Turning Point: The Inside Story of the Papal Birth Control Commission

Robert McClory's Turning Point is a work of investigative journalism and popular history examining the internal Vatican commission that studied Catholic teaching on birth control in the 1960s and ultimately recommended, contrary to the eventual papal ruling in Humanae Vitae, that the church's ban be reconsidered. McClory's account draws on interviews with surviving commission participants and documentary material to reconstruct a genuinely underreported internal church debate. As journalism rather than an academic archival history, its narrative reconstruction relies significantly on retrospective participant testimony gathered years after the events, a method that carries the ordinary limits of memory and post hoc framing that specialist historians weigh against the commission's own surviving contemporaneous documents where those are available.