A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., is told in the third person past tense by an objective, albeit generally sympathetic and friendly narrator. It is important to realize A Canticle for Leibowitz is written and published in 1959, prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965.) Vatican II, particularly the early sessions, while Pope John XXIII lived, re-examined many of the medieval practices seen in the novel and reformed the liturgical rites that are portrayed in A Canticle for Leibowitz extending forward some eighteen centuries. Positing a massive nuclear confrontation the world feared in 1959 - and came dramatically to the brink of in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 -- the novel heightens and makes immediate the tough bioethical problems, primarily euthanasia and abortion, that the Roman Catholic Church in.....
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