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A number of leading newspapers editorially worried about the impact of the Pope's edict on population-control programs or governments that are particularly susceptible to Catholic pressure, such as those in Latin America. Wrote West Berlin's liberal Die Zeit: "What kind of church leadership is it that is willing to throw all the warnings of science to the winds? How is this papal decree reconcilable with the command to love thy neighbor, when we already know that between now and 1980 approximately 40 million people will starve to death?" In Manhattan, demonstrators representing the Parents' Aid Society, a militant birth control group, paraded in protest outside St. Patrick's Cathedral. The Vatican daily, L'Osservatore Romano, hard put to include favorable non-Catholic judgments in its roundup of world opinion, solemnly noted that the Pope had received a message of support from a family of Norwegian Protestants with 14 children.
Values of Marriage. The tone of non-Catholic criticism paled in comparison with the encyclical's reception by Catholics outside the hierarchy. Some comments were almost indecently abusive. Father Alfons Sarrach, a German priest-journalist, described the encyclical as "a breath of outdated and ignorant monkish theology." Many more of the outcries, however, were couched in rhetoric that reflected personal anguish and disappointment at the decision. "You are not speaking as our Pope," protested Jesuit Philosopher Norris Clarke before a cheering crowd of 1,000 at a Fordham University symposium on the encyclical. "We can't hear you. We demand that you do not speak to us this way."
Far more disturbing to the Pope and the bishops was the fact that the encyclical was flatly rejected by some of the most influential teaching minds of the church. Led by Father Charles Curran of Catholic University, 172 U.S. theologians and other Catholics, including all six American lay members of the pontifical birth control commission, rejected the encyclical as outdated, inadequate and not binding on conscience. "We conclude," said their statement, "that spouses may responsibly decide according to their conscience that artificial contraception in some circumstances is permissible and indeed necessary to preserve and foster the values and sacredness of marriage."
Swiss Theologian Hans Kung said flatly that the Pope was wrong, and that the encyclical might lead to a new "Galileo case." One of the experts who signed the statement was Dr. John Noonan of the University of California at Berkeley, whose Contraception is the most thorough study of Catholic teaching on the subject. At a Washington press conference, Noonan suggested that the encyclical may ultimately be regarded as just another mistake of the papacy, like the medieval declarations that usury is a sin, or Pius IX's insistence that the papal states of Italy existed by divine will.