The World - News from Oct. 25, 1988

Pope John Paul II, asking U.S. bishops to urge couples to embrace marriage and reject abortion and contraception, lamented a world “that often reduces sex to the pursuit of pleasure.” In a Vatican City speech to 18 visiting bishops from Michigan and Ohio, the Pope said he wanted to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the church’s ban on artificial birth control. “We see ever more clearly today how relevant and positive it is,” the pontiff told the delegation headed by Cardinal Edmund Szoka of Detroit.