"Birth control is nearing the status of a recognized procedure in preventive and curative medicine. Knowledge of contraceptives is also widely disseminated and the question of their use has become one of great social importance. . . . There is general agreement also that sex union between husbands and wives as an expression of mutual affection, without relation to procreation, is right. This is recognized by the Scriptures, by all branches of the Christian Church, by social and medical science, and by the good sense and idealism of mankind."
So reads a majority report issued last week by the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America.* So does U. S. Protestantism disagree with Pope Pius XI and some Church of England bishops on the subject of Birth Control.
As revealed last fortnight by Bishop Albert Augustus David of Liverpool (TIME, March 16), a number of Anglican Bishops at last year's Lambeth Conference were privily agreed that the sexual relationship "even in marriage must be regarded as a regrettable necessity. . . . Except where children are desired, married persons should remain celibate after marriage, as before." In this recommendation of abstinence, three of the 28 members of the Federal Council's Committee on Marriage and the Home concurred: Mrs. Robert Elliott Speer, president of the National Board of the Young Women's Christian Associations; Mrs. Orrin R. Judd, president of the Council of Women for Home Missions; and Dr. Howard Chandler Robbins of General Theological Seminary, Manhattan.
Bishop Auxiliary John J. Dunn of New York and Archbishop Michael Joseph Curley of Baltimore promptly replied for Catholicism to the Protestants' report. Archbishop Curley called it a "confession of moral bankruptcy." Bishop Dunn quoted His Holiness, Pope Pius XI: "Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose, sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and in- trinsically vicious. . . . No reason, however grave, may be put forward by which anything against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good." (TIME, Jan. 19.)