Roman Catholics: Division on Birth Control

Sworn to secrecy about their work, 50-odd members of Pope Paul’s advisory commission on birth control met last week for three days of discussion at Rome’s Spanish College. Their job is to prepare a report for the Pope to help him formulate an authoritative position on the Roman Catholic Church’s most vexing issue. But so far, the experts are widely divided.

The commission members include doctors, moralists, sociologists and population experts from a dozen countries, nine from the U.S. Among them are those who favor “the pill” as a licit method of birth limitation, such as Canon Louis Janssens of the University of Louvain in Belgium, and those who oppose it, such as Monsignor George Kelly of New York’s Archdiocesan Family Life Bureau. But some Catholics who want a modification of the church’s position on birth control charge that the membership has been stacked in favor of the status quo. Recently, two of England’s best-known Catholic doctors made public a complaint, submitted to the Vatican, that the only Briton appointed, Dr. John Marshall of London, is against any change.

The commission’s discussions, said one member, have moved well beyond the legality of the pill to consider the larger issue “of whether or not the church should alter its stand on the whole question.” He reported, that both camps were standing fast, and have summoned all kinds of experts to back up their views.

The sharp division among the members suggests to some church observers that the mind of the church is not yet “mature” on the subject. Thus, even though millions of married Catholics hang intently on the decision, prudent Pope Paul may choose to say nothing at all, preferring to wait for some new medical discovery or the evolution of a firm theological consensus.