The world lent an ear to Rome this month after Vatican sources indicated that a papal pronouncement on birth control could be expected before Easter.
The pressure for some amplification of the Roman Catholic teaching on the role of sex in marriage has been building up for years. Not until recent months, however, has there been open argument among Catholics for modification of the church’s traditional view that the use of contraceptives is immoral.
Even Pope Paul VI has stressed the urgency of the situation. He acknowledged that the problem was “deeply preoccupying public opinion in the world and also, very justly, husbands and wives and their pastors.”
The question was posed most dramatically during two days last year—October 29 and 30—when the Vatican Council was in its third session. This was when three distinguished Council Fathers joined in calling for a re-examination of the church’s doctrine on marriage, postulated by St. Augustine fifteen centuries ago (“Intercourse is unlawful and wicked where the conception of the offspring is prevented”) and reaffirmed by Pope Pius XI in 1930 in his encyclical “Christian Marriage.” The three were Leo Joseph Cardinal Suenens, Archbishop of Malines-Brussels, Belgium; Melkite Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh of Antioch (now a cardinal); and Paul-Emile Cardinal Leger, Archbishop of Montreal.
The discussion on the council floor produced no definite decision and probably prompted greater debate outside the council. Last month, twenty influential Catholic lay men and women in England sent a report to a Vatican commission urging that the use of contraceptives in marriage be permitted. The report argued that since the church has accepted family planning through the use of the “safe period” and preached the positive value and unitive purpose of sexual intercourse in marriage, the absolute prohibition of contraception seemed “strongly unintegrated.”
The episcopal enfant terrible of English Roman Catholicism, Archbishop Thomas Roberts, recently predicted that his church would lose a large number of members unless it changed its attitude on birth control. Roberts, a Jesuit and former Archbishop of Bombay, thus defied the Pope’s wish, conveyed by John Cardinal Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster, that same week, for a moratorium on birth control discussion. This followed the suspension of two young English priests who had criticized Catholic teaching on the subject.
Pope Paul did not announce until last June the formation of a special birth control commission. Actually, however, the commission held its first meeting in the fall of 1963, when it was asked to advise the Holy See on the population question, with particular reference to United Nations policy. The second meeting was held in February, 1964, and a third meeting was planned for next September.
Late in March, however, the commission members—increased from twenty-five to more than fifty—were urgently called to Rome because, it is understood, the Pope wanted advice regarding progestine-estrogen pills, which introduce female hormone compounds that prevent ovulation. The commission includes theologians, medical doctors, social scientists, and psychologists.
Religious News Service has relayed reports that “three schools of thought have been represented in the commission, whose membership and deliberations have been shrouded in the utmost secrecy.” Supposedly one group opposed any radical change in the church’s traditional stand against artificial methods of birth control, while another favored permitting the new pill to augment the present rhythm system sanctioned by the church. A third group reportedly favored wider use of the pill, which Father Bernhard Haring, noted German theologian, has asserted does not interfere with the conjugal act but merely affects the functions of nature.
Another report said that several members of the commission believed a consensus of a sort had been reached that regards as morally acceptable the limited use of the pill to regularize a woman with erratic menstrual cycles on her doctor’s advice and with the approval of her confessor.
There seems little doubt that public sentiment, religious and otherwise, is shifting increasingly toward acceptance of birth control. In the United States, the Gallup Poll registered a 25 per cent shift over eighteen months of Roman Catholic opinion toward a position favoring making birth control information available “anywhere in the United States to anyone who wants it.” The New York Times reported on March 28 that tax support for birth control is increasing across the nation at all levels of government. The Ford Foundation recently announced it has committed $34.5 million for birth control research and training centers in the United States and abroad. One of the ironies of the Vatican opposition to the pill has been that Dr. John Rock, who is given much of the credit for its development, is a Roman Catholic.
The Rev. C. Stanley Lowell of Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State has reported on a worldwide study of birth control laws. He says the following countries have laws which “at least partially or in some areas prohibit” birth control: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Eire, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, and the United States (a test case on Connecticut’s birth control law is before the U. S. Supreme Court).
Perhaps the most balanced viewpoint on birth control came in a new statement of order from the Lutheran Church of Bavaria. The statement said there is no objection to birth control when practiced by married couples as a matter of “personal responsibility.” It added, however, that it would be “a sin against the divine creative order” and therefore absolutely objectionable to restrict the number of children because of “selfishness” and “egotism.”
Any Objections?
“To be or not to be, that is the question.” Hamlet raised the question after existence. Scientists today are raising it before existence.
The day of test-tube human embryos, grown by scientists, may be as little as ten or twenty years away, according to a report in the April issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal. As its authority the report quotes Dr. H. Bentley Glass of Johns Hopkins University, described as one of the world’s leading geneticists.
The goal of scientists is to reduce birth defects and diseases and give “reliably healthy” babies to those who might have to remain childless otherwise. The Journal report attributes to Glass the conviction that “before too long male sperm cells and female ova or egg cells will be grown in laboratory cultures. The next step would be joining the two to produce the series of dividing cells that form a human embryo.” The report adds:
“The egg cells used could be the wife’s. The sperm—if the husband is infertile, which is common—could come, for example, from a sperm bank controlled by a hospital. The resulting embryo could then be implanted into the womb and become a healthy baby. Indeed, this technique might be far more reliable than present-day artificial insemination, with the donor chosen by a doctor.”
But what about the ethical implications, Glass asks. “Would it be murder to dispose of embryos when an experiment is done? Or are we justified in refraining from such studies when they might lead to advances of enormous benefit?”
The doctor admits that he himself is not sure what the religious and ethical answers to such questions are. But he wants to know. And he is asking leaders in the fields of religion, science, and medicine to find the answers now—not after the event.
Roman Catholics have traditionally rejected contraceptives on the ground that they thwart the normal processes of nature. But if Glass’s confident predictions come true, barren women will soon rejoice—and the sterile husband no less—not by thwarting but by abetting nature’s processes. The old instinctive inhibition against placing unnatural obstacles in nature’s way—which some Protestants share—would lose much of its force.
Yet the assist science would seem to give nature will raise intricate and thorny issues. For the questions must be faced whether the function of sexual love can be ethically transferred to laboratory manipulations and whether the nature of marriage is achieved when the greatest symbol that two have become one flesh is produced, not in the flesh, but in the laboratory.
Christians often complain that science ignores religion. At this crucial place where science stands on the margin of the mystery of life, sex, and marriage, the help of religion is being specifically requested—before the event.
The Question Of Guilt
A Passion Sunday remark by Pope Paul VI stirred protests from Jewish leaders. The pontiff had referred to the clash between Jesus and the Hebrew people and, in the words of a Vatican source, “used the historical fact of the Jews’ killing of Christ to re-illustrate the human phenomenon in today’s world of the general rejection of Christ.”
There were various translations made of what Pope Paul said, and some of them were interpreted as implying “collective Jewish guilt” for the crucifixion of Christ. A “Jewish declaration” that won the preliminary approval of the Second Vatican Council last fall renounces collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion.
For Services To Religion
The Religious Public Relations Council awarded citations to three newspapers, a television station, and two radio stations at its thirty-sixth annual convention in Minneapolis this month.
Chosen were the Los Angeles Times, the Charlotte (North Carolina) News, the National Observer, station KPIX-TV of San Francisco, radio station KMBC of Kansas City, Missouri, and radio station WBBM of Chicago.
The religion editors of the three winning newspapers were honored by being designated RPRC “fellows.” They were Dan Thrapp of the Los Angeles Times, Sue Tit-comb Creighton of the Charlotte News, and Lee E. Dirks of the weekly National Observer.
Also designated a “fellow” was John Gallos, religion editor of station WCCO-TV, Minneapolis. The station won an RPRC award last year for a religious news program written, edited, and announced by Gallos.
This year’s awards were given “in recognition of outstanding service rendered to organized religion” and “continued efforts on behalf of all faiths to advance the spiritual life of our nation.”
The RPRC is composed of public relations and communications specialists from thirty-eight denominations, interchurch agencies, and various interdenominational bodies.
Seminar On Scripture
A seminar on the authority and inspiration of the Scriptures is being planned for next year, with an international group of evangelical scholars scheduled to be the participants. Dr. Harold Ockenga, pastor of Park Street Church (Congregational), Boston, is chairman of the organizing committee. Date and location of the seminar have not been determined.
The Friends United Meeting
Beginning January 1, 1966, the Five Years Meeting of Friends will be known as the Friends United Meeting as a result of action taken at the organization’s executive council meeting in Richmond, Indiana, last month.
The old name became misleading in 1960 when the body decided to meet triennially instead of every five years. The executive council was empowered to establish a new name that would be more accurate and reflect increased cooperation among fourteen separate Quaker affiliations.
For the most part, Quaker groups holding membership in the newly designated Friends United Meeting employ full-time ministers. Meetings for worship are planned, with a sermon, anthem, and congregational hymns.
Another major body of Quakers is the Friends General Conference. Most of the congregations represented in this body follow the old Quaker practice of unprogrammed meetings for worship on the basis of silence. Some Quaker groups belong to both organizations.
Both organizations cooperate in the American Friends Service Committee, as do other more conservative yearly meetings.
Confronting The Urban Challenge
Philadelphia College of Bible is inaugurating a social-work major in which students will combine classroom training with direct field experience.
“There is a growing demand for qualified, professionally trained Christian social workers,” says the Rev. Charles Y. Furness, director of the college’s newly established Bible Social Work Division.
“Singing ‘I’ll be a sunbeam for Jesus’ is all right as far as it goes. Becoming ‘a contact for Jesus’ in some area of social service focuses the light of the Gospel upon specific areas of human need.”
Furness declares that to make effective contact for Christ “requires highly professional training by an experienced social worker with years of technical ‘know-how.’ ” The new PCB program is structured to give pre-professional, biblically oriented training in social-work fundamentals. Some sixty hours of Bible and related subjects will be required in addition to a major of twenty-two hours of social-work requirements.
Field work placement for social-work majors will be coordinated through the Philadelphia Health and Welfare Council.
Furness, who holds a master’s degree from the Rutgers Graduate School of Social Work and a B.D. from Reformed Episcopal Seminary, is already teaching a social-work class at PCB. The full program will become operative in the fall.
Neurotics And The Church
Two couples going through marital crises went to their pastor for advice. The pastor concluded that both marriages were ruined but felt compelled to advise against divorce. Subsequently, two of the four persons abandoned their church and their faith. The other two committed suicide.
“Ecclesiastical order has been saved, but the people are dead,” was the pastor’s cry. “Where can we ministers learn something about correct and compassionate pastoral counseling?”
Dr. Klaus Thomas, who spoke on “neurotic religion” before the Academy of Religion and Mental Health in Washington, D. C., last month, uses the example above in his book on suicide prevention. He is spending a year in America on an advisory basis at St. Elizabeths Hospital, a mental institution in Washington, where he gives lectures to ministers and seminarians on how to do pastoral counseling, defining the complementary roles of pastor and psychoanalyst and urging ministers to stay in their role rather than trying to be analysts.
Dr. Thomas himself, who is fifty years old, is both a practicing psychiatrist and a Lutheran minister. He is also founder and director of the Suicide Prevention Center in his home town of Berlin, to which since its beginning in 1956 thousands of people have come for help.
Berlin has the highest suicide rate in the world. Since World War II, with the exception of one year, East Berlin’s rate has been higher than West Berlin’s, and the indications are that the rate has risen still higher in East Berlin since the erection of the wall.
But Dr. Thomas talks more about religious factors than political ones. “Nearly everyone who commits suicide has religious problems and doubts, though only half of them talk about them,” he says. Ministers themselves have come to the center for counseling. Among the first 200 people who came were 94 pastors. Of the first 531 cases of severe neurosis, more than a third were diagnosed as “ecclesiogenic,” a term used to describe neuroses that, says Dr. Thomas, stem from a religiously legalistic, antiphysical upbringing.
He calls such cases “tragic.” Numerous case histories in his files involve ministers who suffered from various forms of perversion. Through counseling at the center, thirty of the first 200 ecclesiogenic neurotics were healed, and forty others were partially healed. Some of the others visited the center only once.
Dr. Thomas believes in the therapeutic value of prayer and the laying on of hands, which, he says, “dissolves tensions and difficulties and brings a peace of mind that otherwise can only be achieved in sessions lasting several hours.”
He also advocates a theology that would positively affirm the “eroticism” of the Song of Solomon without falling into libertinism.
To meet the need for counseling, which far exceeds the supply of trained counselers, he recommends the clinical training of lay volunteers as well as ministers.
Dr. Thomas’s own schedule this year attests to the demand. He is at his desk at St. Elizabeths as early as 4 A.M.; advice-seekers call him at his home long distance late at night. He also lectures at two seminaries and takes out-of-town speaking engagements.
“We asked Dr. Thomas to join our staff for a year in order to benefit from his considerable experience in working with people who have lost hope and the will to live,” says the Rev. Ernest E. Bruder, director of Protestant chaplain activities at St. Elizabeths. “This is a situation which vitally concerns both the minister and the psychiatrist—and Dr. Thomas is both.”
A Correction For Preachers
The old sermon illustration about the elements in the human body being worth less than a dollar may fall victim to inflation.
Charles Allen Thomas, retiring board chairman of the Monsanto Company, said last month that basic chemical elements in the body are worth only about 99 cents on the open market. He added, however, that the human body is composed of nucleic acids and enzymes that cannot be evaluated.
“Each of us possesses more than a pound of these materials and I am happy to say that at present going prices, these chemicals today have a market value of approximately $800,” he told a stockholders’ meeting in St. Louis.
Words For Victory
Evangelical literature by and large is suffering from pernicious anemia, says Sherwood E. Wirt, editor of Decision. But Wirt and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association are developing a therapy through an annual School of Christian Writing. This year’s sessions are scheduled for June 28–30 in Minneapolis.
“We hope to develop a corps of Christian writers in the United States and Canada who will forsake, renounce, and eschew forever the habits of laziness bred from ignorance, and will use words the way Winston Churchill used them—to win victories,” Wirt declares.
Applicants may write to the registrar. Mrs. Doris Anderson, 1300 Harmon Place, Minneapolis.
Facing The World
A chapel with strikingly modern architectural lines will be built on the campus of the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. It will have a southern exposure facing the atomic accelerator at the University of Texas and the dome of the State Capitol. These, said a spokesman, are “symbolic in part of the world to which the Church is a servant.”
A groundbreaking is planned for next month, and the chapel is scheduled for completion in September. It will have a normal seating capacity of 150. For special events the chapel will be able to accommodate 250.
