The Presidency and the Church
FEUER, LEWIS S.
Two Views THE PRESIDENCY AND THE CHURCH By Leuis S. Feuer SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY has stated with admirable candor that he believes religion can be a proper matter for discussion in political...
...Perhaps one may venture to hope that liberal Catholics will find some way of reducing the rigidity of dogma so that they can join fully in the statesmanship necessary to meet the problem of overpopulation...
...Lewis S. Feuer, a University of California philosophy professor, and George N. Shuster, president of Hunter College, debate these questions here...
...Would Catholic dogma deprive a Catholic President of the capacity for providing world leadership on this problem ? For the President's responsibility on the problem of the world's overpopulation is inescapable...
...To Dewey, Smith was the authentic voice of American liberalism, the child of the immigrant generation and the city's slums, bringing into the nation's councils a new sincerity and humane sympathy...
...Could an American President take so passive a role without doing harm to the function of presidential leadership...
...The Communists, for instance, used to insist that overpopulation was a purely capitalist bogey, that so-called overpopulation was a disguise for an unemployment produced by the capitalist system...
...If an inexpensive pill were discovered, it would make the way for the over-populated countries much easier...
...Would a Catholic President allow similar decisions by American social scientists serving on the UN Population Commission...
...There is the deep, unresolved issue of the unity of the community, and its reluctance to underwrite an educational philosophy which it believes sharpens religious differences and suspicions among children at their tenderest age...
...No person will want to see children in the kind of school building, whether parochial or public, in which children of Chicago were burned to death last year...
...The facts of the so-called "population explosion" have been well and often documented...
...That the vast majority of Americans favor the teaching and practice of birth control is well-known...
...his whole program of New Deal reforms might have been endangered...
...At the current rate of increase, there will be 80 million more people in seven years, to feed whom India must increase its agricultural productivity by 57 per cent (according to a visiting team of American agricultural specialists...
...Ireland and Spain followed the Catholic position...
...The Japanese birth rate for the first time in many years began to decline...
...The Soviet delegate to the UN Population Commission in 1957 abandoned Marxian dogma enough so as to recognize that each country should adopt whatever population policy it needed...
...That year, under General Douglas MacArthur's direction, the Japanese Parliament enacted laws which made abortions legal, and provided for the licensed sale of contraceptives...
...When the principle of a universalistic approach to this planetary question has begun to emerge, would the election of a Catholic President make for a self-imposed irrationality in American policy...
...And the question now is whether any such problem of foreign policy exists with respect to which we might expect that a Roman Catholic President would be committed by his religion to a stand contrary to the national interest...
...And persistence in ideological dogmas becomes an indulgence which existence does not allow...
...We often hear today that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals...
...A worldwide campaign for birth control would cost only a fraction of what the U. S. expends in foreign aid...
...Would a Catholic President, moreover, approve of grants by the National Science Foundation and Public Health Service for research in the field of contraception...
...The world's population, which in 1950 stood at about 2.5 billion persons, will have increased by 1975 (according to the United Nations estimate) to 3.83 billion people...
...Mencken, editor of the American Mercury, the magazine for the uncommitted intellectuals, said he was pleased to support a candidate who was linked to the Pope, who at any rate was a scholar and a gentleman, rather than to some Methodist bishop of the booboisie...
...It was in 1918 that the Court of Appeals in New York, by defining "disease" as comprising "an alteration in the state of the body," made it possible for physicians to give birth control advice...
...American experience shows that on this issue the initiative must lie with the executive and the courts...
...Economists say that to get a 3 per cent increase in output, an average of a 9 per cent increase in capital investment is required...
...By some curious oversight, it seems to have received no discussion in terms of the coming Presidential campaign...
...By 1950, 48 new firms were manufacturing contraceptives and advertising widely in women's magazines and motion pictures...
...New Delhi has finally decided also to provide the use of its state hospitals for this purpose...
...The leading Protestant denominations have stated their official approval, and the Catholic laity has given its unofficial approval...
...A volunteer for the operation gets free hospital care and about five dollars...
...India...
...Does Mayor Wagner's action provide the model for a policy of self-disqualification with respect to the population problem by a Catholic President...
...Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway and Yugoslavia voted unsuccessfully to consider the problem...
...To change these cultural patterns requires the maximum moral authority available...
...The Puerto Rican experience is instructive in its lesson of the need and difficulty in making birth control practice part of a people's way of life...
...There are at least two-thirds as many legal abortions in Japan as there are births...
...The Roman Catholic standpoint remains as it was enunciated time and again by Pope Pius XII...
...Actually, until 1936, American secular liberals were in political alliance with Roman Catholics...
...The World Health Organization has been sorely tried by this issue...
...There remains, however, one basic issue in which the attitude of a Roman Catholic President might be crucial for the long-term prospects for world peace and social development — namely, the problem of the world's growing overpopulation...
...The Catholic hierarchy was the principal force responsible for the American embargo on the shipment of arms to the legally elected government of Spain...
...The use of the so-called rhythm method is condoned only for grave reasons...
...Puerto Rico has become, indeed, the only Latin American country which has had in recent years a marked decline in its birth rate...
...Unfortunately, what has been taking place in the poorer countries of the world is a turn toward sterilization as their method of dealing with overpopulation...
...And we can take cheer from the outlines of a universalist ethics which one may be seen arising in the world as it is compelled to confront the problem of overpopulation...
...the majority of the Catholic laity are not prepared to vote in referenda or legislatures against the clerical standpoint...
...Certainly he meant this in no sense which might suggest a religious qualification for office: nor was he proposing that theological disputes have any place in political debate...
...The social worker who recruits the volunteer receives about 42 cents for each case...
...Social surveys indicate that a large majority of Puerto Rican adults favor a birth control program...
...Such was the report of a Gallup poll a year and a half ago...
...Mayor Robert Wagner, as a practicing Catholic, indicated his personal opposition to the prescribing of contraceptive devices by New York's physicians, even in cases where the patient's life might be threatened by another pregnancy...
...What instructions to our delegate on the WHO would be forthcoming from a Catholic President...
...They were enthusiastic supporters of Alfred E. Smith in the Presidential election of 1928...
...Propaganda for sterilization is open to abuses...
...There is a larger percentage of workingmen among Catholic believers than in any other major denomination...
...A child can be just as hungry in a parochial as in a public school, and none but the most doctrinaire anticlerical will refuse to provide him with lunches...
...It found among the American people a growing disinclination to look at candidates through a religious screen...
...But there is also what we might call the "birth control-birth rate ratio...
...To support them, Roman Catholic working-class families bear voluntarily a burden of double taxation...
...The practicable alternative, for instance, in such a Catholic country as Puerto Rico is contraceptive birth control or sterilization...
...It is difficult for the democratic will to express itself on the population problem through legislative channels...
...Nevertheless, the Church's influence has seriously curtailed the Government's program...
...produced the rift between secular liberals and the Catholic Church...
...The desire to prove his virility by "conspicuous reproduction," his fear of infidelity, his association of contraception with prostitution, are strong in mind of the Puerto Rican man...
...This problem and its decision each year take on a higher priority...
...That program, begun when a Roman Catholic woman...
...Hindu India, Catholic Puerto Rico, Buddhist Japan and Communist China are led by realities to relinquish ideology in favor of a common solution...
...The population increase is frustrating the effort to raise the standard of living in such countries as India...
...The pressure of their population growth has, however, forced the Chinese Communists to undertake to promote the sale of contraceptives in Government stores...
...Ever since 1916, when Margaret Sanger turned from the working women to the club women, from immigrants to Old Americans, from the Socialists to the Dwight Morrows and Thomas Lamonts, for support in the birth control movement, it has been clear that the population problem can be grasped as one for the human community at large...
...A public opinion poll in 1943 showed that 69 per cent of Catholic women endorsed the use of contraceptive birth control...
...The condemnation of contraceptive birth control, said the Pope, "will continue tomorrow and for all time, because it is not a mere precept of human law, but rather an expression of natural and divine law...
...Under the pressure of the Church, something like a Catholic bloc has emerged in the UN on the population problem...
...Would a Catholic President, for instance, have vetoed the steps which Japan took in 1948, under the aegis of the American Occupation, to limit its population...
...The dangers in such a program are clear...
...The Nation, the New Republic, intellectuals from John Dewey to Walter Lippmann and H. L. Mencken ranged themselves with Al Smith...
...Because judicial and executive leadership are essential in solving the population problem, we must be especially concerned with the policy of a Catholic President...
...For example, would the U.S., with a Catholic President, be hindered in assuming world leadership to cope with the threat posed by overpopulation to underdeveloped countries...
...But he allowed the decision to be made as a medical one by the Commissioner and Board of Hospitals, which voted by 8-2 to allow such therapy...
...They refer to this proportion as the capital-output ratio...
...With the legislatures and voters divided against themselves by theological anxiety, the courts ever since 1913 have been acting as the lawmaking body...
...For then, perhaps, the ground of a common agreement can be defined before the evasions, equivocations and exaggerations of the Presidential campaign begin...
...Catholic voting loyalties are, however, at variance with Catholic practice...
...With a Catholic President, would leadership on this problem falter and be even more hamstrung than it is now...
...A successful birth control program could do far more within a shorter time and with much less money in raising the standard of living in Asian countries than even programs of massive investment...
...a negligible percentage are opposed on religious grounds...
...Nonetheless, after many years of debate on the educational issue, seven out of every 10 voters are ready to vote for a Catholic if he were a nominee of their party...
...A successful contraceptive program would obviate this traffic in surgery...
...Experiments have been in progress in Puerto Rico to test birth control "pills...
...American liberals for the first time became vitally aware that religious doctrine and organization could deflect American foreign policy from what they took to be the national interest...
...All find themselves creatures on a common planet which sets for them the minimal conditions of existence...
...The UN must finally lead the way toward a sane population policy: otherwise, all its work and that of the United States for the world's better health will reinstate the Mal-thusian dilemmas of misery, discontent, unrest, extremism and war...
...Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, was India's Minister of Health, had the expert assistance of a WHO mission headed by Dr...
...Abraham Epstein...
...The irreversible nature of the operation, its psychological consequences, and not least, the precedent which such surgery provides for geno-cidal madmen, are considerations which prompt one to see it replaced by contraceptive birth control...
...The significance of this question on a local scale was made clear in September 1958, when the issue of birth control therapy in the hospitals in New York City was sharply presented...
...These are questions which call for the most forthright discussion between Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and secular liberals...
...No such expansion in food resources is in sight...
...The manufacture of contraceptives in America is estimated by Fortune magazine to be a business of about $200 million dollars a year...
...But sterilization seems to have been more responsible for this decline than contraception...
...And in May 1959, a judge in New Jersey found unconstitutional an 82-year-old law which restricted the sale of contraceptives...
...What he had in mind is that there are "public questions" with respect to which many Americans believe that one's religious standpoint has made a difference, and that only in this domain is a discussion of the bearing of religious conviction a valid one...
...The Catholic parochial schools are, from a class standpoint, proletarian private schools...
...And the women, lacking bathrooms in their homes and the necessary privacy, respond to the men's reluctance by having themselves sterilized...
...The Catholic bloc in 1952 compelled the withdrawal of the birth control problem from the agenda of the WHO...
...The Church continues also to reinforce those motives in the Puerto Rican male which make him reluctant to practice birth control methods...
...President Franklin D. Roosevelt wished to lift this embargo but felt he could not allow a cleavage along religious lines to develop in the Democratic party...
...they get it all over with...
...But despite the people's desire for birth control information, no dent was made in the population's rate of growth...
...There are basic issues involved here which Senator Kennedy justly observes are "economic...
...The birth rate, which during 1946-50 averaged 3.25 per cent, was down to 1.84 per cent in 1956...
...The underdeveloped countries, which had 65.5 per cent of the world's population in 1950, are growing in numbers twice as fast as the industrial countries...
...It was the Spanish Civil War which Are there public issues on which a President's religion might have a decisive bearing...
...The statutes which prohibit the giving of information on birth control for this reason still stand on the books of Massachusetts and Connecticut...
...Unfortunately, a phenomenal recourse to abortions has been a primary factor in this decline...
...Countries like Belgium, Italy, France, Portugal...
...Two Views THE PRESIDENCY AND THE CHURCH By Leuis S. Feuer SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY has stated with admirable candor that he believes religion can be a proper matter for discussion in political campaigns...
...It also passed a liberal divorce law...
...The economic aspect, of course, is only one phase of this problem...
...on the other hand...
...In desperation, the states of Mysore and Madras have begun to encourage mass sterilization through the payment of subsidies...
...Despite its Catholicism, which was perhaps more ritualistic than doctrinal, the Puerto Rican Government undertook in 1937 to establish a chain of public contraceptive clinics...
...The volunteer may be ignorant of the operation's character or in some temporary mood of despondency...
...If we were to divide the world's countries into "international social classes" in accordance with their annual real income per person, then from about the "lower-middle class" down—that is, beginning with countries such as Japan and Puerto Rico—the pattern of sterilization as a mode of birth control is beginning to appear...
...It affirms that contraceptive birth control is always immoral, no matter what the medical, economic or social circumstances...
...India, too, is turning toward sterilization to limit its population growth, after several years of discouraging results in a campaign to promote the widespread use of the rhythm method...
...On questions of domestic policy, there is a closer approximation to agreement between liberals and Catholics than is usually recognized...
...A small expenditure in contraceptive birth control work might result in a relatively high decline in the birth rate...
...A study in 1957 of more than 1.000 women in the Torrens Housing Project showed that one out of every four had been sterilized, while only 18.2 per cent were using contraceptives...
...Would a Catholic President be prepared to approve large grants for such purpose to the poorer countries of the world...
...Margaret Sanger, once the imprisoned apostle of birth control in the U.S., was escorted before the Japanese Parliament in 1954 to become the first non-Japanese woman ever to address it...
...There are signs that the Church hierarchy itself is becoming more sensitive to the dimensions of the growing pressure of population on subsistence in the "Malthusian" countries...
...The rise in the average standard of living would exceed what a big investment program would accomplish...
...Would a Catholic President provide the required initiative and leadership...
...In the United States, the problem of birth control raises no issues of class interest...
Vol. 42 • November 1959 • No. 41
