Roman Catholics: No More Galileos

ROMAN CATHOLICS

Three of the Vatican Council’s most influential bishops pleaded last week for some modification of Roman Catholic objections to birth control.

“We should affirm,” said Paul-Emile Cardinal Léger of Montreal, “that the intimate union of the marriage partners finds its end in love as well as procreation. May this Council clearly proclaim the two ends as equally good and holy.” Belgium’s Leo Josef Cardinal Suenens said that the church has for too long based its marital teaching on the Biblical injunction “Increase and multiply,” while ignoring an equally important Scriptural imperative: “They shall be two in one flesh.” Suenens proposed that the Council commission responsible for Schema 13 (“The Church in the Modern World”) should work with a recently appointed papal team of birth-control experts to frame a doctrine on marriage that would take into account new medical discoveries. “We have learned many things since Aristotle,” he said. “I urge you, brothers, let us avoid a new Galileo case—one is certainly enough in the history of the church.” Even more explicit was Maximos IV Saigh, the Melchite Patriarch of Antioch. Speaking, as always, in French rather than the Council’s official Latin, the Patriarch admitted that “the immense majority” of Catholics did not practice what the church teaches on birth control. “Shouldn’t the official position of the church in the matter be revised in the light of modern science?” he asked.

When the day’s discussion ended, many moral theologians in Rome hailed it as a “watershed” and a “turning point” in the life of the Council and the history of the church.