Churches: Collision on Contraception

The rebuke lay in the timing: one week after the Roman Catholic bishops of the U.S. charged that federal anti-poverty programs “coerce” the poor into practicing contraception, a number of influential Protestant leaders went on record to assert that they were all for birth control. In a letter to President Johnson, Welfare Secretary John Gardner, and Sargent Shriver of the OEO, the secretary of the United Presbyterians’ General Council, Dr. Theophilus Taylor, stated his denomination’s support for federal birth control programs, and labeled the bishops’ charge as “completely unfounded.”

The Rt. Rev. John E. Hines, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, reiterated that the churches of the Anglican Communion are in “vigorous support” of programs for population control. Approved by the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops in 1958, birth control was explicitly endorsed by the U.S. Episcopal General Convention three years later, and has since been accepted practice in the church. Hines said that the Episcopal Church is sponsoring more than 15 experimental birth control clinics in the U.S. and abroad. Six of them are in nominally Catholic countries: Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala and the Philippines.

Not to be outdone, President John C. Bennett of Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary announced that a petition urging a change in Catholic teaching on family planning had been sent to Pope Paul VI last June; among the 85 scientists and religious leaders who endorsed it were President Franklin Clark Fry of the Lutheran Church of America, Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Rt. Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill, former Episcopal presiding bishop.