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Lobby Sit-in. Later, 130 priests burst into the lobby of the Washington Hilton hotel, where the bishops met, to stage a sit-in in support of the censured clerics. On another night, 120 laymen demonstrated in the Hilton lobby for two hours. They sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic and Impossible Dream, prayed for the disciplined priests to be granted due process and for "the proper use of authority in the church."
Beset by their own internal divisions, the bishops labored in marathon sessions lasting as late as 4 a.m., trying to compose a pastoral letter on birth control that might ease the storm of dissent against Humanae Vitae among U.S. Catholics while not contradicting the Pope. They finally issued a statement which, while urging faithfulness to the Pope's teaching, made clear that U.S. Catholics who practice contraception will not be barred from the sacraments. "No one following the teaching of the church can deny the objective evil of contraception itself," the bishops said. "With pastoral solicitude we urge those who have resorted to artificial contraception never to lose heart but to continue to take full advantage of the strength which comes from the sacrament of penance and the grace, healing, and peace in the Eucharist." The American statement was similar to the stand taken by other hierarchies. It did not, however, go nearly so far as the declaration last week by the bishops of France who emphasized more strongly that couples who conscientiously feel the need to practice birth control should do so; they choose the "lesser evil" in disobeying the Pope's decrees.
Unquestionably, Pope Paul was thoroughly unprepared for the reaction to his encyclical. Perhaps the most dramatic repudiation of its teaching in the U.S. was a statement, prepared by the Rev. Charles E. Curran and other theologians from the Catholic University of America, insisting that couples had the right to practice contraception if their consciences dictated; so far, more than 600 priests, theologians and laymen have subscribed to the declaration. In West Germany, 5,000 laymen at the church's annual Katholikentag (Catholic Day) gave their voice vote to a resolution warning the Pope that they simply could not accept the encyclical's teachings. Swiss Theologian Hans Küng, among many individual thinkers voicing their protests, declared that "the encyclical is not an infallible teaching. I fear it creates a second Galileo case."
"Birth control," says one American scholar in Rome, "is the Pope's Viet Nam." But he has other battles to fight as well. Today there is hardly a dogma of the church that has not been either denied or redefined beyond recognition by some theologians. Any number of Biblical scholars concede, at least privately, that the virginity of Mary is a symbolic rather than a biological truth. Theologians prefer to emphasize the humanity of Jesus rather than his divinity, veiling the fact that some of them cannot subscribe to the traditional formulations of Christ as God's incarnate Son. The sacraments are seen not as quasi-magical dispensing machines for divine grace but as signs of spiritual commitment created by the religious community rather than God.
Love