The following was printed as a ‘Local View’ editorial in my Duluth, MN newspaper.

ON CONTRACEPTIVE POLICY, THE VATICAN IS A HOSTAGE TO ITSELF    

 November 23,  2010

Once again we read of the pope’s struggle to extract Catholics from their self-imposed contraceptive blockade (“Faithful react to pope’s, condom justification, “ Nov 22).  It is all amusing and would make a swell comic opera.  But alas, the issue is deadly serious for the hundreds of thousands of people horribly suffering or dead or AIDS and other preventable sexually transmitted diseases.

American Catholics sneak contraceptives behind the pope’s back and use them at the same rate as other Americans.  Yet they give moral and financial support to an archaic, superstitious system.  How can that  be ethical?

You might ask:  Why doesn’t the Vatican just change?   It can’t:  the Vatican is hostage to its own invention, something called papal infallibility.   In 1964 , Pope Paul VI created the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control.   The two part commission  (made up of 64 lay people and 15 clerics) was assigned a question: How can the church change its policy on birth control with out undermining papal infallibility? 

The commission resolved (with the laity voting 60-4 and the clergy  9-6)  that it could not be done but should be done anyway as it was the right thing to do.

The man who later became pope John Paul II, wrote the minority report which stated that if the Church changed,  “We should have to frankly admit that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant  churches in 1930 and in 1961……and again in ….1958.:    It should likewise have to be admitted that for half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI ,  Pius XXII and a large part of Catholic hierarchy from very serious error.  This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding under pain of eternal damnation, a practice that would be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants.”   

Oh, horrors!

 So, of course, the birth-control doctrine was never changed.

If there is a saving grace, it is that the Catholic Church codifies and records its own nonsense. You can read it for yourself.  “The Catholic Doctrine and Reproductive Health: Why the church Can’t Change.” by Stephen D Mumford,  can be found at secualrhumanism.org.