclical "did not express a definitive truth of faith."

Dominican theologian Fr. Thomas Petri slammed the academy's statement, remarking to Catholic News Agency that the teaching Humanae Vitae "presents is, in fact, irreformable because it's part of the ordinary and universal Magisterium of the Church."

Pope John Paul II instituted the academy in 1994 to "represent the various branches of the biomedical sciences and those that are most closely related to problems concerning the promotion and protection of life."

But during Pope Francis' papacy, the academy's moral credibility has tanked. In 2016, Francis overhauled the academy's statutes, no longer requiring members to defend life in accordance with Church teaching.

A year later it was reported that Pope Francis formed a secret committee to examine possible changes to Catholic teaching on contraceptives.

Since then, the pope has appointed several pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia advocates to the academy's board. And with its latest statement opposing Church teaching, Catholics are questioning just how far things will go.

As of this afternoon, all tweets referring to the matter have been taken down by the academy.

The comments were overwhelmingly critical of the academy's slide towards heterodoxy.

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