Foreign News: SIN & SWEDEN

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The Problem Is Medical. Although assured that I had been hearing a typical Swedish point of view, I was not convinced until I had talked next day with a Roman Catholic priest in Stockholm. (There are about 20,000 Roman Catholics in Sweden.) I expressed my shock that parents and teachers condone promiscuity, do not even try to tell the young people that such things are wrong. "You must understand Swedish mentality," said the Catholic. "They are incapable of imagining a world where there are not unwed mothers, where abortions and birth control are not necessary. They say, 'Since these things exist, then let us do something constructive about them.' They don't believe it is possible to change human nature. They attack the problem as a sociological and medical one." "But what will this lead to?" I asked. "After all, sexual morality is basic to Western ethics." The man shook his head sadly. "I don't know what the result will be." In the pages of a Stockholm paper, in a typical one of a series of interviews being printed under the title, Swedish Youth Speaks, I found a partial answer to my own question. "I have no real morals," said a boy of 19. "And I would never marry a girl because I had made her pregnant. Why should I give up my liberty for the sake of a child?"