Winnipeg Statement Winnipeg Statement The Winnipeg Statement is the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops' statement on the encyclical "Humanae vitae" from a plenary assembly held at Saint Boniface in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Published on September 27, 1968, it is the Canadian bishops' controversial document about Pope Paul VI's July 1968 encyclical on human life and the regulation of birth. Some bishops within the Catholic Church in Canada had already made moves to dissent from traditional Catholic teaching on contraception. An expert, or peritus, accompanying the Canadian bishops to the Second Vatican Council, Gregory Baum was a prominent dissident on the subject and at
Winnipeg Statement gained and much lost by an attempt to rephrase what we have said in Winnipeg. We stand squarely behind our position but we feel it is our duty to insist on a proper interpretation of that position." They added: In 1998, the Canadian bishops voted by secret ballot on a resolution to retract the Winnipeg Statement. It did not pass. Calls for retraction continue, though some see the Canadian bishops' December 1, 1973, document, "Statement on the Formation of Conscience", as evidence that they were trying to distance themselves from the Winnipeg Statement. In 2008, the Canadian bishops issued a