Religion: Birth Control & the Catholic

The Roman Catholic Church is pulling back a bit from its traditional policy on family size: the bigger the better.

In St. Louis, the Rev. William J. Gibbons. S.J.. professor of sociology at Fordham University, told the convention of the American Catholic Sociological Society that U.S. Roman Catholics have been oversold on procreation and undereducated on the responsibilities that go with it.

Too many Catholic couples, he said, think that they are being good just because they refrain from using contraceptives. They must also consider the welfare of their potential children, "and that involves foresight." The size of a family, said Gibbons, should "take into account the physical and mental health of the parents, their economic condition, and the society in which they live. When you have such problems as crowding, lack of jobs and so forth, you need to retreat."

A String Attached. Another factor is—in the popular cliché—the "population explosion." Published last week was a straightforward discussion of the subject: Catholic Viewpoint on Overpopulation, by one of the top authorities in the field, the Rev. Anthony Zimmerman, S.V.D. (Doubleday; $3.50).

Author Zimmerman, who teaches sociology at Japan's Nanzan University in Nagoya, points out that the problem is not entirely new; the pros and cons of letting a population explode were considered by the ancients with varied verdicts. Confucius was for it. When asked about the problem of poverty among a teeming people, he replied simply: "Enrich them." Plato was one of the most fanatical birth-controllers of all time. Citizens of his ideal state would have to get licenses to reproduce—the women between the ages of 20 and 40, the men between 25 and 55. Aristotle was for planned parenthood by abortion. But the Romans, like their descendants under Mussolini, gave prizes for large families.

Christians were against abortion from the beginning, holding that the fetus is not part of the mother but a person in its own right, and they also opposed contraception. St. Hippolytus in the 3rd century criticized Pope St. Callistus for his leniency in granting absolution to ''women, reputed believers, who began to resort to drugs for producing sterility, and to gird themselves round, so as to expel what was being conceived."

Over the centuries, the Roman Catholic Church has reasoned its opposition to mechanical birth control on the basis of natural law: i.e., God gave man his sexual pleasure with a reproductive string attached, and to separate one from the other is to thwart the will of God.

Brakes on Fecundity. But if the only permissible means of birth control is to shun sexual intercourse (either totally, or during a wife's fertile period—the so-called rhythm method), how can the church hope to cope with the zooming population, which demographers maintain will jam the earth with six billion humans by the turn of the century, compared with 1.85 billion in 1920?