From............. HUMAN QUEST magazine

Nov-Dec, 94 page 10

VATICAN PROBED ON POPULATION POLICY

by HQ research team

AN INTENSIVE RESEARCH effort probing the Vatican's unrelenting opposition to contraception and abortion has concluded that there is a "hidden" reason for it, quite apart from the question of morality. Results of the research are the subject of a new book by public health scientist Stephen D. Mumford, who heads the Center for Research on Population and Security [PO Box 13067, Research Triangle, N.C. 27709].

The book can be described as a scholarly equivalent of "investigative journalism."

Advance copies of the 400-page volume were released at the UN International Conference on Population and Development, opening in Cairo September 5.

The book is titled The Life and Death of NSSM 200 , shorthand for "National Security Study Memorandum 200," the April 1974 directive from President Nixon, signed on Nixon's behalf by Henry Kissinger, then national security advisor.

The directive was addressed to the Secretaries of Defense and Agriculture, the Director of the CIA, the Deputy Secretary of State, and the Administrator of AID, the Agency for International Development.

When implemented, the NSSM recommendations would have launched a massive international attack, with strong U.S. leadership, on the steadily worsening dilemma of the world's unprecedented and unbridled population growth.

Concerning the "hidden" reason for papal and Vatican opposition to all efforts to curb global population growth by modern medical means, Dr. Mumford said at the Cairo conference,

"I cannot escape the conclusion that the strongest force driving the Vatican's holy war against family planning is not the pope's convictions about morality. Rather their deeper hangup is about the 1870 Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, on which Pope John Paul II has securely painted himself into a corner. This deeper motivation is no secret among the Catholic priesthood and scholars," Mumford continued, "but it has been hidden from public awareness by the loud rhetoric of the pope, the Vatican establishment and of U.S. Catholic bishops focused on the papal concept of morality."

Mumford quotes the distinguished Catholic theologian Halls Kung, who wrote in 1979,

"The only way [for the Vatican] to solve the problem of contraception is to solve the problem of [papal] infallibility."

"The church was really just getting started," Mumford observes, "when it killed NSSM 2000. It was much better organized during the Reagan and Bush Administrations - when there were no U.S. initiatives on world population stabilization. Then the White House was staffed by what Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Carl Bernstein, in a 1992 [24 Feb] TIME cover article, ["HOLY ALLIANCE" jp] has called Reagan's Catholic Team.

Bernstein lists the first string of the "devout Roman Catholic" team as CIA chief William Casey, Richard Allen (Reagan's first national security advisor), William Clark (Reagan's second national security advisor), Alexander Haig (then Secretary of State). Vernon Walters (Ambassador at Large), and William Wilson, Reagan's first ambassador to the Vatican.

Bernstein comments that these men "regarded the U.S.-Vatican relationship as a holy alliance: the moral force of the pope and the teachings of their church combined with ...... their notion of American Democracy."

On May 5, 1972, after two years of intense study, the 24-member U.S. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, under Rockefeller's chairmanship, made more than 70 recommendations which were to be used to formulate a comprehensive U.S. population policy. These included: school-based population and sex-education; passage of the Equal Rights Amendment; contraception available for all, including minors, at government expense if need be; abortion for all who want it, at government expense if necessary; and the elimination of employment of illegal aliens.

"Nothing ever came of this initiative," Mumford notes. "Not one of the recommendations was adopted. Why?" Mumford concludes, "The Roman Catholic bishops - the Vatican - killed it."

Then came the definitive NSSM 200 study, which met the same fate.

On the demise of the Rockefeller Commission recommendations, Mr. Rockefeller said at the time, "The greatest difficulty has been the very active opposition by the Roman Catholic Church through its various agencies in the United States."

The NSSM 200 study detailed how and why rapid world population growth gravely threatened U.S. and global security. The full text of the NSSM 200 study appears in Mumford's book. The study reports:

"There is a major risk of severe damage [from continued rapid population growth] to world economic, political, and ecological systems and, as these systems begin to fail, to our humanitarian values." ". . . World population growth is widely recognized within the Government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures." ". . . It is of the utmost urgency that governments now recognize the facts and implications of population growth, determine the ultimate population sizes that make sense for their countries and start vigorous programs at once to achieve their desired goals."

The U. S. would provide world leadership in population growth control .

-END QUOTE-