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Saturday, May 19, 2012

Robert Blair Kaiser

There's an article at the National Catholic Reporter by Robert Blair Kaiser. Wikipedia states of him ...

As a correspondent for Time Magazine, he won the Overseas Press Club's Ed Cunningham Award in 1962 for the "best magazine reporting from abroad" for his reporting on the Second Vatican Council.

... and he mentions being at Vatican II in the NCR article ...

Open letter to the U.S. bishops: Let's not be a laughingstock, OK?

[...] The best thing about Vatican II: It reversed centuries of Catholicism's standoffishness toward "the world." I will never forget one day during the council's fourth session, when members of the press were given a draft of the council's crowning document on the church and the world. The world was a good place, it said, because it was redeemed by Christ, and where it wasn't so good, it was our job as followers of Christ to help make it better. I was covering the council for Time magazine, and at a session of the American Bishops' Press Panel later that day, I remember trying to understand the implications of this "new stance toward the world." I asked the panel of theologians, "Does this mean that Catholics can, for example, start working together with all kinds of organizations (not necessarily Catholic), like Planned Parenthood, for instance?" I will never forget my sense of euphoria when almost everyone in the room applauded the reply of Francis Connell, a moral theologian from the then quite rigid Redemptorist Order. He said he didn't see why not ...

Kaiser's history of the papal birth commission and its aftermath, The Politics of Sex and Religion, can be read or downloaded for free here.


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