Catholicism Behind the Iron Curtain: Czechoslovak and Hungarian Responses to Humanae Vitae

‘New eugenics,’ gender and sexuality: a global perspective on reproductive politics and sex education in Cold War Europe

“…As the latest studies reveal, there were, however, a 'spectrum of Christian responses' to the social changes of the 1960s in the field of sexuality and reproductive matters (Harris, 2018, p. 13). Concerning the state socialist countries, the role of the Catholic Church has already been reexamined in some detail (Heimann & Szegedi, 2018;Jarska, 2019;Kościańska, 2018;Kuhar 2015;Kuźma-Markowska & Ignaciuk, 2020). Two issues, namely responses to the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae on the regulation of birth and the liberalization of abortion in the mid-1950s have mostly been studied in the Polish, Czechoslovakian and Hungarian contexts.…”

“…Examining discourses in a variety of Catholic publications, authors have pointed to the diversity in positions concerning birth control within the Catholic Church as well as ways in which Church representatives challenged the position of state actors. They have also underlined that these actors engaged in mutual interaction, used each other's arguments to their own advantage as well as influenced each other's positions (Heimann & Szegedi, 2018;Jarska, 2019). Not only the state but also the Church had its own institutions of premarital and marital counseling, and both were engaged in transnational organizations and debates in legitimizing their arguments (Kościańska, 2018;Kuźma-Markowska & Ignaciuk, 2020).…”