The Pope’s Population Problem

IT’S NOT OFTEN that a Pope achieves consensus, but John Paul II has managed to do it on the issue of population. Not within his Church, mind you—even Popes don’t expect that kind of miracle. But within the reigning Kultur there is nearly universal agreement: if the nations of the world are to ratify an ambitious plan to redefine norms of family and sexuality, and commit their governments to ambitious spending programs to back it up, this Pope has to be dealt with. The plan is the draft program of action for the UN-sponsored International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in mid September, and by calling into question some of its provisions John Paul threatens to spoil what was supposed to be one large party.

In so doing he has concentrated on his person the full wrath of everyone from the prestige press and the Green movement to the UN and the Clinton Administration. Of those who have taken issue with the Pope in their columns and editorials (and you can count his defenders on one hand), virtually all have taken the ad hominem route, portraying him as an old fuddy-duddy who simply cannot deal with the reality of sex. Even the highbrow Economist found room for an editorial called “Condom conundrums” arguing that behind the Pope’s teaching was the truth that “sex, in the eyes of the Vatican’s rump of greybeards and nit pickers, is still the great monster that must be kept beyond the gate.” Only slightly more elevated, the Washington Post’s Hobart Rowan opined that “with the passing of the Soviet empire, the church has lost the ‘glue’ of opposition to Communism upon which it relied to unite the faithful” and is thus in the market for a new devil.

WM

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William McGurn

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IT’S NOT OFTEN that a Pope achieves consensus, but John Paul II has managed to do it on the issue of population. Not within his Church, mind you—even Popes don’t expect that kind of miracle. But within the reigning Kultur there is nearly universal agreement: if the nations of the world are to ratify an ambitious plan to redefine norms of family and sexuality, and commit their governments to ambitious spending programs to back it up, this Pope has to be dealt with. The plan is the draft program of action for the UN-sponsored International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in mid September, and by calling into question some of its provisions John Paul threatens to spoil what was supposed to be one large party.

In so doing he has concentrated on his person the full wrath of everyone from the prestige press and the Green movement to the UN and the Clinton Administration. Of those who have taken issue with the Pope in their columns and editorials (and you can count his defenders on one hand), virtually all have taken the ad hominem route, portraying him as an old fuddy-duddy who simply cannot deal with the reality of sex. Even the highbrow Economist found room for an editorial called “Condom conundrums” arguing that behind the Pope’s teaching was the truth that “sex, in the eyes of the Vatican’s rump of greybeards and nit pickers, is still the great monster that must be kept beyond the gate.” Only slightly more elevated, the Washington Post’s Hobart Rowan opined that “with the passing of the Soviet empire, the church has lost the ‘glue’ of opposition to Communism upon which it relied to unite the faithful” and is thus in the market for a new devil.