A Bold Stand on Birth Control

By Richard N. Ostling

John Paul insists that Catholics must shun contraception

As sunlight streamed through abstract stained-glass windows in the Vatican's ultramodern audience hall, Pope John Paul II told 7,000 pilgrims last week that the practice and attitude of contraception were "harmful to man's interior spiritual culture." Roman Catholic couples, said he, must make a true spiritual evaluation of their sexual relations and express "mature availability to fatherhood and motherhood."

The talk was the 14th in an extraordinary series of discourses this year on birth control at the Pope's weekly general audiences. The aim: to underscore the church's ban on artificial methods. In official policy, abstinence during a woman's fertile time is the only acceptable means of preventing conception. As the Vatican's chief delegate said at the International Conference on Population in Mexico City last August, Roman Catholic teaching not only is unchanged but "has been reaffirmed with new vigor." Despite the hopes of some liberals that the Vatican would eventually downplay or even soften the birth control ban, John Paul has pressed the issue. He wants to establish the church's view strongly for future generations.

To some, the issue involves the credibility of the church's magisterium, or teaching authority. In Western Europe and North America, there is widespread dissent among Catholics on the birth control question. A 1982 survey by the U.S. Government's National Center for Health Statistics found that 91% of Catholic women between ages 15 and 44 who have had sexual intercourse used artificial methods. Says Father William Smith, dean of St. Joseph's Seminary in New York, who favors the Pope's clampdown: "Every moral question is at stake in the contraception debate." The dilemma for developing nations is equally difficult. Some critics of the Holy See argue that rapid population growth in the Third World poses a major threat to world stability.

The Pope's lectures reaffirm a centuries-old Catholic belief, formalized in Pope Pius XI's 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii and Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. The Pauline document, which created a furor, declared that "every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life." The reason: "In the plan of God" there is an "inseparable connection" between the "unitive meaning and procreative meaning" of the marital act. John Paul, when he was Bishop Karol Wojtyla, wrote an enthusiastic preface to the Polish edition of Humanae Vitae and was among the bishops who most vigorously promoted its teaching.

Paul VI based his pronouncements on "natural law," principles built into creation by God that humanity can learn through reason. John Paul's teaching is based on natural law plus divine law, which is part of "the moral order revealed by God." For John Paul, explains one Vatican theologian, the question of contraception "takes us to the center of Christianity." The Pope also puts his teachings within the new context of his "theology of the body," which stresses human dignity and the beauty of sexuality.

In one talk, the Pontiff declared that sex "ceases to be an act of love" whenever artificial birth control is used. That idea appeared hi a book that he wrote in 1960, when he was a bishop, but is new to papal teaching. John Paul also stresses that acceptable natural methods of birth control can be an "abuse" if practiced for "unworthy reasons." Pope Pius XII, in a 1951 speech, said that Catholic couples could use the natural, or rhythm, method for serious "medical, eugenic, economic and social" reasons. John Paul shows little enthusiasm for promoting even these methods.

There may be an additional reason for the tougher Vatican stance. The Pope's advisers believe that recent events have strengthened their case. They argue that natural methods have achieved greater reliability in preventing conception, that there is a bit less doomsaying about the population explosion and mass privation, and that health questions about artificial methods have been raised. To conservatives, the casual attitude in Western society toward sex provides an additional reason for concern.

Some Catholic thinkers are unpersuaded. Noted West German Theologian Father Bernard Haering has argued that biological functions, far from being "untouchable," must be "subordinated to the good of the whole person and marriage itself." Jesuit Richard McCormick of Georgetown University claims "a lot of bishops believe you can't find the arguments to sustain papal teaching." Father Charles Curran of the Catholic University of America doubts that the ban is based on good reasoning, concluding that "faith and reason cannot contradict one another." Curran and McCormick think that the Pope may crack down on dissident priests and make the birth control issue a litmus test in appointments of bishops and seminary professors.

The Pope's position is strongly endorsed by bishops in the developing nations, where population growth is most unchecked. Those Third World bishops who worry about the population problem promote only natural methods. In such nations as the Philippines and Kenya, Cardinals have publicly decried government population programs. For workaday Catholics in impoverished nations, however, it is often not bishops who define what is sinful but parish priests. On that level, the Pope faces increased individualism among priests in the Third World. Typical of many in overcrowded urban slums, Dominican Father Miguel Concha of Mexico City remarks, "If I know someone is using an artificial method, I'm not going to think they're in serious sin. I'm going to respect their decision, though I'll exhort them to seek medical advice so as not to risk the woman's health."

-- By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Michael P. Harris /Washington and Roberto Suro/Rome, with other bureaus

With reporting by Michael P. Harris, Roberto Suro