Religion: Birth Control: Pronouncement Withdrawn

The text had been written and edited, and official translations from the Latin approved. In fact, Pope Paul’s long-awaited motu proprio* on birth control was already rolling off the presses in a secret section of the Vatican’s printing office. Last week, just before the statement was to be made public, it was suddenly scrapped.

The reason was that many leading European prelates considered Paul’s message patently unacceptable. Vienna’s Franziskus Cardinal Konig, who had been informed of its contents in advance, flew to Rome two weeks ago to implore the Pope not to release it. While satisfactory to conservatives of the Roman Curia, Konig argued, the pronouncement was “most unwise pastorally and apostolically,” and it would “do the church much damage.” Such other European liberals as Belgium’s Leo Josef Cardinal Suenens and Munich’s Julius Cardinal Dopfner reportedly telephoned Pope Paul with similar objections.

According to Vatican sources, the motu proprio would have overruled and ignored the findings of the pontifical birth-control commission, which recommended by a 4-to-1 majority that the church relax its traditional opposition to contraception (TIME, April 28, 1967). In its final form, the Pope’s pronouncement would have outlawed any mechanical or chemical form of birth control, including the Pill. In effect, it would have held the church to the judgment on procreation handed down by Pope Pius XI in 1930—that “any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature.”

Pope Paul still intends to have his say. It is expected that he will spend most of the summer revising the statement and that it may be issued some time in the fall.

* “On his own initiative,” a slightly less formal pronouncement than a papal encyclical.