WHY THE POPE CAN'T CHANGE THE CHURCH'S POSITION ON BIRTH CONTROL:
IMPLICATIONS FOR AMERICANS

A presentation by
Stephen D. Mumford DrPH

VATICAN INFLUENCE ON PUBLIC POLICY
A symposium by the members of:
The Rationalist Society of St. Louis
Missouri National Abortion Rights Action League
Greater St. Louis National Organization for Women (NOW)
Center for Research on Population and Security

St. Louis, Missouri
January 27, 1999

The antiabortion movement in the United States was created in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade in 1973, which legalized abortion. However, it really owes its origin to a group of men in Rome 103 years earlier. This was 1870, the year of Vatican Council I, a conclave of great importance in recent church history. Why is this so?

Hans Kung, the renowned Swiss Catholic theologian, best summed up the problem accounting for its creation when he said, "It is not possible to solve the problem of contraception until we solve the problem of infallibility."[1] In his book, How the Pope Became Infallible, Catholic historian Bernhard Hasler describes in great detail what Hans Kung meant by this. For a period of five years, Hasler had enjoyed unlimited access to all Vatican Council I documentation in the Vatican archives. Hasler's book has enormous implications for understanding the origins of the antiabortion movement. Hasler wrote that, for more than a millennium, the Vatican had possessed temporal power which ensured its survival. With the loss of the Papal States in 1870, it appeared all but certain that a strong Papacy would simply disappear. The Vatican urgently needed a new source of power.

A group of conservative and influential leaders, including Pope Pius IX, came up with a brilliant idea for a new source; an infallible pope. What is infallibility? According to Catholic dogma, the pope is God's representative on earth and God guides him as he cares for his flock. When the pope formulates a doctrine, he is simply transmitting this dogma on God's behalf. Therefore, the teaching cannot possibly be in error. Thus, the pope's teachings are infallible.

Roman Catholics could be certain that the teachings of the pope and of God were one and the same, and if strictly followed, one's entrance into heaven was guaranteed. Communicants found this concept very attractive and were eager to behave in any manner required of them. Such an arrangement placed enormous control of individuals into the hands of the Vatican, extending across national borders and even to the other side of the world. Since it could never be in the wrong, the Vatican had its urgently needed new source of power. It could no longer control the laity by means of its governance, as it had in the Papal States which would later become Italy. But the Holy See could exercise control directly by adopting a policy of psychological coercion founded on a new doctrine—that of papal infallibility.

PRINCIPLE OF PAPAL INFALLIBILITY MUST BE
PROTECTED AT ALL COSTS

This was a brilliant concept—and it worked—for a century. But at its introduction in 1870, the Catholic intelligentsia, among them theologians, historians and bishops, recognized that at some point in the future, this principle would lead to self-destruction of the institution. Times were certain to change and in unpredictable ways.

This decision would lock the Church into an inexorable course—teachings that could not be changed without destroying the principle of infallibility itself. Thoughtful Catholics foresaw that this would immediately become the fundamental principle of the Church, upon which all other Catholic dogma would rest—its very foundation. They understood that if this principle were undermined and destroyed at some future date, all Church teachings would collapse around the eroded foundation and the institution itself would be devastated. They were convinced that one day, encumbered by her unchangeable teachings, the Church would find itself down a blind alley from which there would be no escape and faced with inevitable self-destruction as a result of a grave loss of credibility. These distinguished scholars were strongly opposed to this principle and, as a consequence, many of them left the Church. The blind alley turned out to be the issue of birth control—contraception and abortion.

Since the 1968 adoption of the papal encyclical, Humanae Vitae, there has been a hemorrhage in the Church's credibility. Humanae Vitae ruled out any change of the Church's position on birth control for all time.

The proponents of papal infallibility could not imagine the population explosion of the last half of this century. We find it hard to believe in those who claim moral leadership, while implacably resisting any serious solutions to the population problem worldwide. Just as its critics had predicted, institutional self-destruction is now well under way. But, as it stands now, the Church cannot change its position on birth control without undermining all of its dogma. The Vatican is now obliged to protect the fundamental doctrine of papal infallibility at all costs.

The following are only three among scores of findings to indicate how the Vatican is destroying itself:

1) In 1965 there were 42,000 young men in American seminaries studying for the priesthood. Today there are fewer than 6,000 even though the number of Catholics in this country has nearly doubled.

2) The average age of nuns in the United States is 65 years. Only 3% are under age 40, while 35% are older than 70.

3) One-half of all American priests quit the priesthood before reaching retirement age.

Self-destruction as a result of loss of credibility is underway but progressing slowly. The Pope remains hopeful that he can turn this around. He is convinced that if he changes the Church's position on birth control and destroys the principle of infallibility, self-destruction will be very swift. We know that this matter was the focus of his attention for several years in the 1960s.

THE PAPACY IS THREATENED BY LEGALIZED BIRTH
CONTROL AND ABORTION

In 1964, Pope Paul VI created the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control. It was a two-part commission, and met from 1964 to 1966. One consisted of 64 lay persons, the other, of 15 clerics, including Pope John Paul II, then a Polish cardinal. Pope Paul gave the Commission only one mission—-to determine how the Church could change its position on birth control without undermining papal authority. After two years of study, the Commission concluded that it was not possible to make this change without undermining papal authority but that the Church should make the change anyway because it was the right thing to do! The lay members voted 60 to 4 for change, and the clerics, 9 to 6 for change.[2] We know this because one or more members released the details without permission to an Italian and a French newspaper. Pope Paul did not act immediately. A minority report was prepared, co-authored by the man who is now Pope John Paul II. In this report he stated:

If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti Connubii was promulgated), in 1951 (Pius XII's address to the midwives), and in 1958 (the address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error.

This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved.[3]

In 1980, years after he became pope, John Paul wrote to the German bishops:

I am convinced that the doctrine of infallibility is in a certain sense the key to the certainty with which the faith is confessed and proclaimed, as well as to the life and conduct of the faithful. For once this essential foundation is shaken or destroyed, the most basic truths of our faith likewise begin to break down.[4]

In these two texts, the pope took the position that a change on the birth control issue would destroy the principle of papal infallibility and that infallibility was the fundamental principle of the Church upon which all else rests and, thus, must be protected at all costs. A change on matters of birth control would immediately raise questions about other possible errors popes have made in matters of divorce, homosexuality, confession, parochial schooling, etc. that are fundamental to Roman Catholicism. So we have these admissions in the pope's own words.

The security-survival of the papacy itself is on the line. The Church insists on being the sole arbiter of what is moral. Civil law legalizes contraception and abortion. Governments are thereby challenging the prerogative of the pope to be the ultimate authority on matters of morality. Most Americans look to democratic process to determine morality. In the simplest analysis, the Church cannot coexist with such an arrangement, which in its view, threatens its very survival as a world political power.

For this reason, the Vatican was forced to interfere in the democratic process in the United States by lobbying for the passage of numerous antiabortion laws designed to protect its interests. There is a plethora of documentation to support these findings, relating mainly to Vatican and U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops' sources, some of which I will discuss later.

Only legal abortion and legal family planning threaten the Church. It has shown very little interest in illegal abortion. For example, in Latin America, where abortion is illegal, abortion rates are two or three times as high as those seen in the United States. However, abortion is essentially ignored by the bishops there. Illegal abortion poses no threat to papal authority.

VATICAN COMMITS TO POLITICAL ACTION TO BLOCK
LEGAL ABORTION

Even before the work of the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control was completed in 1966, it was widely recognized in the Vatican that the Church faced a grave problem regarding birth control, including abortion. Vatican Council II, which ended in 1966, set the stage for the bishops to address this problem. One of the outcomes of this Council was the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Part 2 of the Constitution was titled, "Some Problems of Special Urgency." In his book, Catholic Bishops in American Politics, published by the Princeton University Press in 1991, TA Byrnes observes, "This list of problems to which the Church was to turn its attention reads like a blueprint of the American hierarchy's political agenda in the 1970s and 1980s."[5] The first was abortion:

God, the Lord of life, has conferred on men the surpassing ministry of safeguarding life—a ministry which must be fulfilled in a manner which is worthy of man. Therefore, from the moment of conception life must be guarded with the greatest of care, while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes.[6]

The Decree on the Bishops' Pastoral Office in the Church, another Vatican Council II document, created the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) which was organized according to universal church law. It was created to serve as a political instrument of the Vatican.[7] During a meeting of the American hierarchy in November 1966, the bishops formally established the NCCB as their official collective body and established the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) as their administrative arm and secretariat.[8]

The Jesuit weekly, America, editorialized that the national conference had been "converted from a confraternity into a government."[9] The Catholic lay newspaper, Commonweal, called the new organization, "a viable instrument with power adequate to national problems."[10]

The Vatican had determined that legalization of abortion was about to become such a national problem. From the very beginning, there has been a common and correct perception that the Catholic hierarchy was primarily an antiabortion political lobby. Byrnes summarizes his study of the history of Catholic bishops in American politics by saying:

Before I end, I want to address one final matter, namely the unique position that abortion occupies on the Catholic hierarchy's public policy agenda. Abortion is not simply one issue among many for the bishops. It is rather the bedrock, non-negotiable starting point from which the rest of their agenda has developed. The bishops' positions on other issues have led to political action and political controversy but abortion, throughout the period I have examined, has been a consistently central feature of the Catholic hierarchy's participation in American politics.[11]

On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court passed down its decision on Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion for Americans. According to Bishop James McHugh, "within twenty-four hours" of the court's action, the bishops knew they would need to mount a political campaign in favor of a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion.[12] "Indeed," Byrnes observed, "by November 1973 the bishops had explicitly declared that they wished 'to make it clear beyond a doubt to our fellow citizens that we consider the passage of a pro-life constitutional amendment a priority of the highest order.'"[13]

The Vatican wasted no time in responding. In 1974, the stage was further set to create a political machine to end legal abortion in the United States when Rome issued a document titled, Vatican Declaration on Abortion, which states:

A Christian can never conform to a law which is in itself immoral, and such is the case of a law which would admit in principle the licitness of abortion. Nor can a Christian take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it. Moreover, he may not collaborate in its application.[14]

This statement is an unequivocal rejection of the legitimacy of our democratically elected government to pass laws legalizing abortion. Obviously, no American Catholic who chose to follow this Vatican declaration could pay taxes to a government that would use tax money to perform abortions, counsel on abortion, educate on abortion, or to undertake any of the other numerous abortion-related activities in which the government would be involved in order to deliver abortion services.

The Papacy had placed its authority on the line, pitting itself against our government. If the Vatican were to avoid the looming destruction of papal authority, it must minimize the number of abortions legally performed and ultimately succeed in reversing the effects of Roe v. Wade.

This is by no means a new rejection of the principles of American Democracy. The Papacy is unalterably opposed to separation of church and state, the freedoms of speech, press, worship and assembly, and legislative authority vested solely with democratically elected representatives of the people. Today all Catholic priests must take a solemn oath to uphold and promote these views. From the Catholic almanac:

The Catholic citizen is conscience bound to respect and obey the duly constituted authority provided faith and morals are thereby not endangered. Under no circumstances may the Church be subjugated by the State. Whatever their form may be, states are not conceded the right to force the observance of immoral or irreligious laws upon a people.[15]

The 1974 Vatican Declaration on Abortion follows the instructions set forth by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical on the Chief Duties of Christian Citizens:

If the laws of the state are manifestly at variance with the divine law, containing enactments hurtful to the Church or conveying injunctions adverse to the duty imposed by religion, or if they violate in the person of the Supreme Pontiff the authority of Jesus Christ, then truly, to resist becomes a positive duty, to obey, a crime.[16]

The current abortion law in the United States is unquestionably "hurtful to the Church." Minimizing the number of abortions done in the United States is obviously helpful to the Church.

THE BISHOPS' PASTORAL PLAN FOR PRO-LIFE
ACTIVITIES

The stage was set. On November 20, 1975, at their annual meeting, the American Catholic bishops issued their Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities. It is a frank and superbly detailed blueprint of the bishops' strategy for infiltrating and manipulating the American democratic process at national, state and local levels. It maps out the creation of a national political machine controlled by the Vatican through the bishops. The plan is directed toward creating a highly sophisticated, meticulously organized and well-financed local, state and national political machine. The plan candidly states that the Church will undertake activities to elect officials from local to national levels who will adhere to Vatican-ordained positions; that it will seek to influence policy in ways that will eliminate the threat to the Church; and that it will encourage the Executive Branch to deal "administratively" with matters that are unfavorable to the Church.

Archbishop Joseph Bernardin told the bishops that "the will of God and the law of reason" demand an unrelenting fight against abortion. This justified, in the Church's eyes, the implementation of the Pastoral Plan and what the influential National Catholic Reporter, a lay-edited weekly, referred to as the creation of a new political party, an American Catholic Party.[17]

The Plan, in part, reads:

The abortion decisions of the United States Supreme Court (January 22, 1973) violate the moral order, and have disrupted the legal process which previously attempted to safeguard the rights of unborn children. A comprehensive pro-life legislative program must therefore include the following elements:

a) Passage of a constitutional amendment providing protection for the unborn child to the maximum degree possible.

b) Passage of federal and state laws and adoption of administrative policies that will restrict the practice of abortion as much as possible.

According to the Pastoral Plan, there is to be in each state a State Coordinating Committee, functioning under the State Conference or its equivalent, which will include bishops' representatives from each diocese in the state and will function: to monitor political trends in the state and their implications for the abortion effort; to coordinate the efforts of the various dioceses and evaluate progress in the dioceses and congressional districts; and to provide counsel regarding specific political relationships within the various parties at the state level. Diocesan Pro-Life Committees are to coordinate groups and activities within the diocese, particularly efforts to effect passage of a constitutional amendment to protect the unborn child. The diocesan committee is to rely for the information and direction on the Bishops' Pro-Life Office and on the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment. The objective of the diocesan committee is: to provide direction and coordination of diocesan and parish education/information efforts and maintain working relationships with all groups involved in congressional district activity; to encourage the development of "grass-roots" political action organizations; to maintain communication with the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment in regard to federal activity, so as to provide instantaneous information concerning local senators and representatives; to maintain a local public information effort directed to the media, including seeking equal time, etc.; and to develop close relationships with each senator or representative.

Noting that well-planned and coordinated political action at national, state and local levels would be required, the pamphlet states that the activity is not simply the responsibility of Catholics and should not be limited to Catholic Groups or agencies. This instruction was a clarion call by the bishops for the creation of the New Right Movement. Indeed, during the period 1976-1980, all of the organizations that became known as the "New Right Movement" were created, with one exception: The Christian Coalition was created later to replace the Moral Majority which had fallen into public disrepute. Catholics were key players in the creation of all these organizations and influential in their leadership. This assessment of the creation of this movement and the influence in it of the bishops is well documented.[18,19,20]

In 1980, Federal Judge John Dooling, ruled on McRae v. HEW, a challenge to the Hyde Amendment, which prevented Medicaid payment for abortion. The Judge had spent a year studying the anti-abortion movement in great detail, including the bishops' Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities. His findings showed that the anti-abortion movement was essentially Roman Catholic with a little non-Catholic window dressing.[21] The purpose of the amendment, says Dooling bluntly, was quite simply to circumvent the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and prevent as many abortions as possible. The Hyde Amendment is one of the Pastoral Plan's most important successes.

Dooling, a practicing Catholic, makes short work of the anti-abortionists' pretensions to be a spontaneous grass-roots movement that owes its political victories to sheer moral appeal. He confirms that the right-to-life's main source of energy, organization and direction has been the Catholic Church, and he describes in detail how the movement works to achieve its goals.

What is most significant in Judge Dooling's 328-page ruling is his finding that the anti-abortion movement's main source of energy, organization, and direction has been the Catholic Church. The Protestant face carefully put on the movement, first by the Moral Majority and then by the Christian Coalition, was called for in the Pastoral Plan. Richard A. Viguerie, a Catholic, is the man most responsible for the development and success of the New Right. He was also involved in the original discussions that led to the creation of the Moral Majority and, as its fundraiser, can be credited with its financial success. Paul Weyrich, a Catholic, claims credit for originating the idea for the group and the name itself. In their search for an attractive front man for the organization, they chose Jerry Falwell.[22]

It is inconceivable that these Catholic laymen were not responding to the bishops' Pastoral Plan. Much effort went into avoiding public disclosure of the role of the Catholic Church in the creation of the Moral Majority. Maxine Negri, in "A Well-Planned Conspiracy,"[23] exposed involvement of the Catholic hierarchy in the Moral Majority. Then, the June 21, 1982 issue of U.S. News and World Report noted:

At the heart of Moral Majority is a direct-mail operation ... Membership claims ... put the number of Moral Majority's active supporters at roughly 4 million Roman Catholics, Protestant fundamentalists, and orthodox Jews. The organization says its "hardcore contributors," numbered at more than 400,000, include a cadre of 80,000 priests, ministers and rabbis organized into fifty autonomous chapters.[24]

The Christian Coalition, created to replace the Majority, was from a leadership perspective, a replica of the Moral Majority, with the bishops in full control. The evidence supporting this statement is compelling.[25] For example, Maureen Roselli, Executive Director of the Catholic Alliance, a branch of the Christian Coalition, claims that the Coalition has 250,000 Catholic members.[26] Catholic Georgetown University political science professor Mary Bendyna told the Religious News Service that she was surprised to find, even before the creation of the Catholic Alliance, that all five staffers in the Christian Coalition's Washington, D.C. Office are Catholic.[27]

Claims of autonomy by the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition should not be taken seriously. What is described here is exactly the organization contemplated in the Pastoral Plan down to the details.

The Plan details a 3-pronged attack, one devoted to each of the three branches of our federal government: legislative, judicial and administrative. What has been the outcome of the Plan?

OUTCOMES OF THE CATHOLIC BISHOPS' PASTORAL
PLAN

Father Vincent Tanzola, S.J., writing for LIFE-PAC in 1980, summarizes some of the successes of the bishops:

For years Catholics have helped to lead the fight against legalized abortion ... For years our efforts have focused on national leaders in national elections and Amendments to the U.S. Constitution ... Local and statewide races are our target. Our goals are very simple and very direct. We plan on cutting the pipeline for all state funds being used to buy the death of unborn children. We'll do this by voting abortionist legislators, county officials, and other key elected persons out of our local and state government ... And we've proven we can do it—LIFE-PAC is the oldest pro-life political action committee, and we have been successful in 82 percent of the races we have worked in ... Now we have the chance to duplicate our efforts in about five hundred specifically targeted local and statewide races. We can defeat abortion candidates and elect pro-life representatives ... Please help LIFE-PAC do our special work. Please hear the words of our beloved Pope John Paul II ... and put an end to abortion by helping to elect pro-life candidates to office.[28]

Thus, it is clear that by the 1980 presidential election, the bishops had had considerable success with their Pastoral Plan. The fact that the bishops reaffirmed their plan at their November 1985 annual meeting suggests that significant progress had been achieved.[29]

What are some of the bishops' successes on the three branches of our federal government? The February 24, 1992 issue of Time magazine showed that with the election of anti-abortion Ronald Reagan and anti-abortion George Bush in 1980, the views of the Vatican gained substantial influence within the administrative branch of the U.S. government in the area of population and family planning policy.[30] Presidents Reagan and Bush were arguably the most pro-Vatican Presidents in American history.

This article was written by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein. He described what he referred to as the "Catholic Team":

The key Administration players were all devout Roman Catholics—CIA chief William Casey, [Richard] Allen [Reagan's first National Security Advisor], [William] Clark [Reagan's second National Security Advisor], [Alexander] Haig [Secretary of State], [Vernon] Walters [Ambassador at Large] and William Wilson, Reagan's first ambassador to the Vatican. They 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.

In a section of his article headed "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control," Bernstein includes three more revealing paragraphs:

In response to concerns of the Vatican, the Reagan Administration agreed to alter its foreign aid program to comply with the church's teachings on birth control. According to William Wilson, the President's first ambassador to the Vatican, the State Department reluctantly agreed to an outright ban on the use of any U.S. aid funds by either countries or international health organizations for the promotion of ... abortions. As a result of this position, announced at the World Conference on Population in Mexico City in 1984, the U.S. withdrew funding from, among others, two of the world's largest family planning organizations: the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.

'American policy was changed as a result of the Vatican's not agreeing with our policy,' Wilson writes, 'American aid programs around the world did not meet the criteria the Vatican had for family planning. AID [the Agency for International Development] sent various people from [the Department of] State to Rome, and I'd accompany them to meet the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, and in long discussions they finally got the message. But it was a struggle. They finally selected different programs and abandoned others as a result of this intervention.'

'I might have touched on that in some of my discussions with [CIA director William] Casey,' acknowledges Pio Cardinal Laghi, the former apostolic delegate to Washington. 'Certainly Casey already knew about our positions about that.'

Thus, Bernstein documents at least some of the activities the cadre of devout Catholics in the Reagan Administration undertook to respond to the call of the bishops in their Pastoral Plan as they targeted the administrative branch of our government.

However, the bishops may have had even greater success in targeting the judicial branch. In the 12 years of the Reagan and Bush Administrations, these two presidents appointed 5 Supreme Court Justices and 70 percent of all sitting judges in the federal court system. All were anti-abortion, another goal of the Plan.

The legislative branch has been more difficult for the bishops, although they did achieve sufficient influence in Congress to the extent that pro-choice Congressmen could not override a presidential veto of family planning bills. As long as the anti-family planning interests controlled the White House, as they did during the Reagan and Bush years, this was sufficient for the bishops' purposes. But this changed in 1994. In a February 1996 fund-raising letter, Catholic presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan states, "On November 8, 1994, we made a tremendous start—electing 5 new pro-life Senators and 44 new pro-life Representatives. Now for the first time in 40 years, both houses of Congress are controlled by the Republican Party—a party solemnly sworn, in its platform, to a 100 percent pro-life position. If we elect a pro-life president in 1996, we can finally move forward to ending abortion in the United States."[31] The stage would set to achieve the Vatican's goal of a Human Life Amendment in the U.S. Constitution. Buchanan suggests that the Republican Party has become the papal party.

Indeed, one of the more profound accomplishments of this Plan is the capture of the Republican Party by the Vatican. But this accomplishment was vital to the bishops' legislative agenda described in the Plan. In a July 28, 1994 Los Angeles Times wire service story, Jack Nelson describes the maneuvers of the Religious Right so that this takeover is all but an accomplished fact. According to Nelson, "GOP moderates have remained passive on the sidelines, unwilling to fight ... "[32]

On September 11, 1995, Bill Moyers gives his assessment of the influence of the Religious Right in remarks titled Echoes of the Crusades: The Radical Religious Right's Holy War on American Freedom: "They control the Republican party, the House of Representatives and the Senate ..."[33]

Outgoing Republican National Committee Chairman Richard Bond told the members of that committee on January 29, 1993 that it was time for the Republican Party to abandon the papal position on abortion. Bond said that the party should not be governed by "zealotry masquerading as principle."[34]

But who is the Religious Right? The Spring 1994 issue of Conscience, the journal of Catholics For a Free Choice, exploded the myth that the Religious Right is a Protestant movement. It was designed, created and controlled by Catholics in response to the Pastoral Plan. These Catholics recruited opportunistic Protestants to give the appearance that Protestants were the instigators. The leadership is Catholic but the followers are often Protestant. As mentioned earlier, The National Catholic Reporter predicted that the Bishops' Pastoral Plan would lead to the creation of a new political party, an American Catholic Party.[17] But instead, the Vatican simply chose to seize control of the Republican Party.

The outcomes of the Plan have been truly remarkable. And they have implications for all Americans.

THE VATICAN'S BOLD BEHAVIOR

In April 1992 in a rare public admission of this threat, Cardinal John O'Connor of New York, delivering a major address to the Franciscan University of Steubenville, acknowledged:

The fact is that attacks on the Catholic Church's stance on abortion—unless they are rebutted—effectively erode Church authority on all matters, indeed on the authority of God himself.[35]

The Vatican claims the right to protect itself against "harmful laws"—even when democratically legislated. The central difficulty here, of course, is that what the Vatican considers "harmful" to itself and its authority often is exactly what patriotic American lay Catholic and non-Catholic men and women thoughtfully consider beneficial to themselves and their families. In a letter to American bishops from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—the most powerful Vatican office—Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger reminded the bishops that "The Church has the responsibility to protect herself from the application of harmful laws."[36] Obviously, if an institution has the "responsibility," it also claims the "right." The Vatican exercises its "right" to protect itself from the application of harmful laws in the autocratic way it defines harmful.

The stage was set for the demand for parental notification laws in The Charter of the Rights of the Family. This Charter specifically calls for such legislation. It was distributed by the Holy See at the International Conference on Population in Mexico City, August 1984. It was "Presented by the Holy See to All Persons, Institutions, and Authorities Concerned with the Mission of the Family in Today's World." It reads:

[The Charter] aims ... at presenting to all contemporaries, be they Christian or not, a formulation—as complete and ordered as possible—of the fundamental rights that are inherent in that natural and universal society which is the family ... The Christian vision is present in this Charter as the light of divine revelation which enlightens the natural reality of the family. These rights arise, in the ultimate analysis, from that law which is inscribed by the Creator in the heart of every human being. Society is called to defend these rights against all violations and to respect and promote them in the entirety of their content.

The rights that are proposed ... express fundamental postulates and principles for legislation to be implemented and for the development of family policy. In all cases they are a prophetic call in favor of the family institution, which must be respected and defended against all usurpation.

Article 3 begins:

The spouses have the inalienable right to found a family and to decide on the spacing of births and the number of children to be born, taking into full consideration their duties toward themselves, their children already born, the family, and society, in a just hierarchy of values and in accordance with the objective moral order which excludes recourse to contraception, sterilization, and abortion.

a) The activities of public authorities and private organizations which attempt in any way to limit the freedom of couples in deciding about their children constitute a grave offense against human dignity and justice.

Article 4 begins:

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception.

a) Abortion is a direct violation of the fundamental right to life of the human being.

The Vatican's assertions in this Charter are forthright. There is a specific demand for the passage of laws that restrict access to abortion, such as parental notification laws.

In 1995, Pope John Paul II issued his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life). It frankly attacks the principles of liberal democracy and questions the legitimacy of the American government. He instructs Catholics to defy civil laws he deems illegitimate, and to impose papal teachings on all Americans through political commitment, even if it means that they must sacrifice their lives to do so. Evangelium Vitae is quite lengthy and contains 105 sections. The following passages, referenced by their section numbers, illustrate the pope's message:

Laws which authorize and promote abortion and euthanasia are therefore radically opposed not only to the good of the individual but also to the common good; as such they are completely lacking in authentic juridical validity [#72].

Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection [#73].

It is precisely from obedience to God—to whom alone is due that for which is acknowledgment of His absolute sovereignty—that the strength and the courage to resist unjust human laws are born. It is the strength and the courage of those prepared even to be imprisoned or put to the sword, in the certainty that this is what makes for the endurance and faith of the saints [#73].

In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law or to vote for it [#73].

No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the church [#62].

Christians ... are called upon under grave obligation to conscience not to cooperate formally in practices which, even if permitted by civil legislation, are contrary to God's law. Indeed, from the moral standpoint, it is never licit to cooperate formally in evil ... This cooperation can never be justified either by invoking respect for the freedom of others or by appealing to the fact that civil law permits it or requires it [#74].

To refuse to take part in committing an injustice is not only a moral duty; it is also a basic human right [#74].

Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality or a panacea for immorality. Fundamentally, democracy is a 'system' and as such is a means and not an end. Its 'moral' value is not automatic but depends on conformity to the moral law [#70].

By virtue of our sharing in Christ's royal mission, our support and promotion of human life must be accomplished through ... political commitment [#87].

In her National Catholic Reporter article, "Defending life even unto death," Professor Janine Langan, of the University of Toronto, assesses Evangelium Vitae: "John Paul leaves no room for ghetto Catholicism. Excusing our silence about matters of truth because 'we should not push on other people our Christian God,' as one of my students put it last year, is not acceptable." Professor Langan does not acknowledge that this encyclical is extremist in nature but she describes it forthrightly, referring to section #73: "In a situation as grave as the present one, Christians are bound to come into conflict ... Evangelium Vitae is thus a challenge to defend life even at the cost of martyrdom. But it's also a promise that, with God, everything is possible. Finally, this encyclical does not merely state that being 'pro-choice' is not an option, but that every one of us is also morally bound to oppose, at any cost, any public attack on any human person's right to life [#104]." Langan quotes the pope, "life finds its center, its meaning and its fulfillment when it is given up [#51]." In her view, and the pope's, martyrdom is admirable: "Martyrdom is the one witness to the truth about man which every one can hear. No society, however dark, can stifle it."[37]

This chilling view of martyrdom held by the pope and Professor Langan is not shared by most Americans. When fanatical Moslem extremists resort to it, martyrdom is almost universally condemned as religious extremism. Why should it be admirable behavior when exercised by Catholics? Yet, this discussion shows the extent to which the pope is willing to go in order to pass legislation which reduces the number of abortions.

Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, who spoke on October 3, 1995 on "Culture of Life, Culture of Death in the Encyclical, Evangelium Vitae," makes it clear that the Church is at war with democratic America with its civil laws:

The Pope invites us with courage to the boycott of unjust laws which suppress the imperative of natural law carved into consciences by the Creator. And legislators, politicians, physicians, and scientists have the duty of conscience to be the defenders of life in the war against this culture of death.[38]

This is an aggressive call to Catholics to impose papal law on all Americans through legislation.

On December 21, 1998, the American Catholic bishops brought this call even closer when it issued its statement, Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics. As to the role of the Church in the political process, the bishops state:

... at all times and in all places, the Church should have the true freedom to teach the faith, to proclaim its teaching about society, to carry out its task among men without hindrance, and to pass moral judgment even in matters relating to politics ... [#18].

In other words, no one should offer resistance as the Church goes about passing laws demanded by the pope, such as parental consent laws.

The American bishops go on to assert:

Democracy is not a substitute for morality, nor a panacea for immorality. Its value stands—or falls—with the values which it embodies and promotes. Only tireless promotion of the truth about the human person can infuse democracy with the right values ... American Catholics have long sought to assimilate into U.S. cultural life. But in assimilating, we have too often been digested. We have been changed by our culture too much, and we have changed it not enough [#25].

Here the bishops demand change to Catholic moral law.

They continue:

[Scripture] demands moral leadership. Each and every person baptized in the truth of the Catholic faith is a member of the 'people of life' sent by God to evangelize the world [#26].

If you were born Catholic you are obligated to be part of the team that will impose Catholic law on all Americans.

The bishops continue:

As bishops, we have the responsibility to call Americans to conversion, including political leaders, and especially those publicly identified as Catholic. As the Holy Father reminds us in The Splendor of the Truth (Veritatis Splendor): it is part of our pastoral ministry to see to it that [the Church's] moral teaching is faithfully handed down, and to have recourse to appropriate measures to ensure that the faithful are guarded from every doctrine and theory contrary to it [#29].

The bishops have concluded that it is their job to pass civil laws that will protect the Catholic faithful from abortions that they would otherwise procure.

The allegiance demanded by the American bishops in December 1998 is clear:

Catholics who are privileged to serve in public leadership positions have an obligation to place their faith at the heart of their public service, particularly on issues regarding the sanctity and dignity of human life. Thomas More, the former chancellor of England who preferred to give his life rather than betray his Catholic convictions, went to his execution with the words, 'I die the King's good servant, but God's first [#31].'

No public official, especially one claiming to be a faithful and serious Catholic, can responsibly advocate for or actively support direct attacks on innocent human life ... Those who justify their inaction on the grounds that abortion is the law of the land need to recognize that there is a higher law, the law of God [#32].

The arena for moral responsibility includes not only the halls of government, but the voting booth as well. Laws that permit abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide are profoundly unjust, and we should work peacefully and tirelessly to oppose and change them. Because they are unjust they cannot bind citizens in conscience, be supported, acquiesced in, or recognized as valid [#33]."

In the teachings cited above, the Vatican has made numerous assertions, proclamations, declarations and decrees. They serve, above all, to exemplify its intense desperation on the matter of legal abortion and family planning. Its very survival depends on halting all legal family planning and abortion which are causing a hemorrhage in the credibility of this religious institution. In my opinion, this remarkable dilemma is entirely responsible for the Vatican's behavior. The Church, faced with disaster, is behaving like a wounded animal.

Americans would not benefit from any law now being used to restrict abortion. On the other hand, as others have documented, young women will be irreparably harmed. Some will die. Some will commit suicide rather than tell their parents. Many will suffer adverse consequences from which they will never recover. The question is: should this human sacrifice of young American women who are not even Catholic be permitted so that men in Rome will be able to "infuse democracy with the right values" in order to try to save a Church which finds itself down a blind alley just as predicted by the Church intelligentsia in 1870?

The political machine created by the Pastoral Plan has had far-reaching consequences for all Americans. At this moment, the impeachment of President Clinton, the most pro-choice president in history, would not have been possible without the successful implementation of this plan in the House of Representatives. He has defied the pope, strongly supporting access to abortion. All 13 House prosecutors are anti-abortion Republicans and are led by the most rabid abortion foe in the House, Roman Catholic Henry Hyde. According to the October 1, 1998 issue of the New York Times, Hyde and the lawyer he chose to lead the Republican impeachment team, David Schippers, another Catholic and father of 10, were both knighted by the pope three years ago for their outstanding service to the Catholic Church.[39] Each of these men most certainly benefitted from the existence of the political machine created by the Pastoral Plan. There are many other such examples and they are negatively affecting us all.

References

1. Hasler, A.B., How the Pope Became Infallible, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981. p. 25.
2. Jones, A., Vatican, "International Agencies Hone Family, Population Positions," National Catholic Reporter (reprinted in Conscience, May/June 1984. p. 7.)
3. Hasler, op. cit., p. 270.
4. Ibid., p. 313.
5. Byrnes, T.A., Catholic Bishops in American Politics, Lawrenceville, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991. p. 66.
6. Ibid., p. 41.
7. Ibid., p. 48.
8. Ibid., p. 49.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 143.
12. Ibid., p. 57.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 144.
15. Blanshard, P., American Freedom and Catholic Power, Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950. p. 46 [Quoted from the Catholic Almanac.]
16. Ibid., p. 50. [Quoted from Leo XIII's encyclical, Chief Duties of Christian Citizens.]
17. "U.S. Bishops Spark New Abortion Debate," INTERCOM, 1976, 4(1):13.
18. Mumford, S.D., American Democracy & The Vatican: Population Growth & National Security, Amherst, New York: Humanist Press, 1984. 268 pp.
19. Mumford, S.D., The Pope and the New Apocalypse: The Holy War Against Family Planning, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: Center for Research on Population and Security, 1986. 82 pp.
20. Mumford, S.D., The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: Center for Research on Population and Security, 1996. 580 pp.
21. Dooling, D.J., Decision in McRae v. HEW, New York: U.S. District Court, 1980.
22. Young, P.D., "Richard A. Viguerie: The New Right's Secret Power Broker," Penthouse, December 1982, p. 146.
23. Negri, M., "A Well-Planned Conspiracy," The Humanist, May/June 1982, 42(3):40.
24. U.S. News and World Report, June 21, 1982.
25. Mumford, op. cit., 1996 (see pages 178-83).
26. A 1996 Catholic Alliance fund raising letter signed by Maureen Roselli.
27. Conn, J., "Papal Blessing?" Church & State, November 1995. p.4.
28. Tanzola, V., Fund to Defeat the Abortion Candidates, a project of LIFE-PAC, The Anti-Abortion Political Action Committee, Washington, D.C. A Fundraising letter received March 1980.
29. "Bishops revise plan for drive to reverse U.S. abortion policy," Boston Globe, November 12, 1985. p. 4.
30. Bernstein, C., "The Holy Alliance," Time, February 24, 1992.
31. Buchanan, P.J., Candidate for President fundraising letter. February 1996. p. 1.
32. Nelson, J., Los Angeles Times wire service story. July 28, 1994.
33. Moyers, B., "Echoes of the Crusades," Church & State, December 1995. p. 16.
34. Droleskey, T., "Zealotry masquerading as principle?" The Wanderer, February 18, 1993. p. 10.
35. King, H.V., "Cardinal O'Connor Declares That Church Teaching on Abortion Underpins All Else," The Wanderer, April 23, 1992. p. 1.
36. Likoudis, P., "Vatican letter calls on bishops to oppose homosexual rights laws," The Wanderer, July 30, 1992. p. 1.
37. Langan, J., "Defending life even unto death," National Catholic Register, September 17, 1996. p. 1.
38. "Be Defenders of Life, Says Cardinal Lopez Trujillo," The Wanderer, October 12, 1995. p. 7.
39. New York Times, October 1, 1998. p. 1.

The Vatican's Role in the World Population Crisis: The Untold Story. The International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994 was a turning point. Until then, it was not widely known that the Catholic Church, as directed by its hierarchy in the Vatican, was a principle force in opposing population growth control. Any effort by the Vatican to conceal its staunch opposition was abandoned when the Holy See shut down the meeting for the first six days. Everyone was stunned.

• Few believed that the Vatican would do this.
• Few believed that the Vatican could do this.
• The big question is why the Vatican did it?

A presentation given at
Main Line Unitarian Church,
Philadelphia, Pa., April 14, 1996
by
Stephen D. Mumford, DrPH
Center for Research on
Population and Security

With an Introduction
by Lay Leader
George L. Kelley.

Introduction

Good morning. Let me commence this service by saying a few words about the spiritual house in which we all reside:

This house is for the ingathering of nature and human nature. It is a house of friendships, a haven in trouble, an open room for the encouragement of our struggle. It is a house of freedom, guarding the dignity and worth of every person. It offers a platform for the free voice, for declaring, both in times of security and danger, the full and undivided conflict of opinion. It is a house of truth-seeking, where scientists can encourage devotion to their quest, where mystics can abide in a community of searchers. It is a house of art, adorning its celebrations with melodies and handiworks. It is a house of prophecy, outrunning times past and times present in visions of growth and progress. This house is a cradle for our dreams, the workshop of our common endeavor.

In 1830 there were one billion people on the planet. By 1930 there were two billion, and by 1960 there were three billion. Today [1969] the world population stands at three and one-half billion persons. One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of population. Whether man’s response to that challenge will be a cause of pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today. If we now begin our work in an appropriate manner, and if we continue to devote a considerable amount of attention and energy to this problem, then mankind will be able to surmount this challenge as it has surmounted so many during the long march of civilization.

When future generations evaluate the record of our time, one of the most important factors in their judgment will be the way in which we respond to population growth. Let us act in such a way that those who come after us—even as they lift their eyes beyond Earth’s bounds—can do so with pride in the planet on which they live, with gratitude to those who lived on it in the past, and with continuing confidence in the future.

In the 27 years that have elapsed since President Nixon delivered this message to Congress, the World’s population has expanded from three and one-half billion to nearly six billion and its growth rate is essentially unchanged. Uncontrolled population growth is a primary cause of the worst problems that face the world today, including the degradation of the environment, the destruction of natural habitat and permanent loss of countless species along with it, malnutrition and starvation, widespread unemployment, poverty, and social unrest resulting in national and international conflict. The overall result is a general undermining of our humanitarian values. The time to commence serious action has long since past. Only through our awareness and commitment to world population growth control can society hope to save itself from the traditional regulators of human overpopulation—war, pestilence and starvation.

I am very pleased to introduce as our speaker this morning, Dr. Stephen Mumford who heads the Center for Research on Population and Security and has traveled from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to be with us today. Dr. Mumford is a leading researcher and writer on population issues, having published six books and 89 articles on the subject. For the past 26 years he has spent a large portion of his time working on population issues in developing countries. Dr. Mumford will discuss the pivotal role of the Catholic Church hierarchy in thwarting efforts to alleviate the world population crisis. While I do not believe that there will be time during the service to ask him questions, I encourage anyone who is interested in his message and who may wish to exchange comments to meet with us afterwards.

Presentation by Stephen D. Mumford

George Kelley read to you a remarkable passage of a message to Congress by President Nixon in 1969. At that time, America seemed to have the political will to deal with the overpopulation problem. But within five years that will began to weaken.

Here today, we can bear witness only to our government’s aversion to population control. Why have we come to this sad state of affairs?

The Cairo Population Conference 18 months ago was a turning point. Until then, it was not widely known that the Catholic Church, as directed by its hierarchy in the Vatican, was a principle force in opposing population growth control. Any effort by the Vatican to conceal its staunch opposition was abandoned when the Holy See shut down the meeting for the first six days. Everyone was stunned.

• Few believed that the Vatican would do this.
• Few believed that the Vatican could do this.
• The big question is why the Vatican did it?

At the last International Population Conference, convened in Mexico City in 1984, the Vatican was not forced to take such overt action to achieve its goals. Conservative Catholic James Buckley led a largely conservative Catholic delegation to Mexico City to represent the United States. They took the Vatican position on abortion and family planning and helped to impose it on the conference. The Vatican thereby avoided the need to place itself directly in the way of progress on this vital issue.

Why is the Vatican so anxious to impose its will on the world of Catholics and non-Catholics alike when it comes to this issue?

The Vatican desperately wanted the policy established in Mexico City to be retained after the Cairo conference. But it lacked the powerful U.S. delegation to support it this time.

Why is the Vatican so anxious to impose its will on the world of Catholics and non-Catholics alike when it comes to this issue?

First, let me say that we are talking about the Catholic hierarchy—priests, bishops, cardinals, the pope—not the laity. It is well known that American Catholic lay people do not differ from non-Catholics in the use of contraception and abortion.

The eminent Catholic theologian, Hans Küng, best described the situation when he wrote: “We cannot solve the problem of contraception until we solve the problem of infallibility.”

What is infallibility? What did Dr. Küng mean?

Infallibility is a Catholic dogma—a Catholic teaching—a principle. As you know, according to Catholic dogma, the pope is God’s representative on earth and God guides him as he cares for his flock. When the pope formulates a teaching, he is simply transmitting this teaching on God’s behalf. Therefore, the teaching cannot possibly be in error. Thus, his teachings are infallible.

This principle was not created until 1870, the very year when the pope lost all temporal power with the creation of the country of Italy. Up to that moment, the Vatican was still executing so-called heretics, people whom it viewed as posing a threat to papal power. But suddenly this source of power was gone.

The Vatican urgently needed a new source of power. It could no longer control the laity by means of its governance, as it had in the papal states which would later become Italy. But it could control the laity directly by adopting a policy of psychological coercion founded on a new doctrine—that of papal infallibility.

This was a brilliant concept—and it worked—for a century. But at its introduction in 1870, the Catholic intelligentsia, among them theologians, historians and bishops, recognized that at some point in the future, this principle would lead to self-destruction of the institution.

Why? Because they recognized that times were certain to change—and in unpredictable ways. This principle would lock the Church into an inexorable course—teachings that could not be changed without destroying the principle of infallibility itself.

These thoughtful Catholics foresaw that this principle would immediately become the fundamental principle of the Catholic Church, upon which all other Catholic dogma would rest—the very foundation of the Church.

They understood that if this principle were undermined and destroyed at some future date, all Church teachings would collapse around the eroded foundation and the institution itself would be devastated.

Since the adoption of Humanae Vitae, 28 years ago, there has been a hemorrhage in the Church’s credibility ... self-destruction is now well under way.

They were convinced that one day, encumbered by her unchangeable teachings, the Church would find itself down a blind alley from which there would be no escape—and faced with inevitable self-destruction as a result of a grave loss of credibility. These distinguished scholars were strongly opposed to this principle and many left the Church.

The blind alley turned out to be the issue of birth control.

They could not imagine the population explosion of the last half of this century. As it stands now, the Church cannot change its teaching on birth control without undermining all of its teachings. The Vatican must protect the fundamental doctrine of papal infallibility at all costs.

We all know that the Catholic Church has lost much of its credibility, authority and claim to moral leadership as it has stonewalled any serious solutions to the population problem. The 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae ruled out any change of the Church’s position on birth control for all time.

Since the adoption of Humanae Vitae, 28 years ago, there has been a hemorrhage in the Church’s credibility, just as the intellectual leaders of the Church predicted in 1870. And self-destruction is now well under way.

This morning, I will give you three examples of this erosion but there are scores of others.

• In 1965 there were 42,000 young men in American seminaries studying for the priesthood. Today there are fewer than 6,000 even though there are 50% more Catholics.
• The average age of nuns in the United States is 65 years. Only 3% are under age 40 while 35% are older than 70.
• One-half of all American priests quit the priesthood before reaching retirement age.

Self-destruction as a result of loss of credibility is underway but progressing slowly. The Pope still has hope that he can turn this around. We know that he is convinced that if he changes the Church’s position on birth control and destroys the principle of infallibility, self-destruction will be very swift.

We know that this matter was the focus of his attention for several years in the 1960s.

"I am convinced that the doctrine of infallibility is in a certain sense the key to the certainty with which the faith is confessed ..."
– Pope John Paul II 1980

In 1964, Pope Paul VI created the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control which met from 1964 to 1966. It was a two-part commission. One consisted of 64 lay persons, the other, of 15 clerics, including Pope John Paul II, then a Polish cardinal.

Pope Paul gave the Commission only one mission—to determine how the Church can change its position on birth control without undermining papal authority.

After two years of study, the Commission concluded that it was not possible to make this change without undermining papal authority—but that the Church should make the change anyway because it was the right thing to do! The lay members voted 60 to 4 for change, and the clerics, 9 to 6 for change. We know this because one or more commission members released the details without permission to an Italian and a French newspaper. Pope Paul did not act immediately. A minority report was prepared, coauthored by the man who is now Pope John Paul II.

In this report he said:

If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti Connubii was promulgated), in 1951 (Pius XII’s address to the midwives), and in 1958 (the address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error.

This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved.

In 1980, years after he became pope, John Paul wrote to the German bishops:

I am convinced that the doctrine of infallibility is in a certain sense the key to the certainty with which the faith is confessed and proclaimed, as well as to the life and conduct of the faithful. For once this essential foundation is shaken or destroyed, the most basic truths of our faith likewise begin to break down.

In these two texts, the pope took the position that a change on the birth control issue would destroy the principle of papal infallibility and that infallibility was the fundamental principle of the Church upon which all else rests.

The principle of infallibility must be protected at all costs. The security-survival of the papacy itself is on the line.

Civil law, which legalizes contraception and abortion undermines papal authority. The Church insists that only it can determine what is moral. By passing these civil laws, governments are challenging the prerogative of the pope to be the ultimate authority on what is moral. Because most Americans look to democratic process to determine morality, the authority of the pope is threatened by this process. In the simplest analysis, the Church cannot coexist with such an arrangement, which in its view, threatens the very survival of the papacy as a world power.

My views in these matters have been influenced primarily by three Catholic writers: theologian Hans Küng, historian Bernhard Hasler and sociologist Jean-Guy Vaillancourt.

The same year that the encyclical Humanae Vitae was issued—1968—Richard Nixon was elected president. Nixon felt very strongly about the population problem. Public awareness of this problem and political commitment to deal with it was just beginning to peak.

In March 1970, Nixon created the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. The task of this Commission was to make a series of recommendations that could be used to formulate a comprehensive population policy for the United States.

Nothing ever came of this report. Not one recommendation was ever adopted. To this day the U.S. does not have a population policy.

After two years of intensive study, the Commission made more than 70 recommendations. The report had the makings of an outstanding population policy. Two of the recommendations were that contraception and abortion would be made available to all who wanted them, at government expense, if necessary.

1972 was a presidential election year and President Nixon was facing a difficult campaign, so when the report was presented to him on May 5, 1972, six months before Americans would go to the polls, Nixon sharply condemned its most important recommendations.

Nothing ever came of this report. Not one recommendation was ever adopted. To this day the U.S. does not have a population policy.

According to the chairman of the Commission, John D. Rockefeller 3rd, and Commission member, Congressman James Scheuer of New York, the President was convinced that the Catholic bishops, who were hostile to the report, had the power to upset his bid for reelection.

This report never saw the light of day again.

But Nixon did make another bold move. Despite the intense opposition of the Catholic hierarchy that he encountered in the wake of his population commission, Nixon’s assessment of the gravity of world overpopulation problem remained unchanged.

In April 1974, in National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), he directed that a comprehensive study be undertaken to determine the "implications of world population growth for U.S. security and overseas interests."

He ordered that this study be undertaken by all the departments and agencies of the government that had significant intelligence gathering capabilities. This included The National Security Council, the CIA, the Defense, Agriculture and State Departments, and the Agency for International Development.

Before the study was completed in July 1975, President Nixon had lost his job. However, his successor, Gerald Ford, recognized the importance of this study. Both the findings and recommendations are as relevant today as they were in 1975.

Because of the constraint of time I can only cite a few of the findings from this remarkable report:

"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." [Executive Summary of the NSSM 200 Report, page 10]

"... World population growth is widely recognized within the Government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures ..." [Page 194 of the NSSM 200 Report]

"... population factors are indeed critical in, and often determinants of, violent conflict in developing areas." [Page 66]

"Where population size is greater than available resources, or is expanding more rapidly than the available resources, there is a tendency toward internal disorders and violence and, sometimes, disruptive international policies or violence." [Page 69]

"In developing countries, the burden of population factors, added to others, will weaken unstable governments, often only marginally effective in good times, and open the way to extremist regimes." [Page 84]

the 227-page report and its recommendations were endorsed by President Ford. However, none of them were ever implemented. The Vatican moved swiftly to intervene ...

This report predicted the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the United States-Iraq war and pointed out that the cost of such a conflict will far exceed the costs of decades of worldwide population growth control. The report also predicted the civil wars in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia and numerous other population driven hostilities of the past 20 years.

The report offers numerous recommendations. The following few excerpts will give you an idea of the concern expressed by the departments and agencies which conducted the studies:

"Our objective should be to assure that developing countries make family planning information, education and means available to all their peoples by 1980." [Page 130]

"... intense efforts are required to assure full availability by 1980 of birth control information and means to all fertile individuals, especially in rural areas." [Executive Summary, page 9]

"While specific goals in this area are difficult to state, our aim should be for the world to achieve a replacement level of fertility, (a two-child family on the average), by about the year 2000 ... Attainment of this goal will require greatly intensified population programs ... U.S. leadership is essential." [Executive Summary, page 14]

"— No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion" [Page 182]— Indeed, abortion, legal and illegal, now has become the most widespread fertility control method in use in the world today ..." [Page 183]

"— It would be unwise to restrict abortion research for the following reasons: 1) The persistent and ubiquitous nature of abortion. 2) Widespread lack of safe abortion techniques ..." [Page 185]

NSSM 200 was an astounding report prepared by leading cabinet level agencies.

Its conclusion: overpopulation threatens American security and the security of all nations.

Overpopulation is a more serious threat than nuclear conflagration.

On November 26, 1975, the 227-page report and its recommendations were endorsed by President Ford. However, none of them were ever implemented. The Vatican moved swiftly to intervene, and all efforts were very quietly subverted.

On November 20, 1975, six days before Ford endorsed the recommendations, the U.S. Catholic bishops adopted a plan to build a political machine with the stated goal of passing a human rights amendment to the Constitution. This plan, which is represented by a printed document, describes the creation of the new right movement, including the Moral Majority. Within a period of only four years, almost the entire new right movement had been created. More recently, the bishops were the moving force behind the creation of the Christian Coalition to replace the Moral Majority, which had fallen into public disrepute.

Many documented details of the Vatican intervention in the implementation of the NSSM 200 recommendations are described in my last three books. Given that the very survival of the papacy is on the line, the Vatican has taken extraordinary steps to halt any and all local and global initiatives to promote population growth control activities.

I believe that this grave conflict between the well documented efforts by the papacy to preserve its power and influence, and the security-survival interests of our country and the entire world, is the most important story of the last half of the 20th century. This incredible story is going untold.

While we would wish that everyone could see the urgency of finding acceptable methods for controlling the world’s population growth, I recognize that there are some whose religious beliefs and attitudes may never allow them to accommodate their beliefs to such needs.

However, it remains for the rest of us who live in a democratic and pluralistic society to understand the forces that undermine and block a free and honest exchange of ideas on this subject—forces that now prevent us from implementing humane solutions to this most fundamental problem.

Only by understanding these forces can they be dealt with effectively, and progress be made toward attaining a sustainable population for our planet.

Thank you for letting me share these thoughts with you this morning.

Closing Words

In his discourse today, Dr. Mumford has made it clear that we are under siege not only on the abortion and other human rights issues, but that even with the most fundamental of survival issues—the need for population control—there are powerful forces, having no accountability, to whom reason is irrelevant and which will use every means at their disposal to suppress open discussion and meaningful action. For those of you who wish to learn more about this subject, the information presented today has been documented by Dr. Mumford in a 1995 journal article in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies (Spring 1995, Vol. 20, No. 1). You may obtain a copy as you pass through the Main Meeting Room doors.

Vatican Control of World Health Organization Policy: An Interview with Milton P. Siegel, former assistant director general of WHO, from: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF NSSM 200, Appendix 3 by Stephen D. Mumford

There is a growing consensus among international public-health leaders that the gains made by their earliest practitioners are about to be lost as a result of overpopulation. The hideous scourge of premature death in Africa that we have been witnessing on our television screens for the last decade is spreading throughout the continent along with civil war.

Somalia is presently the focus of our attention, but there are many other African countries which are all but certain to slip into chaos. CIA director Robert Gates has predicted that, within the next year, there will be 30 million people starving in Africa alone.

A December 20, 1992, article from the National Geographic News Service identifies the fundamental problem in Africa: "Along with war and drought, the third horseman of the African apocalpyse has been overpopulation. There are simply more people trying to live on the land than the land can support." The article goes on to observe: "There doesn't seem to be any long term solution short of transporting millions of Somalis out of there and leaving enough living space for the people and cattle that remain." But no country will accept these millions of Somalis and the tens of millions of other Africans who face the same prospect.

The result will be an explosion in premature deaths, just as some of the delegates who shaped United Nations health policy in the late 1940s had predicted. These leaders in public health recognized that the choice was not whether population growth would be controlled but how. Would birth control be implemented along with "death control," or would population-growth control be left to implacable nature through starvation and starvation-related diseases? They argued that this was the real choice they were making as they shaped World Health Organization policy. These leaders understood that, in the not-too-distant future, overpopulation would be a major--and preventable--cause of death.

But these people of vision lost that debate in the 1940s, and now premature death on an appalling scale is just getting underway in Africa. It is reasonable to predict that more than half of the Africans alive today will die prematurely, and that a substantial majority of African children born in this decade will die either in this decade or the next.

Because of his position and the length of his tenure, Milton P. Siegel is considered among the world's foremost authorities on the development of World Health Organization policy. In this videotaped interview (available from the Center for Research on Population and Security, P.O. Box 13067, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, for $19), he reveals the influence of the Vatican in shaping WHO policy, particularly in blocking adoption of the concept that overpopulation is a grave public-health threat--a concept which, in WHO's early years, enjoyed a broad consensus among member countries.

Without this separation of population dynamics from WHO public-health policy, the Vatican would have found it much more difficult to subsequently manipulate governments on such issues as family planning and abortion. National leaders would have been able to refer to the international consensus, as demonstrated by WHO policy. WHO, they could have insisted, has determined that family planning and abortion--like clean water, good nutrition, and immunizations--are necessary to protect public health.

Professor Siegel has now decided to speak out on the subject. As he was involved in the World Health Organization at an early stage, his personal experience provides ample evidence that the Vatican influenced WHO policy development from the outset, during the early period of the Interim Commission in 1946. In its 44-year history, this international health body has had a deplorable record in family planning. Its commitment has been miniscule, and even today family planning accounts for only a tiny fraction of its budget.

Professor Siegel joined the World Health Organization in 1946, when it was still in its formative stages--under the umbrella of the United Nations, created just the year before. Because of Siegel's earlier work in North America and the Middle East, he was asked, in effect, to be one of WHO's "founding fathers." So he came on board on the senior staff of the Interim Commission. Dr. Brock Chisholm of Canada was the executive director of the commission. The Interim Commission set up the permanent organization with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and Dr. Chisholm was chosen to be WHO's first director general.

MUMFORD: In your role as assistant director general of WHO, you were in a position to know all of the essential facts that went into all WHO policy-making decisions, weren’t you?

SIEGEL: I feel it might be useful for me to point out my participation in, first, the creation of the World Health Organization, and my role as assistant director general for 24 years, which is when I reached retirement age. I attended every meeting of the World Health Assembly and every session of the executive board. The board met twice a year. The Health Assembly met annually, and I was present, exercising my functions at these meetings. I didn't miss a single one.

MUMFORD: How did Dr. Chisholm regard family planning in those early days as a potential concern for WHO?

SIEGEL: He considered it absolutely essential ... Brock Chisholm was a realist, and he firmly believed that overpopulation was a threat--a security threat, if you will--to all the nations of the world. And that steps must be taken, and it should be considered part of health function to do something about population-growth control.

MUMFORD: Did you and Brock Chisholm ever discuss the opposition to family planning?

SIEGEL: Yes, we had to. It was an issue even before I joined the Interim Commission. I joined the commission a year after it was created.

MUMFORD: When did you first start witnessing this opposition to WHO involvement with family planning?

SIEGEL: Well, my first exposure to it--the initial stages of opposition to family planning by the Catholic church--started as soon as I joined WHO and word reached me that this was a real problem. I was visited by one of the representatives of the Vatican in Geneva, who wanted to know who I was and where I came from and what I believed in. And I politely invited him out of my office, because I did not consider that I was under any obligation to reveal anything that I knew to someone outside the organization--whether it was someone from the Vatican or any other organized group. So they couldn't get any information out of me. But as a result, I had the beginnings of conversations with my colleagues, particularly with Dr. Chisholm.

MUMFORD: What was the basis of opposition within WHO to the discussion of population and population problems?

SIEGEL: Well, the position simply was that population-growth control, family planning, or whatever you want to call it, was not a health problem and therefore should not even be debated. That was the position of Ireland, Italy, Lebanon, and later on Belgium. The issue of population growth came up at every meeting WHO held.

You couldn't separate population problems from health in the minds of most of the delegates. But these few countries--particularly those which were dominated by the Vatican--didn't want to see that discussed in a health organization. Because as soon as you introduce anything under the subject of health--whether it's peace, security, or family planning--it's pretty hard to argue against improving the health of people. These countries knew that, and they tried to defend themselves by saying, "These are political considerations and shouldn't be discussed in a health arena."

MUMFORD: Wasn't the question of religion, as such, ever raised in the discussion?

SIEGEL: Well, it was raised indirectly. Religion always was raised indirectly one way or another. But sometimes they would simply call it politics.

I think one can provide many illustrative examples of the way in which politics has interfered with the progress of health. And the influence of religion never did show itself until the Vatican began to use its influence through the church organizational structure, which, incidentally, probably is one of the best organizational structures the world's ever seen.

So, one way or another, sometimes surreptitiously, the Catholic church used its influence to defeat, if you will, any movement toward family planning or birth control.

MUMFORD: I've read--and we've discussed--that in the second World Health Assembly the representative from Ceylon commented that the security and peace of the world is threatened by population growth, and that the need for birth control must be considered internationally. What reaction was there to this?

SIEGEL: Well, it's interesting to note the fact that the second World Health Assembly was not held in Geneva; it was in Rome.

The environment which we were subjected to in Rome for the second World Health Assembly made it particularly difficult for anyone to make the kind of statement made by that man, the representative of the country that was then called Ceylon ... But he still had the courage to get up and make that statement about the importance of peace and security and health, and the role that health can play with regard to population control or family planning or what I choose to call management of population growth.

MUMFORD: Yes, I recall how action was stymied in the second World Health Assembly. What happened at the third assembly?

SIEGEL: When we reached the third World Health Assembly, which was back again in Geneva ... for the first time to my recollection a strong effort was made in the steering committee to add the subject of population and family planning to the agenda to be discussed at the third World Health Assembly.

Well, the delegation of Ceylon was on the steering committee that drafted the agenda to go to the Health Assembly for approval, and the delegates did their utmost to argue that population for them was an exceedingly serious problem, because they were a small island with a relatively large population, considering the size of the island. And they felt that population just had to be considered by the World Health Organization, and for that reason they were making very strong efforts to get the steering committee to allow the subjects of family planning and population to be added to the suggested agenda.

When that hit the assembly for its approval of the agenda, it was the delegate from Ireland--Dr. Hourihane--who made a rather strong, forceful statement (in the style which was the one style he could handle extremely well), saying there were two major religions, and his country was one of them--that is, the major part of its population was one of the religions--which absolutely refused to permit its delegation to participate in any meeting where the problem of family planning was being discussed.

When the vote came on the subject of whether to put population and family planning on the agenda, the vote was 30 against, one in favor, and there were somewhere between four and six abstentions.

MUMFORD: So lreland simply intimidated just about everyone. While the Catholic opposition was developing earlier, how did Dr. Chisholm react? Was he concerned?

SIEGEL: Oh, he was very concerned because he was beginning to feel pressure from the member states of WHO that were predominantly Catholic in all respects--politically and in the development of their programs. And they were putting pressure on Brock Chisholm as director general of WHO to do as little as possible about family planning. Then later on, as time went by, when they weren't very successful in influencing the development of the program, they became extremely difficult and put considerable pressure on the director general to do nothing about family planning. It took them about three years before they could get the kind of resolutions or consensus in our annual meetings of the Health Assembly to prevent the director from proposing programs that included such things as family planning.

MUMFORD: It took whom three years? You're talking about the Catholic church's representatives?

SIEGEL: Well, they had to work through government representatives because they couldn't speak officially; they didn't have the prerogative of being recognized to speak at a meeting of the World Health Assembly or any of its subsidiary bodies unless they were invited. So they operated through the countries where they knew they had influence. I think it's a well-known fact who those countries are. The two outstanding ones are Ireland and Italy.

Then later on, the Belgians became very much involved and it was the Belgian and Irish delegates--the chief delegates--who went to Brock Chisholm and demanded that he make a clear statement to the assembly that he would not propose any family-planning programs in any of the annual programs and budget of the organization. They threatened that, if he didn't do that at the then-ongoing Health Assembly, which was, I think, the third (1950), they would withdraw from the organization and take steps to destroy the organization. They went so far as to use these words threatening him--that, if he didn't do what they wanted him to do, they would first withdraw and then create a new organization altogether and destroy the World Health Organization.

Among the people Chisholm talked to was myself. Who else he talked to, I don't know, but I think I was the only one of his top policy-makers with whom he discussed this. I told him that he should not allow himself to be virtually blackmailed into taking the action they wanted him to take. "Let them go ahead and withdraw and see what happens," I advised.

Well, he did not want to do that because his term as director general only had a couple more years to run, and he didn't want to leave that problem in the hands of his successor. He knew that he was not going to remain for a second term as director general, having already served two years as executive director of the Interim Commission.

So he made a statement to the Health Assembly in full complete session that he would not, as long as he was director general, do anything to include family planning in the programming of the organization. And that put a stop to anything that had been going on previously.

Now the only thing that was going on previously was a program in India which took place almost from the outset of the organization--because the then-minister of health of India was a woman, not a doctor, who was formerly secretary to Mahatma Gandhi, and she was a converted Catholic dead set against any kind of family-planning programs in India. The Vatican would accept the idea of the use of the rhythm method but no contraceptives.

We provided an expert, whose name was Abraham Stone, to go to India to try to set up a program for the rhythm method, together with the minister of health--whose name, incidentally, was Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. She was a princess; that's what rajkumari means. I knew her well, and she was a charming person and certainly a great supporter of WHO; but her being a converted Catholic made her more Catholic than the pope, and she refused to support any kind of family-planning program.

When the rhythm method failed miserably--it produced absolutely no results--then there was nothing else that was acceptable to her. It was only after she retired as minister of health that India began to do something about family planning.

MUMFORD: How very sad. At last, Chisholm felt he had to knuckle under.

SIEGEL: After what had happened at the third World Health Assembly, the fourth--which was in 1951 in Geneva--didn't even touch the subject. It was almost taken for granted that it would simply be a repetition of what had happened at the third assembly--and therefore let's not waste time at the fourth.

And so we get to the fifth World Health Assembly, in 1952. I have equated the fifth assembly in my own mind with the death knell of WHO's involvement in population--primarily because of the pressure put on the director general by, particularly, the governments of Ireland and Belgium.

MUMFORD: So I gather Dr. Chisholm's capitulation at the third World Health Assembly wasn't quite the end of it, was it?

SIEGEL: The representative of Ceylon at the fifth World Health Assembly was Dr. Wickremsinghe, and, in referring to the population problem, he said: "We must therefore always regard the population problem as a vital one, and see how, without violating any religious beliefs or moral standards, we could solve this problem in a scientific and careful manner." This then led to a proposal by one of the outstanding members of the delegations that came to WHO meetings--Dr. Karl Evang from Norway. The Scandinavian countries, as most people know, have almost always been in favor of doing something about family planning. This has particularly been true of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

Dr. Karl Evang was an outstanding public-health person in the world and spoke absolutely perfect English. He proposed, after hearing what the representative from Ceylon had to say, that it was time to establish an expert committee to examine the problem and report on the health aspects of the population problem.

His proposal met with the support of representatives of a number of countries; I won't take the time to list them all, but, of course, one of them was Sweden and another Ceylon. The group of countries under the influence of the Vatican proposed another resolution: that, from a purely medical stand-point, population problems do not require any particular action on the part of WHO at the present time.

In the meantime, the delegate from India, whom I knew quite well (incidentally, he was a gynecologist and obstetrician from Madras, India), proposed a resolution that an expert committee should be set up with the aim of acquiring knowledge with regard to the spacing of children and birth-control problems as well as the other health aspects of population.

MUMFORD: So, two countries proposed expert committees?

SIEGEL: After heated debate, discussion was closed, and it was time to put the resolutions to a vote.

One of the members said he didn't understand what was taking place, because, as he understood it, discussion of the subject had already been declared closed and he didn't see why it should be reopened. The chair of the committee, being mindful of what the problem was growing into, suggested that, in the interest of harmony and conciliation, the best procedure would be to withdraw all the resolutions. And that was accepted by consensus.

MUMFORD: What was the implication?

SIEGEL: Well, the implication of that was that nothing happened; the discussion was closed and there was no resolution. Therefore, the director general having already made his statement that he would not include family planning in any program as long as he was director general--but he only had another year or two to go--the result was that the organization did absolutely nothing about family planning for a period of somewhere between seven and nine years.

That gave me an awful lot of problems; every time I'd go to New York, I'd be jumped on at the United Nations because of WHO's failure to take what the United Nations considered to be the kind of action that WHO was the appropriate organization to deal with.

The failure of WHO to be able to do anything during this period to which I referred--seven to nine years--was clearly the result of the very effective job done by the Vatican and its representatives, not only at WHO but at meetings of the United Nations and other organizations.

The United Nations itself, first by its division of social affairs, tried to do something about the population problem and was very disappointed that WHO had been placed in a position where it was virtually stopped and prevented from doing anything. That probably had a great deal of influence in the United Nations on the establishment of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, which it set up because WHO had miserably failed to do what the United Nations had hoped it would do.

MUMFORD: Do you think the Vatican exerts pressure on WHO even today?

SIEGEL: I believe that the Catholic church still has considerable influence on WHO's policies and program development.

Stephen D. Mumford is the director of the Center for Research on Population and Security. Much of the history covered by Professor Siegel in this interview about the intrusion of the Catholic church into the development of WHO population policy is also covered in The United Nations and the Population Question by Richard Symonds and Michael Carder, a Population Council book, published by McGraw-Hill in 1973.

In Overcoming Overpopulation: The Rise and Fall of American Political Will, Stephen D. Mumford describes the work of Vatican activists in undermining efforts to implement any population growth control policy by the US government and how Catholic bishops issued their Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities just six days before President Ford made the NSSM 200 report public policy. He shows the plan as a frank and superbly detailed blueprint of the bishops' strategy for infiltrating and manipulating the American democratic process at the national, state, and local levels. This report details the three-pronged attack, one devoted to each of the three branches of our federal government: legislative, judicial, and administrative. The purpose is to kill the political will of the United States to overcome the overpopulation problem. From: FREE INQUIRY, SPRING 1994

Overcoming Overpopulation:
The Rise and Fall of American Political Will

by Stephen D. Mumford

The 1960s saw a rapidly increasing American public awareness of the world population problem. The invention of the contraceptive pill in 1960 stimulated broad public debate on birth control and the need for it. When Pope John XXIII created the Commission on Population and Birth Control in the mid-1960s, he gave hope that the church was about to change its position on birth control. After all, why study the issue if the church was not in a position to change its teaching? In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published his book The Population Bomb, the most successful book of this kind.[1] That same year, the journal Science published one of its most controversial articles, Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons," which sparked much discussion of the overpopulation threat.[2]

The Rockefeller Commission Report and the NSSM 200 response are arguably the most important documents on overpopulation ever written. Our country and the world would be very different today if the recommendations in these documents had been implemented.

Mainstream religious denominations called for a bold response to the problem. For example, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1965 urged "the government of the United States to be ready to assist countries who request help in the development of programs of voluntary planned parenthood as a practical and humane means of controlling fertility and population growth." By 1971, it recognized that "the assumption that couples have the freedom to have as many children as they can support should be challenged. We can no longer justify bringing into existence as many children as we desire. Our corporate responsibility to each other prohibits this." And in 1972, the Presbyterians called on governments "to take such actions as will stabilize population size.

... We who are motivated by the urgency of overpopulation ... would preserve the species by responding in faith: Do not multiply--the earth is filled![3]

This cry for action made it safe for American politicians to call for programs to deal with the problem of population growth. As a result, in 1969 President Richard Nixon sent a rare Special Message to Congress, and Congress, in an equally rare move, voted to endorse the message. The message set forth a far-reaching commitment to limit population growth, and put in motion a broad range of government activities, both domestic and international. These activities included: (1) the creation of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future; (2) increased research on birth-control methods of all types and the sociology of population growth; (3) expanded programs to train more people in the population and family planning fields, both in this country and abroad; (4) expanded research on the effects of population growth on our environment and on the world's food supply; and (5) increased domestic family planning assistance, aimed at providing adequate family planning services to all who want but cannot afford them. This was the beginning of the peak of American political will to deal with the problem.

Design for a Population Policy and Resistance to It

The twenty-four-member Commission on Population Growth and the American Future was chaired by John D. Rockefeller 3rd. It ordered more than one hundred research projects which collected and analyzed data for the formulation of a comprehensive U.S. population policy.

After two years of intense study, the Rockefeller Commission made over seventy recommendations. They included: passage of a Population Education Act to help school systems establish well-planned population education programs; sex education to be widely available, especially through the schools; passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA); contraception available for all, including minors, at government expense if need be; abortion for all who want it, at government expense if necessary; vastly expanded research in many areas related to population growth control; and the elimination of employment of illegal aliens.[4]

On May 5, 1972, at a ceremony to submit formally the Commission's findings and conclusions, President Nixon publicly renounced the report.[5] This was six months before he faced reelection, and he was feeling intense political heat from one particularly powerful special interest group. During the two years that followed, it became clear that there would be no further response to the Commission's recommendations. Thus in May 1973 a group of pioneer population activists asked Ambassador Adolph Schmidt to speak with his friend, Commission Chairman John D. Rockefeller 3rd. At their June 1973 meeting in New York City, Schmidt noted the disappointment he shared with colleagues because no program resulted from the Commission's recommendations. What had gone wrong? Rockefeller responded: "The greatest difficulty has been the very active opposition by the Roman Catholic Church through its various agencies in the United States."[6] A similar evaluation became public last summer when one Rockefeller Commission member, Congressman James Scheuer (D-NY), spoke out for the first time on what had happened:

Our exuberance was short-lived. Then-president Richard Nixon promptly ignored our final report. The reasons were obvious--the fear of attacks from the far right and from the Roman Catholic Church because of our positions on family planning and abortion. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that this obstruction was but the first of many similar actions to come from high places.[7]

It is tragic that Americans have been kept in the dark about this undemocratic and un-American intervention by the Vatican. No doubt, both Catholic and non-Catholic Americans would have strongly rejected such interference had they been aware of it. The quality of life for all Americans has been diminished by this unconstitutional manipulation of American policy, undertaken for the purposes of protecting papal interests.

Nixon Again Moves Boldly

Despite the intense opposition of the Catholic hierarchy to the Rockefeller Commission Report, President Nixon's assessment of the gravity of the overpopulation problem and his desire to deal with it evidently were unchanged. On April 24, 1974, in the single most important act of his presidency regarding the population crisis, Mr. Nixon directed that a comprehensive new study be undertaken to determine the "Implications of World Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests."

I can only speculate on his thinking, but one can assume that President Nixon knew he would encounter the same intense Vatican opposition he had following the Rockefeller Commission Report. However, with his reelection safely behind him, perhaps he felt that if a definitive study of the national and global security implications of overpopulation showed that the very security of the United States was seriously threatened, it would generate public demand for action. This might serve to overcome the continued opposition of the Vatican. Why else would he have asked for this study, given his earlier experience with the Catholic church?

NSSM 200

In National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200,[8] National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, acting for the president, directed the secretaries of defense and agriculture, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the deputy secretary of state, and the administrator of the Agency for International Development (AID), to undertake jointly "a study of the impact of the world population growth on U.S. security and overseas interests." The report on this study was completed December 10, 1974, and circulated to the designated secretaries and agency heads for their review and comments.[9]

Revisions of the study continued until July 1975. On November 26, 1975, the 227-page report and its recommendations were endorsed by then-president Gerald Ford in National Security Decision Memorandum (NSDM) 314.

"The President has reviewed the inter-agency response to NSSM 200," wrote the new national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft. "He believes that United States leadership is essential to combat population growth, to implement the [UN] World Population Plan of Action, and to advance United States security and overseas interests. The President endorses the policy recommendations contained in the Executive Summary of the NSSM 200 response."[10] To this day, the policy set forth in NSDM 314 has not been officially rescinded.

The NSSM 200 Report: Concerns and
Recommendations

The NSSM 200 response details how and why world population growth gravely threatens United States and global security, and provides a blueprint for U.S. response to this burgeoning problem. The strategy is complex, raising difficult questions. Some suggested policies are necessarily bold. For these reasons, the report's authors urged that it be classified for five years to prepare the American public for full acceptance of the goals proposed.

The NSSM 200 report states: "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."[11] "World population growth is widely recognized within the government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures."[12] "[I]t 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.[13]

The NSSM 200 report includes the following recommendations:

• The United States should provide world leadership in population growth control.[14]
  
  
• The United States should seek to attain population stability by 2000.[15] This would have required a one-child family policy for the United States, thanks to the phenomenon of demographic momentum,[16] a requirement the authors well understood. (This recommendation came two years before the Chinese adopted their one-child family policy.)
  
  
• The United States should have as goals (1) making family planning information, education, and means available to all people of the developing world by 1980,[17] and (2) achieving a two-child family in the developing countries by 2000.[18]
  
  
• The United States should provide whatever funds necessary to achieve these goals.[19]

Political Will Peaks

President Ford's approval of the policy recommendations of the NSSM 200 response in his Decision Memorandum 314 represented the high point of American political will to deal with the population problem. Then it plummeted. Like the Rockefeller Commission Report, the NSSM 200 response--a definitive study by the most powerful departments in our government, those with virtually all our intelligence-gathering capability--identified a grave threat to United States and global security. But none of its recommendations was ever implemented.

Dire Predictions Come True

The Rockefeller Commission Report and the NSSM 200 response are arguably the most important documents on overpopulation ever written. Our country and the world would be very different today if the recommendations in these documents had been implemented. For example, had illegal immigration been controlled and legal immigration adjusted in 1971, as the Rockefeller Commission Report urged, the U.S. population would have peaked at 243 million in 2035. Instead, in 1992 our population stood at 255 million, and it will not peak until it reaches 383 million in 2050--assuming there is no more immigration after 1992.[20] The lives of all Americans will be significantly affected as we attempt to accommodate this additional 128 million people. And this number can explode if we do not deal with excessive immigration.

In 1974, the NSSM 200 report predicted that growing scarcities of resources would lead to ever-increasing dislocations and conflicts all over the globe that would diminish security for everyone everywhere. The January 31, 1993, issue of the New York Times contains an op-ed piece by Thomas Homer-Dixon, titled "Destruction and Death," which documents that the predictions are already coming true. This article examines case-studies of violent conflicts attributed to overpopulation by researchers from four continents: brutal ethnic conflicts caused by the migration of millions from Bangladesh to India; persistent conflict in the Philippines driven by the desperate poverty caused by overpopulation; conflict between Israelis and Palestinians caused by severe shortages of ground water in the Jordan River basin; violence in urban squatter settlements in South Africa fueled by migration forced by destruction of ecologically sensitive territories; conflict in the Senegal River Basin spurred by expanding population in Senegal and Mauritania; growth of the violent Maoist Shining Path in Peru stimulated by similar factors; and social strife in Haiti--with the resultant exodus of boat people--caused by the irreversible clear-cutting of forests and loss of soil. There are many other examples.

Implementation Halted

These examples reveal the consequences of our failure to implement the policy recommendations of the NSSM 200 report. This implementation was blocked by the swift action of the Vatican. The Catholic church had to take this action for the same reason it had to block the Rockefeller Commission recommendations: the NSSM 200 response forthrightly opposes Rome on population strategy, family planning, and abortion.

During 1976, Catholic activists worked diligently to undermine population growth control efforts. Dr. R. T. Ravenholt directed the global population program of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Department of State from 1966 to 1979. On March 4, 1991, he addressed the Washington State Chapter of Zero Population Growth (ZPG)[21] and described how this was accomplished. (Copies of the Ravenholt report are available from the Center for Research on Population and Security, P.O. Box 13067, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, (919) 933-7491, for $3.00 each.) [See R. T. Ravenholt's article in this issue of FREE INQUIRY, and the article by Roland Van Liew in the Spring 1992 issue.--Ed.]

Vatican/Laymen Disagreement

It is obvious that the Vatican is seriously out of sync with American lay Catholic thinking on family planning and abortion. For example, a recent study by Catholic priest Andrew Greeley of the National Opinion Research Center found that only seven percent of U.S. Catholics support the Vatican position on abortion.[22] In fact, U.S. Catholics exhibit the same family planning behavior as non-Catholics. There is a good reason for this. The security-survival interests of Catholic Americans are pitted against the security-survival interests of the papacy. For many reasons--including economic, medical, and social reasons--family planning, abortion services, good sex education, population education, and the advancement of women's rights, enhance the security of the lay person and his/her family and improve their odds of survival. But family planning, abortion, etc., seriously undermine the security of the papacy and threaten its very survival because they undermine papal authority.

Vatican Claims Self-Protection

The Vatican claims the right to protect itself against harmful laws--even when democratically legislated! The central difficulty here, of course, is that the Vatican considers "harmful" to itself and its authority what lay Catholics consider beneficial to themselves and their families. In a letter sent to all American bishops by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the most powerful Vatican office, Cardinal Ratzinger reminded the bishops that "the church has the responsibility to protect herself from the application of harmful laws." This letter was kept secret from the fifty-five million American Catholics until a brief notice by Peter Steinfels appeared in the New York Times on July 10, 1992. The actual text was published on July 15, 1992.[23]

The church's assertion of "responsibility" implies a "right" as well. The Vatican exercised the "right" to protect herself from what it considered harmful laws when it blocked U.S. adoption of the Rockefeller Commission recommendations and implementation of the NSSM 200 policies approved by President Ford. "To protect herself," the church moved quickly and efficiently to kill the two most important initiatives to control population growth in American history.

The Threat to Papal Power

When our government legalized contraception and abortion, it pitted civil authority against papal authority. The Vatican demands supremacy over civil governments in matters of faith and morals, but our government has rejected this concept. Thus, while the church is saying that family planning and abortion are evil and grave sins, our government is saying they are good and should be used. While many Catholic countries in Latin America have abortion rates two to four times as high as the U.S. rate, the bishops there ignore abortions. Why? They are illegal abortions, not legal ones, and thus do not threaten papal authority! So the bishops take no significant actions to halt abortions in Latin America. But legal abortions in the United States, because their legalization established their morality, do undermine papal authority.

In Papal Power: A Study of Vatican Control over Lay Catholic Elites, published by the University of California Press in 1980, Jean-Guy Vaillancourt, associate professor of sociology at the University of Montreal, closely examined the sources and evolution of papal power. He found that papal authority is vital to the maintenance of papal power. However, the relationship between the two is circular. Less authority means less power, which means even less authority. Thus, the very survival of the Vatican is threatened by programs of population growth control.

This threat to papal authority was recognized decades ago by the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control. The commission, which met from 1964 to 1966, consisted of fifteen cardinals and bishops, and sixty-four lay experts representing a variety of disciplines. According to commission member Thomas Burch, Pope Paul VI assigned the commission the task of finding a way of changing the church's position on birth control without destroying the pope's authority.[24] But the commission was unable to do this. Finally, after studying the dilemma, the laymen voted sixty to four, and the clerics nine to six, to change the church's teaching on birth control, even though it would mean a loss of papal authority, because it was the right thing to do. However, Pope Paul VI accepted the minority recommendation, and in 1968 issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which banned contraception. But because two newspapers had, without authorization, published the full texts of the commission's reports in 1967, the world knew that a substantial majority of the commission had recommended liberalization on birth control.[25] And in 1985, Thomas Burch revealed to the world the real assignment of the commission. Thus it was clear that Humanae Vitae was an admission that the church cannot change its position on birth control without undermining papal authority--an unacceptable sacrifice.

The Vatican believes, probably correctly, that if the solutions to the population problem are applied, the dominance of Vatican power will soon cease. Thus, it is in no position to compromise with the United States. The Vatican simply cannot accommodate U.S. security interests.

The Bishops' Pastoral Plan

On November 20, 1975, the American Catholic bishops issued their Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities. This was just six days before President Ford made the NSSM 200 report public policy. The success of that plan is confirmed in an excellent article that recently appeared in Time, which I will discuss later.

The plan is a flank and superbly detailed blueprint of the bishops' strategy for infiltrating and manipulating the American democratic process at the national, state, and local levels. The purpose is to kill the political will of the United States to overcome the overpopulation problem. Abortion was the issue chosen to galvanize the movement, as proposed by Jesuit priest Virgil Blum in a 1971 America magazine article.[26] The plan details a three-pronged attack, one devoted to each of the three branches of our federal government: legislative, judicial, and administrative.

As the Time article shows, with the election of the anti-abortion team of Ronald Reagan and George Bush in 1980, the Vatican seized control of the administrative branch of our government in the area of population and family planning policy. These two men appointed five Supreme Court justices and 70 percent of all sitting judges in the federal court system. All were anti-abortion, another goal of the bishops' plan. The third branch has been more difficult for the bishops, though they did achieve sufficient influence in Congress that pro-choice congressmen could not override a presidential veto. So long as the bishops controlled the White House, this was sufficient for their purposes. Even in the Carter years, the bishops were highly successful in undermining federal government population growth control efforts.[27]

The bishops enjoyed considerable success at the state level as well. In 1987, I conducted a study to determine if the bishops had accomplished the goal they set in their plan with regard to the North Carolina legislature.[28] A University of North Carolina statewide poll had established that 79 percent of the state's Democratic voters and 78 percent of the Republican voters were pro-abortion rights. When I examined the voting behavior of the legislators on abortion legislation, I found that 78 percent of the Democratic legislators voted pro on abortion legislation, just as would be predicted if the legislators accurately reflected the Democratic voters of the state. However, only 8 percent of the Republican legislators did, rather than the approximately 78 percent one would predict given Republican voter attitudes across the state. This was exactly the goal set by the bishops. In North Carolina, the bishops had succeeded in making the Republican party theirs.

The plan also called for the creation of a broad-based popular movement. This emerged between 1976 and 1980, and became known as the "New Right Movement." Catholics were key players in the movement and its leadership. The creation and control of the movement by the bishops is well-documented.[29] There is a mountain of evidence that they enjoyed great success in killing American political will.

Time Magazine Says It Like It Is

The headline on the cover of the February 24, 1992, issue of Time magazine was: "HOLY ALLIANCE: How Reagan and the Pope Conspired To Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism." The article, written by prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein, contains the most significant revelations since the adoption of the Pastoral Plan in 1975. Bernstein reports, "The Catholic Team: The key administration players were all devout Roman Catholics--CIA chief William Casey, [Richard] Allen [Reagan's first national security advisor], [William] Clark [Reagan's second national security advisor], [Alexander] Haig [secretary of state], [Vernon] Walters [ambassador at large], and William Wilson, Reagan's first ambassador to the Vatican. They 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."

Bernstein makes clear what the cadre of devout Catholics in the Reagan administration did to protect the papacy from the NSSM 200 report. He quotes our ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson, who reveals that during the Reagan administration, papal policy on birth control and abortion replaced the policy set forth by the NSSM 200 response. In a section of his article headed "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control," Bernstein writes:

In response to concerns of the Vatican, the Reagan Administration agreed to alter its foreign aid program to comply with the church's teachings on birth control. According to William Wilson, the president's first ambassador to the Vatican, the State Department reluctantly agreed to an outright ban on the use of any U.S. aid funds by either countries or international health organizations for the promotion of abortions. As a result of this position, announced at the World Conference on Population in Mexico City in 1984, the U.S. withdrew funding from, among others, two of the world's largest family planning organizations: the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.

‘American policy was changed as a result of the Vatican's not agreeing with our policy,’ Wilson explains.

Presidents Reagan and Bush were the most pro-Catholic presidents in American history. The bishops had seized control of the Republican party just as they had set out to do. In November 1992, traditional Republicans realized they had been taken. Outgoing Republican National Committee Chairman Richard Bond told the members of the committee on January 29, 1993, that it was time for the Republican Party to abandon the papal position on abortion. Bond said that the party should not be governed by "zealotry masquerading as principle."[30]

So, there are reasons for hope. The bishops have suffered some major setbacks in recent years. The publication of the Time article, the surfacing of the NSSM 200 report, and the loss of George Bush were serious setbacks. We can expect the bishops to suffer further reverses in the Clinton years.

Here are the key points I have offered:

• Papal security-survival is pitted against U.S. security-survival. Right now, U.S. security interests are losing out.
  
  
• The Vatican has recognized it cannot coexist with American democracy when democracy passes laws gravely undermining papal authority.
  
  
• There is a code of silence that inhibits open discussion of the issues I have presented. This code has been successfully imposed by the Vatican. At the present time these issues are undiscussed even among population specialists. There will be no success in dealing with overpopulation until this silence is broken and the Catholic church is successfully neutralized on this issue.

I hope each of you will help break this code of silence, so that American political will can be reborn to deal with the population problem.

Notes

1. Paul R. Erlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).
2. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1234-1248.
3. R. Beck, “Religions and the Environment: Commitment High until U.S. Population Issues Raised,” The Social Contract 3 (1993): 76-89.
4. President’s Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Population and the American Future (Washington, D.C., 1972).
5. Richard M. Nixon, “Statement about the Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future,” May 5, 1972, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Richard M. Nixon, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1974), 576 577.
6. Adolph W. Schmidt, letter to author, August 28. 1992.
7. James Scheuer, “A Disappointing Outcome: United States and World Population Trends since the Rockefeller Commission,” The Social Contract vol. 2, no. 4 (1992): 203-206.
8. National Security Council, "National Security Study Memorandum 200" (Washington, D.C., April 24, 1975).
9. National Security Council, NSSM 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (Washington, D.C., December 10, 1974).
10. National Security Council, "National Security Decision Memorandum 314" (Washington, D.C., November 26, 1975).
11. National Security Council, "NSSM 200: Implications."
12. Ibid., 194.
13. Ibid., 15.
14. Ibid., 14.
15. Ibid., 15.
16. “Demographic momentum” refers to the growth that occurs in a population with a disproportionate number of individuals in their child bearing years or younger, even with a two-child family. A population becomes stable only when the median age equals half the life expectancy.
17. National Security Council, "NSSM 200: Implications," 130.
18. Ibid., 14.
19. Ibid., 24.
20. Beck, “Religions and the Environment.”
21. R. T. Ravenholt, "Pronatalist Zealotry and Population Pressure Conflicts: How Catholics Seized Control of U.S. Family Planning Programs" (Research Triangle Park, N.C.: Center for Research on Population and Security, 1991).
22. Andrew M. Greeley, “Who Are the Catholic Conservatives?” America 165, no. 7 (1991): 158-162.
23. P. Likoudiss, “Vatican Letter Calls on Bishops to Oppose Homosexual Rights Laws,” The Wanderer July 30, 1992, 1.
24. A. Jones, “Vatican, International Agencies Hone Family, Population Positions,” Conscience 5, no. 3 (May/June 1984), 7. First published in National Catholic Reporter.
25. F. X. Murphy and J. F. Erhart, “Catholic Perspectives on Population Issues,” Population Bulletin 30, no. 6 (1975): 3-3 1.
26. Virgil C. Blum, “Public Policy Making: Why the Churches Strike Out,” America 124, no. 9 (1971): 224-228.
27. R. T. Ravenholt, "Pronatalist Zealotry."
28. Stephen D. Mumford, "The Catholic bishops ‘Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities and Its Implications for Democracy in North Carolina" (Research Triangle Park, N.C.: Center for Research on Population and Security, 1987).
29. Stephen D. Mumford, American Democracy and the Vatican: Population Growth and National Security (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanist Press, 1984); and idem, The Pope and the New Apocalypse: The Holy War against Family Planning (Research Triangle Park, N.C.: Center ‘for Research on Population and Security, 1986).
30. T. Droleskey, “Zealotry Masquerading as Principle?” The Wanderer February 18, 1993, 10.

Dr. Stephen D. Mumford is president of the Center for Research on Population and Security. For more than two decades, his principal research interest has been the relationship between world population growth and national and global security.

Vatican Influence on U.S. Immigration Policy

The Vatican affects United States population levels not only through its impact on family planning policies but also through its influence on immigration policy. As a recent study revealed:

No religious group wields more power on behalf of high immigration to the U.S. than the Catholic Church. Thanks to the 1880-1914 and 1970-present Great Waves of immigration consisting primarily of Catholics, the church towers over all other American religious groups. Its fifty-nine million members give it immense financial, institutional, and political clout, even though polls suggest the majority of its members probably don't agree with its pro-immigration stances.[1]

A November 8, 1992, National Catholic Register article confirms this assessment. Father Richard J. Ryscavage, executive director of the Migration and Refugee Services of the U.S. Catholic Conference, writes that immigration is the "growing edge of Catholicism in the United States ... We are in the middle of a huge wave of immigration ... and most of them are Catholics ... It's the key to our future and the key to why the church is going to be very healthy in the twenty-first century."

Another recent study[2] reveals official papal positions most Americans will find shocking:

• The United States does not have an inherent right to limit migration.
  
  
• Every human has a right to migrate to the United States and take up residence there--to seek better living conditions.
  
  
• The Catholic church rejects the concept of national sovereignty.
  
  
• All immigrants and their offspring have a right to retain their native languages.
  
  
• Immigration restrictions are immoral.
  
  
• The Catholic church rejects the U.S. government distinction between political and economic refugees.

The study's author, David Simcox, quotes a synopsis of the Catholic position provided by Archbishop Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, who presides over the United States' largest concentration of illegal aliens: "If the question is between the right of a nation to control its borders and the right of a person to emigrate in order to seek safe haven from hunger or violence (or both), we believe that the first right must give way to the second" (1987).

For obvious reasons, American lay Catholics oppose the Vatican's stance on unrestricted immigration into the United States. While this migration enhances the security-survival interests of the papacy, it undermines the security-survival interests of the lay Catholic and his or her family for economic, educational, medical, social, and other reasons. Thus, the same situation that characterizes American lay Catholic and Vatican relations regarding family planning and abortion characterizes their relations regarding immigration.

--Stephen D. Mumford

Notes

1. R. Beck, “Religions and the Environment: Commitment High Until U.S. Population Issues Raised,” The Social Contract 3 (1993): 76-89.
2. D. Simcox, “The Catholic Hierarchy and Immigration: Boundless Compassion, Limited Responsibility,” The Social Contract 3 (1993): 90-95.

From:
Spring 1994
Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism
3965 Rensch Road
Buffalo, NY 14228-2713

NSSM 200, the Vatican, and the World Population Explosion by Stephen D. Mumford. From: THE JOURNAL OF SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES, 1995

On March 30, 1995, Pope John Paul II made public his encyclical letter entitled Evangelicum Vitae, which assailed both abortion and contraception, in the strongest terms, charging that they are crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize and condemned even democratic decisions which did not conform to his concept of what constituted morality. This encyclical was the most sweeping attack on measures designed to save planet earth from the impact of the ongoing population explosion currently taking place in the poorest countries of the world. If followed it would effectively condemn the planet to deforestation, desertification and eventual ecological disaster. Sadly, the fact is that even prior to this latest ruling, the Vatican had already blocked one of the most conscientious efforts to slow down the slide toward world-wide disaster which has been increasingly evident to informed observers for several decades: this was the Vatican's success in blocking an American policy decision to combat this threat which dated from Richard Nixon's presidency, but was never put into effect.

In 1992, President Richard M. Nixon reasserted his long-held belief that overpopulation gravely threatens world peace and stability. In his book, Seize the Moment (Simon & Schuster, 1992), he ranks assistance in population growth control as the most important effort the United States can undertake to promote peace and stability--and, thus, protect U.S. security. He goes on to say:

We must help break the link between spiraling population growth and poverty ... Where they have been tried, family planning programs have largely worked ... Many pro-life advocates ... contend that to condone abortion even implicitly is morally unconscionable. Their view is morally shortsighted ... if we provide funds for birth control ... we will prevent the conception of millions of babies who would be doomed to the devastation of poverty in the underdeveloped world.

President Nixon did not have the grim lessons of Somalia and Rwanda when he wrote this book. However, he undoubtedly foresaw disasters of this kind more than 25 years ago. From his first days in the Oval Office, he understood the grave dangers of high rates of population growth--more than any other president. He responded appropriately when he perceived that the American people and their way of life were gravely threatened.

In 1974, the President requested the authoritative interagency study that came to be known as "NSSM 200"--National Security Study Memorandum 200. In order to effectively examine the content and fate of NSSM 200, we need to backtrack a bit to "the Rockefeller Commission." In 1969, seven months into his first term, in a rare move for a president, Nixon delivered his Special Message to the Congress.[1]

The message set forth a far-reaching commitment to limiting population growth. It set in motion a broad range of government activities, both domestic and international. It called for creation of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, of which John D. Rockefeller 3rd was named Chairman. Other government activities initiated by the message included: (1) Increased research on birth control methods of all kinds and on the sociology of population growth; (2) Expanded programs to train more people to work professionally in the population and family planning fields, both in this country and abroad; (3) Expanded research on the effects of population growth on our environment and on the world's food supply; and (4) Increased domestic family planning assistance, to provide effective family planning services for all Americans who want them but cannot afford them.

The Special Message concluded as follows:

One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of the population. Whether man's response to that challenge will be a cause for pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today. If we now begin our work in an appropriate manner, and if we continue to devote a considerable amount of attention and energy to this problem, then mankind will be able to surmount this challenge as it has surmounted so many during the long march of civilization. When future generations evaluate the record of our time, one of the most important factors in their judgment will be the way in which we responded to population growth. Let us act in such a way that those who come after us ... can do so with pride in the planet on which they live, with gratitude to those who lived on it in the past ...

In an equally rare move, Congress voted to endorse this Special Message.

Design for a Population Policy

In March, 1970, Congress created The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, which completed its work in March 1972. The tasks assigned the Commission are described in the Preface of the Commission's final report:

The Commission was asked to examine the probable extent of population growth and internal migration in the United States between now and the end of this century, to assess the impact that population change will have upon government services, our economy, and our resources and environment, and to make recommendations on how the nation can best cope with that impact.[2]

The 24 member Rockefeller Commission and its staff conducted an extensive inquiry, enlisting many of the nation's leading scientists in more than 100 research projects and hearing more than 100 witnesses in public hearings. The data collected and analyzed made it possible, for the first time, to formulate a comprehensive U.S. population policy.

After 2 years of intensive study, the Commission made more than 70 recommendations. They included: passage of a Population Education Act to help school systems establish well-planned population education programs; extension of widespread sex education, especially through the schools; passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA); extension of contraception for all, including minors, at government expense if need be; provision of abortion for all who want it, at government expense if necessary; vastly expanded research in many areas related to population growth control; and, elimination of all employment of illegal aliens.

Killing the Commission Report

1972 was a presidential election year and President Nixon was facing a difficult re-election bid, so when a delegation of the Commission presented the final report to him on May 5, 1972, six months before election, he sharply condemned its most important recommendations.[3] Why was he attempting to distance himself from the report that he had anticipated so earnestly? In the words of a Commission member, Congressman James Scheuer (D.-NY):

Our exuberance was short-lived. Then-president Richard Nixon promptly ignored our final report. The reasons were obvious--the fear of attacks from the far right and from the Roman Catholic Church because of our positions on family planning and abortion. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that this obstruction was but the first of many similar actions to come from high places.[4]

During the two years that followed, it became clear that there would be no further response to the Commission's recommendations. In May 1973, a group of pioneer population activists acknowledged this inaction and asked Ambassador Adolph Schmidt to speak with his friend, Commission Chairman John D. Rockefeller III. They met in June 1973, in New York City. Schmidt noted his own disappointment and that of his colleagues because no programs of any kind had been mounted as a result of the Commission's recommendations. What had gone wrong? Rockefeller responded: "The greatest difficulty has been the very active opposition by the Roman Catholic Church through its various agencies in the United States."[5]

The Rockefeller Commission's recommendations were not shaped to fit the political realities of the day. Rather, taken collectively, they constituted a detailed blueprint for a broad and sophisticated national population policy. None of the recommendations was ever implemented. To this day, unlike many countries, the U.S. has no population policy. It is shameful that the American people have been kept in the dark about this quite undemocratic and un-American intrusion by the Vatican. Surely, both Catholic and non-Catholic Americans would have strongly rejected such interference in the American democratic process had they been aware of it. Lay Catholic Americans desire the same number of children,[6] use contraceptives[7] and obtain abortions[8] in the same proportions as non-Catholics. They support school-based population and sex education[9] for their children, and advocate a halt to illegal immigration[10] into the U.S., in the same proportions as non-Catholic Americans. The quality of life for all Americans has been significantly diminished by this secret unconstitutional manipulation of American policy undertaken for the purposes of protecting papal interests.

Nixon's Next Bold Move

Despite the intense opposition of the Catholic hierarchy he encountered in the wake of the Rockefeller Commission, the President's assessment of the gravity of world overpopulation and his desire to deal with it remained unchanged. On April 24, 1974, in a forthright effort to contend with this crisis, Richard Nixon, in National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), directed that a comprehensive study be undertaken to determine the "Implications of World Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests."[11] Its findings promised to be momentous indeed.

I can only speculate, but the President surely must have been aware that this new study would meet with the same intense Vatican opposition as the earlier one. However, perhaps he felt that a definitive study of the national and global security implications of overpopulation, revealing that the very security of the United States was seriously threatened, would generate public demand for action to curb population growth. Hopefully, it would overcome the blocks mounted secretly by the Vatican. Why else would he have undertaken this new study, given his painful experience after the Rockefeller Commission?

NSSM 200

In NSSM 200, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, acting for the President, directed the Secretaries of Defense and Agriculture, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Deputy Secretary of State and the Administrator of the Agency for International Development (MD), to jointly undertake "a study of the impact of world population growth on U.S. security and overseas interests." This work was completed on December 10, 1974 and circulated to the designated Secretaries and Agency heads for their review and comments.[12]

Meanwhile, on August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford had succeeded to the presidency. Revisions and refinements of the study continued until July, 1975. On November 26, 1975, the 227-page report and its recommendations were endorsed by President Ford in National Security Decision Memorandum 314. Wrote the new National Security Advisor, Brent Scoweroft:

The President has reviewed the interagency response to NSSM 200 ... He believes that United States leadership is essential to combat population growth, to implement the World Population Plan of Action* and to advance United States security and overseas interests. The President endorses the policy recommendations contained in the Executive Summary of the NSSM 200 response ...[13]

*The blueprint for a global population policy adopted by the nations attending the 1974 UN world Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania.

President Ford, recognizing the gravity of the situation, asked the National Security Council (NSC) to take further action. Writes Seowcroft:

The President, therefore, assigns to the Chairman, NSC Undersecretaries Committee, the responsibility to define and develop policy in the population field and to coordinate its implementation beyond the NSSM 200 response.[13]

NSSM 200 was intended to be and became a broad and definitive interagency study of the threat of overpopulation to U.S. security. NSSM 200 details how and why world population growth gravely threatens U.S. and global security. It also provides a blueprint for the U.S. response to this burgeoning problem, reflecting the deep concern of those who produced the report. Because of the bold nature of the recommended initiatives, the authors recommended that the report remain classified for 5 years in order to provide time to educate the American public as to the necessity of these initiatives. The NSSM 200 report actually remained classified for 14 years.

Both the findings and recommendations are as relevant in 1995 as they were in 1975, but too numerous to list here in their entirety. To select a few:

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 [Executive Summary of the NSSM 200 Report, page 10].

The sense of near emergency is electric:

... World population growth is widely recognized within the Government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures [Page 194 of the NSSM 200 Report] ... 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 [Page 15].

... population factors are indeed critical in, and often determinants of, violent conflict in developing areas. Segmental (religious, social, racial) differences, migration, rapid population growth, differential levels of knowledge and skills, rural/urban differences, population pressure and the spatial location of population in relation to resources--in this rough order of importance--all appear to be important contributions to conflict and violence ... Clearly, conflicts which are regarded in primarily political terms often have demographic roots. Recognition of these relationships appears crucial to any understanding or prevention of such hostilities [Page 66].

Where population size is greater than available resources, or is expanding more rapidly than the available resources, there is a tendency toward internal disorders and violence and, sometimes, disruptive international policies or violence [Page 69].

In developing countries, the burden of population factors, added to others, will weaken unstable governments, often only marginally effective in good times, and open the way to extremist regimes [Page 84].

The World Population Plan of Action and the resolutions adopted by consensus of 137 nations at the August 1974 U.N. World Population Conference, though not ideal, provide an excellent framework for developing a worldwide system of population/family planning programs [Executive Summary, page 19].

At the 1974 UN World Population Conference, only the Vatican opposed the Plan:

... the Conference adopted by acclamation (only the Holy See stating a general reservation) a complete World Population Plan of Action [Page 87].

Suggested Goals and Plans

Our objective should be to assure that developing countries make family planning information, education and means available to all their peoples by 1980 [Page 130] ... intense efforts are required to assure full availability by 1980 of birth control information and means to all fertile individuals, especially in rural areas [Executive Summary, page 9].

While specific goals in this area are difficult to state, our aim should be for the world to achieve a replacement level of fertility, (a two-child family on the average), by about the year 2000 ... Attainment of this goal will require greatly intensified population programs ... U.S. leadership is essential [Executive Summary, page 14].

It is now all too clear how crucial U.S. leadership was ... and is. The U.S. withdrew from this role shortly after the election of President Carter, just one year after the initiation of public policy based on the NSSM 200 report. Government initiatives for curtailment of population growth have been going downhill ever since.

After suitable preparation in the U.S., announce a U.S. goal to maintain our present national average fertility no higher than replacement level and attain stability by 2000 [Executive Summary, page 19]. Only nominal attention is [currently] given to population education or sex education in schools ... [Page 158].

Recommendation: That US agencies stress the importance of education of the next generation of parents, starting in elementary schools, toward a two-child family ideal. That AID stimulate specific efforts to develop means of educating children of elementary school age to the ideal of the two-child family ... [Page 159].

Despite the Helms Amendment passed by Congress, which clearly ruled out abortion assistance in U.S. foreign aid programs, there was a clear consensus that continued widespread use of abortion was vital to meeting/attaining the population stabilization objective:

While the agencies participating in this study have no specific recommendations to propose on abortion, the following issues are believed important and should be considered in the context of a global population strategy ... Certain facts about abortion need to be appreciated:

-No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion [Page 182].

-Indeed, abortion, legal and illegal, now has become the most widespread fertility control method in use in the world today [Page 183].

-It would be unwise to restrict abortion research for the following reasons: 1) The persistent and ubiquitous nature of abortion. 2) Widespread lack of safe abortion techniques ... [Page 185].

Two reports later published by this author offer considerable evidence to support the position that abortion is vital to U.S. and global security.[14][15]

An important goal in NSSM 200 dealt with leadership:

These [family planning] programs will have only modest success until there is much stronger and wider acceptance of their real importance by leadership groups. Such acceptance and support will be essential to assure that the population information, education and service programs have vital moral backing, administrative capacity, technical skills and government financing [Page 195].

The report recommended spending whatever could reasonably be absorbed to achieve these goals:

We recommend increases in the AID budget requests [for population and family planning programs] to the Congress on the order of $35-$50 million annually through FY 1980 (above the $137.5 million requested for FY 1975) ... However, the level of funds needed in the future could change significantly, depending on such factors as major breakthroughs in fertility control technologies and LDC receptivity to population assistance [Executive Summary, page 24].

Even after a country reduces fertility to the replacement level, the population continues to grow for another 70 years before stability is achieved. The study frankly dismissed the arguments that had been raised by the Vatican to counter efforts to reduce population growth. The position of the Roman Catholic Church on population growth centers on the need for economic development in Third World countries as a way to bring growth rates down--following the concept that as families ascend the economic ladder, they will choose to have fewer children. NSSM 200 takes an entirely different tack:

We cannot wait for overall modernization and development to produce lower fertility rates naturally since this will undoubtedly take many decades in most developing countries ... [Executive Summary, page 7]. Clearly development per se is a powerful determinant of fertility. However, since it is unlikely that most LDCs will develop sufficiently during the next 25-30 years, it is crucial to identify those sectors that most directly and powerfully affect fertility [Page 137].

There is also even less cause for optimism on the rapidity of socio-economic progress that would generate rapid fertility reduction in the poor LDCs, than on the feasibility of extending family planning services to those in their populations who may wish to take advantage of them ... But we can be certain of the desirable direction of change and can state as a plausible objective the target of achieving replacement fertility rates by the year 2000 [Page 99].

These statements manifestly rule out any accommodation to the Vatican on the issue of population growth control.

NSSM 200 Implementation Quickly Stymied

The Vatican moved swiftly to block implementation of NSSM 200 recommendations already approved by President Ford, for reasons to be discussed later. Absent were the activities one would expect if a concerted effort were underway to implement NSSM 200. By the time the report was circulated among the relevant Department Secretaries and Agency Heads on December 10, 1974, the Church had recognized that NSSM 200 could spell the doom of a powerful Papacy.

Within months, the Vatican was able to stop progress toward any implementation of NSSM 200. During 1976, Catholic activists worked diligently to undermine all such population growth control initiatives. Dr. R.T. Ravenholt, who directed the global population program of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Department of State from 1966 to 1979, tells the story. On March 4, 1991, he addressed the Washington State Chapter of Zero Population Growth (ZPG) on "Pronatalist Zealotry and Population Pressure Conflicts: How Catholics Seized Control of U.S. Family Planning Program ."[16] He described some of these activities:

Following a meeting of Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter and his campaign staff with 15 Catholic leaders at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on August 32, 1976, on which occasion they pressed Carter to de-emphasize federal support for family planning in exchange for a modicum of Catholic support for his presidential race ... [following Carter's election] Joseph Califano became Secretary of HEW ... When Father Hesburgh [President of Notre Dame University] declined the role of AID Administrator, the appointment was given to John J. Gilligan, a Notre Dame graduate and a former governor of Ohio ... John H. Sullivan moved from [Wisconsin] Congressman Clement Zablocki's office into AID ... Congressman Zablocki and Jack Sullivan had persistently worked to curb AID's high powered family planning program. In 1973, Jack Sullivan and allied zealots helped Senator Jesse Helms develop the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act.[16]

As in the case of the Rockefeller Commission Report, none of the recommendations of NSSM 200 was ever implemented. The study had identified a grave threat to U.S. and global security. It was a definitive analysis by the most powerful departments in our government--departments representing virtually all of our intelligence gathering capability. President Ford's approval of the policy recommendations of NSSM 200 in his Decision Memorandum 314 represented the high point of American political will to deal with the population problem. Then it plummeted.

Dire Predictions Coming True

The Rockefeller Commission Report and NSSM 200 are arguably the two most important documents on overpopulation ever written. Our country and the world would be very different today if the recommendations contained in these two documents had been implemented. For example, had illegal immigration been controlled and legal immigration adjusted to meet the needs of Americans in 1971, as called for in the Rockefeller Commission Report, the U.S. population would have peaked at 243 million in 2035. Instead, in 1992 our population stood at 255 million and will not peak until it reaches 383 million in 2050--assuming there was no more immigration after 1992.[17] The lives of all Americans will be significantly affected as we attempt to accommodate these additional 128 million people. And this number can explode if we do not deal with current tides of immigration.

In 1974, NSSM 200 predicted that growing scarcities of critical resources would lead to ever increasing dislocations and conflicts all over the globe which would diminish security for everyone, everywhere. The January 31, 1993 issue of The New York Times contains an op-ed piece by Thomas Homer-Dixon, entitled "Destruction and Death," which documents that the predictions of NSSM 200 are already coming true around the globe. This article examines case-studies of violent conflicts which are attributed to overpopulation by researchers from four continents: the migration of millions from Bangladesh to India, which led to brutal ethnic conflicts; the persistent conflict in the Philippines driven by desperate poverty resulting from overpopulation; severe shortages of ground water in the Jordan River basin which are leading to intensified conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; destruction of ecologically sensitive territories in South Africa, forcing a migration to violent urban squatter settlements; expanding populations in Senegal and Mauritania which have spurred violent conflict in the Senegal River Basin; similar factors which have stimulated the growth of the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas in Peru; the irreversible clear-cutting of forests and loss of soil which has led to violent social strife in Haiti, and which in turn has caused an exodus of boat people. There are many other examples.

Maurice King of the University of Leeds School of Medicine has studied extensively the collapse of Rwanda:

Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa, and has the highest fertility in the world (8.5 children per mother). The tragedy in Rwanda seems likely to be only the beginning, with Burundi likely to follow any day, and with perhaps southern Malawi, parts of Kenya and much of west Africa not far behind. Which other communities are trapped in that they are likely to exceed their carrying capacity and their connectedness? Aid agency executives and academics have at various times mentioned unofficially sizeable communities in: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Eastern Indonesia, The Philippines, Viet Nam, Haiti, The Maldives, Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi, The Gambia, Zanzibar, 'much of sub-Saharan Africa', and Cuba. These communities are in an earlier stage than Rwanda, which seems unlikely to be a unique case.[18]

NSSM 200 predicted that the U.S. would find itself in wars like the recent Iraq-U.S. war, as regional powers invade their neighbors to secure resources needed to provide for their ever expanding populations--just as Iraq invaded Kuwait. It also predicted that the expense of U.S. involvement in these wars would far exceed the costs of worldwide population growth control.

The Threat to Papal Authority Worldwide

Why is the Catholic Church obliged to halt legalized abortion and contraception despite the strong wishes of Americans? When our government legalized contraception and abortion, it pitted U.S. civil authority the against authority of the pope in Rome. The Vatican demands supremacy over civil governments in matters of faith and morals, but our government has rejected this concept. As a result, Papal authority is undermined.

There are many Catholic countries in Latin America which have abortion rates 2 to 4 times as high as the U.S. rate. But the bishops ignore abortions there. Why? Because they are illegal abortions, not legal ones. They do not threaten Papal authority! Only legal abortions do, because their legalization establishes their morality. Thus, the bishops take no significant actions to halt abortions in Latin America.

In Papal Power: A Study of Vatican Control Over Lay Catholic Elites[19], published by The University of California Press in 1980, Jean-Guy Vaillancourt, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Montreal, closely examines the sources of papal power. It is derived in significant part from papal authority. If the Pope's authority is diminished, papal power is diminished. However, some authority is derived from papal power and if papal power is diminished, then authority is undermined. The relationship is circular. Less authority means less power which means even less authority. With diminishing power, survival of the institution of the Roman Catholic Church in its present hierarchical form is gravely threatened. Thus, the very survival of the Vatican is threatened by programs to control population growth.[20]

In April, 1992, in a rare public admission of this threat, Cardinal John O'Connor of New York, delivering a major address to the Franciscan University of Steubenville, acknowledged,

The fact is that attacks on the Catholic Church's stance on abortion--unless they are rebutted--effectively erode Church authority on all matters, indeed on the authority of God himself.[21]

This threat was recognized decades ago by the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control which met from 1964 until 1966. The Commission was created by Pope John XXIII but completed its work under Pope Paul IV. According to Commission member Thomas Burch, Pope Paul himself assigned the Commission the task of finding a way to modify the Church's position on birth control without destroying papal authority,[22] which is essential for the continued survival of the Vatican and the Catholic Church as we know it today. The Commission, of course, failed to find a way and the result was the encyclical Humanae Vitae which banned the use of contraception.

The Vatican clearly sees that if the solutions to the population problem are applied, the dominance of the papacy will be vitiated. Thus, it is in no position to compromise with our national policy. NSSM 200 forthrightly opposes Rome on population strategy, family planning and abortion. But the Vatican simply cannot adjust to U.S. security interests and survive in its present form.

The Rigidity of the Catholic Dogma on Family Planning

A thorough understanding of the Catholic principle of papal infallibility and how it evolved is needed to understand the reasoning that underlies the position now taken by the Holy See on contraception and abortion. Catholic theologian and historian, August Bernhard Hasler, in his book How the Pope Became Infallible (1979), explains this reasoning.[23] Hasler had served in the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity for five years during which he was given access to the Vatican Archives. There he discovered numerous documents which had not been studied before, revealing the history of Vatican Council I and adoption of the infallibility dogma in 1870.

Hasler learned that in 1870, the Papacy, until then a powerful institution, feared that it would soon face extinction.[24] Pope Pius IX and his advisors were convinced that a declaration of papal infallibility was vital to the continuation of papal authority. According to Catholic Sociologist Jean-Guy Vaillancourt:

During the Middle Ages and under feudalism, when the Catholic Church was a dominant institution in society, papal power grew in importance, relying often on force to attain its ends, which were political as much as they were religious. The Crusades and, later on, the Inquisition, stand as the two most notorious of these violent papal ventures. But with the decline of the Portuguese and Spanish empires, with the advent of the Reformation and of the intellectual, democratic, and industrial revolutions, the Catholic hierarchy lost much of its influence and power. Unable to continue using physical coercion, the Papacy was led to strengthen its organizational structure and perfect a wide range of normative means of control. The declaration of papal infallibility by the first Vatican Council ... was an important milestone in that direction. The stress on the absolute authority of the pope in questions of faith and morals helped turn the Church into a unified and powerful bureaucratic organization, and paved the way for the establishment of the Papacy-laity relationship as we know it today.[25]

Faced with the loss of most of its traditional sources of power, the Holy See recognized the enormous potential power offered by the dogma of Papal infallibility, since with it would come almost endless possibilities for normative means of control. Indeed, until the mid-1960s, when the Church began to self-destruct following the proclamation by Pope Paul VI of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae banning contraception as intrinsically evil, this new arrangement worked just as Pius IX had hoped, and the Papacy continued to be a politically powerful institution.

However, in 1870, as Hasler discovered, the intellectual leadership of the Church was strongly opposed to the concept of papal infallibility on the grounds that some time in the future, as the world changed, the Church would find itself down some blind alley from which there would be no escape, with disintegration of the papacy inevitably following. In the 1870s, intellectual leaders left the Church in droves,[26] with no idea what the nature of the future "blind alley" would turn out to be.

We now know that the central issues of family planning are the blind alley. Recognizing this more than a century later, the renowned Swiss Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, wrote in his 31-page introduction to Hasler's book, "The only way to solve the problem of contraception is to solve the problem of infallibility."[27] Few dilemmas, if any, have received so much thought from so many intellectuals in the Church over the past few decades. No solution acceptable to the Holy See has been found.

Once the nature of the principle of infallibility and its origins are understood, it is evident that no solution to the birth control dilemma, short of the demise of the papacy as we know it, is likely. This became widely understood by Vatican decision-makers in the 1960s, as a result of Pope John XXIII's creation of the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control, noted earlier. The two-tiered commission consisted of a group of 15 cardinals and bishops and a group of 64 lay experts representing a variety of disciplines.[28] Finding a way to change the Church's position on birth control without destroying papal authority was the only assignment given the Commission. The Commission failed. None was found.[29]

The failure came after the Commission studied the dilemma for two years. The laymen voted 60 to 4 and the clerics 9 to 6 to change the Church's teaching on birth control,[30] even though it would mean a loss of papal authority, because it was the right thing to do.[31] However, the minority also submitted a report to the pope. Among the authors of the minority report was Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II. Hasler quotes from the minority report:

If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti Connubii was promulgated), in 1951 (Pius XII's address to the midwives), and in 1958 (the address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved.[32]

Thus, change in the Church's position at this point would mean destruction of the principle of papal infallibility. The logic of the minority report was flawless and the result was publication in 1968 of Humanae Vitae, banning the use of contraception as noted. But the problem was even deeper. As one examines the principle of infallibility and it origins, it becomes evident that as soon as this principle was adopted in 1870, it immediately became the fundamental principle of Catholic teaching and authority. If this principle is somehow destroyed, the foundation upon which all other Catholic principles rest is also destroyed. Pope John Paul II has said this in his own words. In a May 15, 1980 letter to the German Bishops' Conference, John Paul II said:

I am convinced that the doctrine of infallibility is in a certain sense the key to the certainty with which the faith is confessed and proclaimed, as well as to the life and conduct of the faithful. For once this essential foundation is shaken or destroyed, the most basic truths of our faith likewise begin to break down.[33]

In these two quotes, Pope John Paul II acknowledges the obvious--and inevitable. Birth control had indeed become the "blind alley" the Church intellectuals so feared in 1870. The Church cannot change its position on birth control without destroying itself. The institution has defined morality in such a way as to attempt prevention of self-destruction--by asserting that birth control is morally wrong.

There is much wishful thinking that the next pope, or the pope after him, will support family planning. But this wishfulness does not take this dilemma into account and can be very destructive. Indeed, if I were a decision-maker in the Holy See, I would be spreading such wishful disinformation--in order to discourage any current efforts to confront the Vatican, forcefully and forthrightly, on the issues of abortion and contraception, a tenacious confrontation by people who are concerned, morally and practically about global stewardship--stewards who recognize that contraception and abortion are vital to the survival of our species--and many others.

Since his installation 17 years ago, Pope John Paul II has now appointed 84 percent of all voting cardinals. They are like-minded. There is precious little chance that the next pope, or the one following, will change the Church's position on family planning.

The Vatican and U.S. Immigration Policy

Many polls and studies show that U.S. Catholic lay couples exhibit the same family planning behavior as non-Catholics and hold the same beliefs about U.S. and world population growth. The Vatican is in conflict with many lay American Catholics on family planning, abortion and immigration. For example, a recent study by Catholic priest Andrew Greeley of the National Opinion Research Center found that only 7 percent of U.S. Catholics support the Vatican position on abortion.[34] The security-survival interests of the Catholic laymen are pitted against the security-survival interests of the Papacy. For many reasons--economic, medical, and social--family planning enhances the security of the layman and his/her family and increase their odds of survival and well being. But, family planning, abortion, etc., because they undermine papal authority, also undermine the security of the Papacy and threaten its very survival.

Likewise, Vatican demands for open borders of the U.S. are rejected by a large majority of U.S. Catholics.[35] American Catholic lay persons are statistically as opposed to unrestricted immigration into the United States as non-Catholic Americans. Yet, a recent study of the positions of religious denominations in the U.S. toward immigration highlighted the role played by the Catholic Church in respect of large-scale immigration:

No religious group wields more power on behalf of high immigration to the U.S. than the Catholic Church. Thanks to the 1880-1914 and 1970-present Great Waves of immigration consisting primarily of Catholics, the Church towers over all other American religious groups. Its 59 million members give it immense financial, institutional and political clout, even though polls suggest the majority of its members probably don't agree with its pro-immigration stances.[36]

A November 8, 1992, National Catholic Register article reveals why the Vatican is taking these positions. In it, Father Richard J. Ryscavage, executive director of the Migration and Refugee Services of the U.S. Catholic Conference noted that immigration is the

... growing edge of Catholicism in the United States ... We are in the middle of a huge wave of immigration ... and most of them are Catholics ... It's the key to our future and the key to why the Church is going to be very healthy in the 21st century.

Another recent study[37] examines some of the Catholic leadership stances which many Americans will find shocking: Catholic leaders assert that the US. does not have an inherent right to limit migration; that every human has a right to migrate to the U.S. and take up residence there--to seek better living conditions; that the Catholic Church rejects the concept of national sovereignty; that all immigrants and their offspring have a right to keep their native language primarily; that most immigration restrictions are immoral; that the U.S. government distinction between political and economic refugees is unacceptable. These are all official papal positions. The author of this study is David Simeox. He is a Roman Catholic, a former foreign service officer, and the first executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), 1985-1992. He offers the following comment:

Archbishop Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, who presides over the United States' largest concentration of illegal aliens, put it in these terms: 'If the question is between the right of a nation to control its borders and the right of a person to emigrate in order to seek safe haven from hunger or violence (or both), we believe that the first right must give way to the second'(1987).

The reasons for American lay Catholic opposition to the Vatican's stance on unrestricted immigration into the U.S. are obvious. While the security-survival of the Papacy is greatly enhanced by this migration, as described by Ryscavage, the security-survival of Catholic layman and their families is undermined economically, educationally, medically, socially and in other ways bearing on the quality of life. Thus, as with family planning and abortion, the security-survival interests of the Catholic layman is pitted against the security-survival interests of the Papacy.

The Vatican Claims Protection from "Harmful Laws"

The Vatican claims the right to protect itself against "harmful laws"--even when democratically legislated! The central difficulty here, of course, is that what the Vatican considers "harmful" to itself and its authority often is exactly what lay Catholic men and women thoughtfully consider beneficial to themselves and their families. In a letter to American bishops from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith--the most powerful Vatican office--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger reminded the bishops that "The Church has the responsibility to protect herself from the application of harmful laws." This letter was keep secret from 55 million American Catholics until a brief notice written by Peter Steinfels for The New York Times appeared July 10, 1992. The actual text remained hidden from the public until it was leaked to the press on July 15, 1992.[38] Obviously, if an institution has the "responsibility," it also claims the "right." The Vatican exercised its "right" to protect itself from the application of harmful laws, in the autocratic way it defines as "harmful," when it blocked U.S. adoption of the Rockefeller Commission recommendations and implementation of the NSSM 200 policies approved by President Ford. "To protect herself," the Church moved quickly and efficiently to kill the two most important initiatives to control population growth in American history.

The Bishops' "Pastoral Plan"

Two decades ago the Vatican determined that if it were to survive, it must become much more active in U.S. politics at the national level. Up until this time the Vatican's involvement was more concentrated at the local level than national. Vatican influence over politics in large Catholic cities is well known and undisputed. Then the bishops decided that only by being highly organized and active politically on all levels of government could the Vatican overcome the mounting surge of political will seeking world population growth control.

On November 20, 1975, the American Catholic bishops issued their Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities.[39] This was just 6 days before President Ford made NSSM 200 public policy. The success of their Pastoral Plan is confirmed in an excellent February 24, 1992 article in Time which I will touch on later.

This Plan is a frank and superbly detailed blueprint of the bishops' strategy for influencing and working through the American democratic process at the national, state and local levels. It maps out a national political machine controlled by the bishops. A prime purpose of the Plan is to kill the political will of the United States to seriously tackle the global overpopulation problem. In the Plan, abortion was the issue chosen to galvanize the movement as proposed by Jesuit priest Virgil Blum in his 1971 America magazine article.[40] The Plan details a 3-pronged attack, one devoted to each of the three branches of our federal government: legislative, judicial and administrative.

As the Time article shows, with the election of anti-abortion Ronald Reagan and anti-abortion George Bush in 1980, the views of the Vatican gained substantial influence within the administrative branch of the U.S. government in the area of population and family planning policy. In their 12 years, these two presidents appointed 5 Supreme Court Justices and 70 percent of all sitting judges in the federal court system. All were anti-abortion, another goal of the Pastoral Plan. The legislative branch has been more difficult for those opposed to family planning, although they did achieve sufficient influence in Congress to the extent that pro-choice Congressmen could not override a presidential veto of family planning bills. As long as the anti-family planning interests controlled the White House, however, this was sufficient for their purposes. As noted earlier, even in the Carter years, the bishops were highly successful in undermining federal government population growth control efforts.

During the period 1976-1980, all of the organizations that became known as the "New Right Movement" were created, with one exception: The Christian Coalition was created later to replace the Moral Majority. In their Plan, the bishops said they favored such a movement. Catholics were key players in the creation of all of these organizations and influential in their leadership. This assessment of the creation of this movement and the influence in it of the bishops is well documented.[41][42] Many Protestant churches, especially some of the Fundamentalist denominations, feel that their institutions are threatened by the solutions to the population problem. Their members are serving in the ranks of the so-called New Right Movement and their influence has been pivotal to the policies of that Movement.

Time Magazine says the Pope Calls the Tune

The February 24, 1992 issue of Time magazine published a story on the alliance between Reagan and the Pope to undermine Communism in Poland, by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein, which included significant revelations about matters other than the overthrow of Communism. According to Bernstein:

The Catholic Team: The key Administration players were all devout Roman Catholics--CIA chief William Casey, [Richard] Allen [Reagan's first National Security Advisor], [William] Clark [Reagan's second National Security Advisor], [Alexander] Haig [Secretary of State], [Vernon] Walters [Ambassador at Large] and William Wilson, Reagan's first ambassador to the Vatican. They 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.

In a section of his article headed "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control," Bernstein includes three more revealing paragraphs:

In response to concerns of the Vatican, the Reagan Administration agreed to alter its foreign aid program to comply with the church's teachings on birth control. According to William Wilson, the President's first ambassador to the Vatican, the State Department reluctantly agreed to an outright ban on the use of any U.S. aid funds by either countries or international health organizations for the promotion of ... abortions. As a result of this position, announced at the World Conference on Population in Mexico City in 1984, the U.S. withdrew funding from, among others, two of the world's largest family planning organizations: the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.

'American policy was changed as a result of the Vatican's not agreeing with our policy,' Wilson writes, 'American aid programs around the world did not meet the criteria the Vatican had for family planning. AID [the Agency for International Development] sent various people from [the Department of] State to Rome, and I'd accompany them to meet the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, and in long discussions they finally got the message. But it was a struggle. They finally selected different programs and abandoned others as a result of this intervention.'

'I might have touched on that in some of my discussions with [CIA director William] Casey,' acknowledges Pio Cardinal Laghi, the former apostolic delegate to Washington. 'Certainly Casey already knew about our positions about that.'

Thus Bernstein indicates what the cadre of devout Catholics in the Reagan Administration did to protect the Papacy from NSSM 200. He quotes our ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson, who reveals that during the Reagan Administration, Papal policy on birth control and abortion, in effect, simply replaced the policy set forth by NSSM 200. (The bishops enjoyed considerable success with their Pastoral Plan at the state level as well.)[43]

Presidents Reagan and Bush were arguably the most pro-Catholic Presidents in American history. The bishops gained influence over the Republican party just as they set out to do, according to their Pastoral Plan. In November 1992, outgoing Republican National Committee Chairman Richard Bond told the members of that committee on January 29, 1993, that it was time for the Republican Party to abandon the papal position on abortion. Bond said that the party should not be governed by "zealotry masquerading as principle."[44]

Silence Cloaks NSSM 200

Although President Ford endorsed the recommendations of NSSM 200 on November 26, 1975, the report was never printed. There are only a handful of photocopies available. Those who wrote the report recommended that it be classified for 5 years. Werner Fornos, President of the Population Institute, with the aid of several members of Congress, succeeded in getting the NSSM 200 report declassified for a brief period in 1976. Despite his best efforts, and the explosiveness of the report, he was unable to achieve any press coverage whatsoever. Instead, he soon found the report reclassified as a result of the objections of "members of the national security establishment" to the early declassification.[45]

In the end, the document remained classified for 14 years, rather than the recommended 5 years. The only institution that benefits from this continued silence is the Roman Catholic Church. Says James Scheuer,

The Roman Catholic Church and its allies cannot be allowed to dictate the rules of the game when it comes to the preservation of life on this planet, at some level of decency.[4]

Congressman Scheuer put it succinctly:

The issue of population growth is too crucial to the future welfare of our nation and of the world to be left to ... the Roman Catholic hierarchy and its allies in the fundamentalist movement.[4]

In Summary

NSSM 200's most important accomplishment was that it defined U.S. security interests regarding world population growth control, and identified the opponents of population growth control as enemies of the United States. U.S. security interests are personal and profound for us all: the peace, well-being and prospects of the American people. Papal security-survival along with the influence of fundamentalist Protestant opposition to birth control is now pitted against the U.S. and world security-survival. Intervention is now crucial if the overpopulation trajectory projected by NSSM 200 is to be broken. The alternative is chaos and ecologic disaster.

Political will has always been the most crucial element in seeking solutions to the population crisis. No matter how concerned we are as individuals or organizations, nothing substantial and significant is likely to happen to reach our goals in this endeavor without mobilizing our political will as a nation. Therefore we must direct our energies now to identifying obstructions to rebuilding our political will to deal with overpopulation and converting this will to action.

We have everything to lose--and so very much to save.

References

1. Nixon R. "Special Message to the Congress on Problems of Population Growth," July 18, 1969. Public Papers of the Presidents, No. 271, p. 521, Office of the Federal Register, National Archives, Washington, DC, 1971.
2. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. "Population and the American Future." Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972. 176 pp.
3. Nixon R. "Statement About the Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future," May 5, 1972. Public Papers of the Presidents, No. 142, p. 576, Office of the Federal Register, National Archives, Washington, DC, 1974.
4. Scheuer J. "A disappointing outcome: United States and World Population Trends since the Rockefeller Commission." The Social Contract 1992;Summer:203-206.
5. Schmidt AW. Personal Communication. August 28, 1992.
6. Mosher WD, Williams LB, Johnson DP. "Religion and fertility in the United States: new patterns." Demography 1992;29(2):199- 214.
7. "U.S. religious groups vary in patterns of method use, but not in overall contraceptive prevalence." Fam Plann Perspect 1991;23(6):288-89.
8. Rossi AS, Sitaraman B. "Abortion in context: historical trends and future changes." Fam Plann Perspect 1988;20(6): 273-81.
9. Greeley AM. "Who are the Catholic conservatives?" America 1991;165(7):158-62.
10. Illegal Immigration. "Special Report of the Environmental Fund." November 1978. The Roper Poll reported on showed that 91% of the public want all illegal immigration halted. To achieve this proportion would require that the vast majority of both Catholics and non-Catholics concur.
11. National Security Council. "National Security Study Memorandum 200." Washington, D.C., April 24, 1974. 2 pp.
12. National Security Council. NSSM 200: Implications of worldwide population growth for U.S. security and overseas interests. Washington, D.C., December 10, 1974. 227 pp.
13. National Security Council. "National Security Decision Memorandum 314." Washington, D.C., November 26, 1975. 4 pp.
14. Mumford SD. "Abortion: a national security issue." American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 1982;142:951-953.
15. Mumford SD, Kessel E. "Is wide availability of abortion essential to national population growth control programs? Experiences of 116 countries." American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 1984;149:639-645.
16. Ravenholt RT. "Pronatalist Zealotry and Population Pressure Conflicts: How Catholics Seized Control of U.S. Family Planning Programs." Center for Research on Population and Security, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. May 1991, 27 pp.
17. Beck R. "Religions and the Environment: Commitment High Until U.S. Population Issues Raised." The Social Contract 1993;3:76- 89.
18. King MH. "Shifting the two-child paradigm." School of Medicine, University of Leeds course handout. 28 February 1995.
19. Vaillancourt JG. Papal Power: A Study of Vatican Control Over Lay Catholic Elites. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
20. Mumford SD. "`Right to Life'" Derivation. The Churchman's Human Quest 1989;CCIII(2):14-15.
21. King HV. "Cardinal O'Connor Declares That Church Teaching On Abortion Underpins All Else." The Wanderer April 23, 1992. p. 1.
22. Jones A. Vatican, "International Agencies Hone Family, Population Positions." National Catholic Reporter (reprinted in Conscience, May/June 1984. p. 7.
23. Hasler, AB. How the Pope Became Infallible. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981. Originally published in German under the title "WIE DER PAPST UNFEHLBAR WURDE: Macht und Ohnmacht eines Dogmas." Verlag, Munchen: R. Piper & Company, 1979.
24. Ibid., p. 51-52.
25. Vaillancourt, op.cit., p. 2.
26. Hasler, op.cit., p. 227, 240, 250.
27. Ibid., p. 25.
28. Murphy FX, Erhart JF. "Catholic perspectives on population Issues." Pop Bulletin 1975;30(6):3-31.
29. Jones A. Vatican, "International Agencies Hone Family, Population Positions." National Catholic Reporter (reprinted in Conscience May/June 1984, p. 7.)
30. Murphy, Erhart. op.cit.
31. Jones, op.cit.
32. Hasler, op.cit., p.270.
33. Ibid., p. 313.
34. Greeley AM. "Who are the Catholic conservatives?" America 1991;165(7):158-62.
35. Beck. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Simcox D. "The Catholic Hierarchy and Immigration: Boundless Compassion, Limited Responsibility." The Social Contract 1993;3:90-95.
38. Likoudis P. Vatican letter calls on bishops to oppose homosexual rights laws. The Wanderer 1992 July 30;1.
39. United States Catholic Conference. "Pastoral plan for pro-life activities." Washington, D.C., 1975. 13 pp. (Copies are available from the Center for Research on Population and Security, P.O. Box 13067, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709)
40. Blum VC. "Public policy making: Why the churches strike out." America 1971;124(9):224-8.
41. Mumford SD. American Democracy & The Vatican: Population Growth and National Security. Amherst, New York: Humanist Press, 1984. 268 pp.
42. Mumford SD. The Pope and the New Apocalypse: The Holy War Against Family Planning. Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: Center for Research on Population and Security, 1986. 82 pp.
43. Mumford SD. "The Catholic bishops' pastoral plan for pro-life activities and its implications for Democracy in North Carolina." Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: Center for Research on Population and Security, 1987.
44. Droleskey T. "Zealotry masquerading as principle?" The Wanderer 1993 February 18;10.
45. Fornos W. Personal Communication. July 10, 1992.

From:
THE JOURNAL OF SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES
1995

Excerpts* from The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a US Population Policy by Stephen Mumford reviews the history of US efforts to define, develop and implement a comprehensive population policy, as well as the work of Roman Catholics within the government to undermine the progress of important proposals. From selected passages of his book, Mumford gives examples of Vatican activists in and out of the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations, including Reagan’s “Catholic team,” devout Roman Catholics CIA chief William Casey, [Richard] Allen [Reagan’s first National Security Advisor], [William] Clark [Reagan’s second National Security Advisor], [Alexander] Haig [Secretary of State], [Vernon] Walters [Ambassador at Large] and William Wilson, Reagan’s first ambassador to the Vatican. This report also quotes Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, “The fact is that attacks on the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion--unless they are rebutted - effectively erode Church authority on all matters, indeed on the authority of God himself."

Mumford clearly makes the case that: "Had the recommendations of NSSM 200 been implemented in 1975, the world would be very different today. The prospects would have improved for every nation and people to be significantly more secure. There would be less civil and regional warfare, less starvation and hunger, a cleaner environment and less disease, greater educational opportunities, expanded civil rights, especially for women, and a political climate more conducive to the expansion of democracy." FOCUS/Vol. 8, No. 11998

Excerpts* from: The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a US Population Policy

Stephen Mumford

From: Introduction

The 1960s saw a surge in American public awareness of the world population problem. The invention of the contraceptive pill in 1960 stimulated broad public debate on birth control and the need for it. When Pope John XXIII created the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control in 1963, he gave the world hope that the Church was about to change its position on birth control. After all, why would the Vatican study the issue if the Church was not in a position to change its teaching on birth control? In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published his book, The Population Bomb, the most successful book of its kind, ever.[1] That same year, the journal Science published one of its most controversial articles ever, an essay by Garrett Hardin titled, “The Tragedy of the Commons,”[2] which sparked much discussion of the overpopulation threat.

Among mainstream protestant denominations, the Presbyterians were one of the first to call for a forthright response to the problem. In 1965, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) urged

the government of the United States to be ready to assist countries who request help in the development of programs of voluntary planned parenthood as a practical and humane means of controlling fertility and population growth.

In 1971, it recognized that reliance on private, voluntary decisions

will not be sufficient to provide the necessary limitation of population growth unless there is a radical and rapid change in the attitudes and desires. The Church must commit itself to effecting this change. The assumption that couples have the freedom to have as many children as they can support should be challenged. We can no longer justify bringing into existence as many children as we desire. Our corporate responsibility to each other prohibits this. Given the population crisis we must recognize and teach, beginning with ourselves, that man has an obligation to limit the size of his family.

And in 1972, the Presbyterians called on governments “to take such actions as will stabilize population size ... We who are motivated by the urgency of over-population rather than the prospect of decimation would preserve the species by responding in faith: Do not multiply--the earth is filled!”[3]

This kind of increasing out cry for action made it safe--almost compelling--for American political leadership to identify with the concept of population growth control and to call for new programs to deal with the problem.

It was in this climate of rising concern that President Nixon sent to Congress his “Special Message on Problems of Population Growth.” Special messages to the Congress are exceedingly rare and this was the first such message on population. This action punctuated the beginning of the peak of American political will to deal with the mounting population crisis. The message, for the first time, committed the United States to confronting the population problem. Also rare, this special message was approved by the Congress. Its passage was bipartisan, indicating broad political support for American political action to combat this problem. The message was a water shed development, yet few recall it.

To this day, the U.S. has no population policy, one of the few major countries with this distinction.

The most important element of the Special Message was its creation of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. During the signing of the bill establishing the Commission, President Nixon commented on the broad political and public support: “I believe this is an historic occasion. It has been made historic not simply by the act of the President in signing this measure, but by the fact that it has had bipartisan support and also such broad support in the Nation.”

The 24 member Commission was chaired by John D. Rockefeller 3rd. It ordered more than 100 research projects which collected and analyzed data that would make possible the formulation of a comprehensive U.S. population policy. After 2 years of intense effort, the Commission completed a 186-page report titled, Population and the American Future which offered more than 70 recommendations. The recommendations were a bold but sane response to the challenges we faced in 1973. For example, they called for: passage of a Population Education Act to help school systems establish well-planned population education programs; sex education to be widely available for all, including minors, at government expense if necessary; vastly expanded research in many areas related to population-growth control; and the elimination of all employment of illegal aliens.

The recommendations represented the conclusions of some of the nation’s most capable people. The scientists who completed the Commission’s 100 research projects were among the best in their fields. These recommendations are included in this book because it is important for the reader to know what the U.S. response to the population problem could have been and should have been. On May 5, 1972, at a ceremony held for the purpose of formally submitting the Commission’s findings and conclusions, President Nixon publicly renounced the report.[4] This was 6 months before the President faced re-election and he was feeling intense political heat from one particularly powerful, foreign-controlled special interest group--the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Nothing happened toward implementation of any of the more than three score recommendations that collectively would have created a comprehensive U.S. population policy. Not one recommendation was ever adopted. To this day, the U.S. has no population policy, one of the few major countries with this distinction.

Had these 70 carefully reasoned recommendations been adopted as U.S. population policy in 1973--or if even a dozen or so of the most important ones had been adopted--America would be very different today. We would be more secure, subjected to less crime, better educated now with even greater educational opportunities ahead, living with less stress in a healthier environment, with more secure employment and greater employment opportunities, with better medical care, all in a physically less crowded America.

We would have set an example for the world, and we have good reason to believe that much of the world would have followed. Ironically, the American people were better prepared to accept these recommendations in 1973 than in 1994, even though world population during this brief period has mushroomed a horrendous 43 percent. For the past 20 years, all of us have been subjected to an intense disinformation program staged by the opposition to raise doubts in each of us regarding the seriousness of the population problem.

Had the recommendations of NSSM 200 been implemented in 1975, the world would be very different today. The prospects would have improved for every nation and people to be significantly more secure. There would be less civil and regional warfare, less starvation and hunger, a cleaner environment and less disease, greater educational opportunities, expanded civil rights, especially for women, and a political climate more conducive to the expansion of democracy.

Despite the intense opposition President Nixon encountered in the wake of the Rockefeller Commission Report, his assessment of the gravity of the overpopulation problem and his desire to deal with it evidently remained unchanged. On April 24, 1974, nearly 18 months after his re-election, in the single most significant act of his presidency regarding the population crisis, Mr. Nixon directed, in NSSM 200, that a comprehensive new study be undertaken to determine the “Implications of World Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The report of this study would become one of the most important documents on world population growth ever written. In NSSM 200, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, acting for the President, directed the Secretaries of Defense and Agriculture, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Deputy Director of State and the Administrator of the Agency for International Development (AID), to undertake the population study jointly. The report on this study was completed on December 10, 1974 and circulated to the designated Secretaries and Agency heads for their review and comments.

On August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford succeeded to the presidency. Revisions of the study continued until July, 1975. On November 26, 1975, the 227-page report and its recommendations were endorsed by President Ford in NSDM 314: “The President has reviewed the interagency response to NSSM 200 ...,” wrote the new National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft. “He believes that United States leadership is essential to combat population growth, to implement the World Population Plan of Action and to advance United States security and overseas interests. The President endorses the policy recommendations contained in the Executive Summary of the NSSM 200 response ...”

President Ford, recognizing the gravity of the situation, directed NSDM 314 not only to the Departments and Agencies cited above. He also directed it to the Secretaries of Health, Education and Welfare and Treasury, the Director of Management and Budget, the Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Council on Environmental Quality. He made it clear to all of the relevant Departments and Agencies of the United States Government that he intended this to become the foundation of population policy for our government.

Mr. Ford assigned responsibility for further action to the National Security Council (NSC): “The President, therefore, assigns to the Chairman, NSC Undersecretaries Committee, the responsibility to define and develop policy in the population field and to coordinate its implementation beyond the NSSM 200 response.” To this day, the policy set forth in NSDM 314 has not been officially rescinded.

NSSM 200 itself is a 227-page document. The report requested in NSSM 200 bears the title, NSSM 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests. It consists of a 29-page Executive Summary and a two-part report 198 typescript pages in length. The report was never printed or published. It was typewritten, double-spaced.

November 26, 1975 marked the end of the peak of American political will to deal with the overpopulation problem. This was the day that President Ford approved NSDM 314, committing the U.S. to a bold policy of population growth control.

The potential importance of this document to U.S. security and the security of all nations was and remains immense. Both the findings and the recommendations have become increasingly relevant and urgent over the years. For this reason I have included the complete document here.

The NSSM 200 study details how and why continued rapid world population growth gravely threatens U.S. and global security. It also provides a blueprint for the U.S. response to this burgeoning problem, reflecting the deep concern of those who produced the report. Their strategy is complex, raising difficult questions. Some suggested policies are necessarily bold and the report’s authors urged that it be classified for five years to prepare the American public for full acceptance of the goals proposed. However, it remained classified for 14 years for reasons that are unclear.

The intense concern of the authors is clearly evident. NSSM 200 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 fall, to our humanitarian values.”[5] "... World population growth is widely recognized within the Government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures.”[6] “... 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 goals.[7]

NSSM 200 made the following recommendations, to mention a few:

• The U.S. would provide world leadership in population growth control.[8]
  
  
• The U.S. would seek to attain its own population stability by the year 2000.[9] This would have required a one-child family policy for the U.S., thanks to the phenomenon of demographic momentum, a requirement the authors well understood (the Chinese did not adopt their one-child family policy until 1977).
  
  
• Have as goals for the U.S.: making family planning information, education and means available to all people of the developing world by 1980,[10] and achieving a 2-child family in the developing countries by 2000.”[11]
  
  
• The U.S. would provide substantial funds to help achieve these goals.[12]

But, as in the case of the Rockefeller Commission Report, the implementation of recommendations made in NSSM 200--approved by President Ford, with his approval communicated to all relevant Departments and Agencies in our government--was halted mainly through the influence of the same opposition that had precluded adoption of the Rockefeller Commission recommendations.

Had the recommendations of NSSM 200 been implemented in 1975, the world would be very different today. The prospects would have improved for every nation and people to be significantly more secure. There would be less civil and regional war fare, less starvation and hunger, a cleaner environment and less disease, greater educational opportunities, expanded civil rights, especially for women, and a political climate more conducive to the expansion of democracy.

Excerpts from: Chapter 5 “What Happened to the Momentum?”

November 26, 1975 marked the end of the peak of American political will to deal with the overpopulation problem. This was the day that President Ford approved NSDM 314, committing the U.S. to a bold policy of population growth control. The peak lasted less than 6 years and then the momentum plummeted and our commitment has since diminished every year.

As noted in the Introduction, when Mr. Nixon received the report, Population and the American Future, from Mr. Rockefeller in May 1972, the President publicly rejected it--just six months before he faced reelection. In his book, Catholic Bishops in American Politics, Timothy A. Byrnes, assistant professor of political science at the City College of New York, states,

Hoping to attract Catholics to his reelection campaign, Nixon publicly disavowed the pro-choice findings of his own presidential commission on population in 1972. He communicated that disavowal in an equally public-letter to Cardinal Terence Cooke [of New York], a leading spokesman for the bishops’ opposition to abortion ... The Catholic vote was especially important to Nixon and his publicists in 1972. They referred to Catholic support of the Republican ticket in order to refute the notion that Nixon had formed his new coalition by cynically appealing to the baser motives of Southern whites. They relied on Catholic participation in the new majority, in other words, as proof that the “social issue” was much more than repackaged racial prejudice. As one of these publicists, Patrick Buchanan, put it: “Though his critics were crying ‘Southern Strategy,’ the President’s politics and policy decisions were not going unnoticed in the Catholic and ethnic communities of the North, East, and Midwest.[13]

Nixon was convinced that if he were to win in 1972, he must carry Southern whites and northern Catholics. He looked to the Catholic bishops for their support. Byrnes goes on to say, "Regardless of what it is based on, however, a perception that the bishops can influence votes has been enough to make candidates sensitive to the bishops ..." And as the saying goes, in politics perceptions often create their own realities. He continues,

The bishops have more than just access to Catholic voters, of course. They also have virtually unparalleled institutional resources at their disposal. ‘If you are a bishop,’ Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager said to me, ‘you've got some pretty substantial organizational capabilities ... You've got a lot of people, you've got money, places to meet ... You've got a lot of things that any good politician would like to have at his disposal.’ You also have the ability, if you are the Catholic hierarchy collectively, to create or fortify movements in support of your preferred policy positions.[14]

Byrnes argues that: the bishops are able to bring virtually unrivaled resources to any cause or effort they decide to support; the bishops committed those resources to the fight against abortion in the 1970s; in the process they played a key role in the creation and maintenance of a large social movement. This movement was the so-called Religious New Right movement. This movement was still in its infancy at the time of Nixon’s reelection bid in 1972 but the bishops were highly organized, single minded and prepared to deal. In his letter to Cardinal Cooke, Nixon made it clear that he too was prepared to deal. Nixon was reelected with the bishops’ support.

During the year that followed the presentation of the Rockefeller Commission Report, it became clear that there would be no further response to the Commission’s recommendations. In May, 1973 a group of pioneer population activists acknowledged this inaction and asked Ambassador Adolph Schmidt to speak with his friend, Commission Chairman John D. Rockefeller 3rd. They met in June, 1973 at the Century Club in New York City. Schmidt noted his own disappointment and that of his colleagues because no program had been mounted as a result of the Commission’s recommendations. What had gone wrong? Rockefeller responded: “The greatest difficulty has been the very active opposition by the Roman Catholic Church through its various agencies in the United States.”[15]

In 1992, one Rockefeller Commission member, Congressman James Scheuer (D-NY), spoke out publicly for the first time on what had happened: “Our exuberance was short-lived. Then-President Richard Nixon promptly ignored our final report. The reasons were obvious--the fear of attacks from the far right and from the Roman Catholic Church because of our positions on family planning and abortion. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that this obstruction was but the first of many similar actions to come from high places.”[16]

None of the Commission’s more than three score and ten recommendations was ever implemented. It is most disturbing that the American people were kept in the dark about this undemocratic and unAmerican intervention by the Vatican. It simply was not considered newsworthy because the press chose not to make it so. I believe both Catholic and non-Catholic Americans would have strongly rejected such interference in the American democratic process had they been aware of it. The quality of life for all Americans has been diminished by this unconstitutional manipulation of American policy, undertaken for the purposes of protecting papal interests.

Excerpts from: Chapter 6 “Why Did our Political Will Fade Away?”
How Population Growth Control Threatens the Papacy

Why is the Catholic Church obliged to halt legalized abortion and contraception despite the strong wishes of Americans? When our government legalized contraception and abortion, it pitted civil authority against papal authority. The Vatican demands supremacy over civil governments in matters of faith and morals, but our government has rejected this concept. Thus, while the Church is saying that family planning and abortion are evil and grave sins, our government is saying they may be good and should be used. Obviously, most American Catholics are accepting morality as defined by the government and rejecting morality as defined by the pope. As a result, papal authority is undermined.

There are a number of Catholic countries in Latin America which have abortion rates 2 to 4 times as high as the U.S. rate. But the bishops ignore abortions there. Why? Because they are illegal abortions, not legal ones. They do not threaten papal authority! Only legal abortions do, because their legalization establishes their morality. Thus, the bishops take no significant actions to halt abortions in Latin America.

Most American Catholics are accepting morality as defined by the government and rejecting morality as defined by the pope. As a result papal authority is undermined.

In Papal Power: A Study of Vatican Control Over Lay Catholic Elites,[35] published by The University of California Press in 1980, Jean-Guy Vaillancourt, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Montreal, closely examines the sources of papal power and how it evolved. He found that papal authority is vital to the maintenance of papal power. This power is derived in significant part from papal authority. If the pope’s authority is diminished, papal power is diminished. However, some authority is derived from papal power and if papal power is diminished, then authority is undermined. The relationship is circular. Less authority means less power which means even less authority. With diminishing power, survival of the institution of the Roman Catholic Church in its present hierarchical form is gravely threatened. Thus, the very survival of the Vatican is threatened by programs of population growth control.

In his book, Persistent Prejudice: Anti-Catholicism in America, published by Our Sunday Visitor in 1984, Michael Schwartz summarized the position of Catholic conservatives on the abortion issue:

The abortion issue is the great crisis of Catholicism in the United States, of far greater import than the election of a Catholic president or the winning of tax support for Catholic education. In the unlikely event that the Church’s resistance to abortion collapses and the Catholic community decides to seek an accommodation with the institutionalized killing of innocent human beings, that would signal the utter failure of Catholicism in America. It would mean that U.S. Catholicism will have been defeated and denatured by the anti-Catholic host culture.[36]

In April, 1992, in a rare public admission of this threat, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, delivering a major address to the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, acknowledged, “The fact is that attacks on the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion--unless they are rebutted--effectively erode Church authority on all matters, indeed on the authority of God himself."[37]

This threat to papal authority was recognized decades ago by the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control. The two tiered commission consisted of a group of 15 cardinals and bishops and a group of 64 lay experts representing a variety of disciplines. The Commission met from 1964 until 1966. According to commission member Thomas Burch, the pope himself, Pope Paul VI, assigned the commission the task of finding a way of changing the Church’s position on birth control without destroying the pope’s authority.[38]

After 2 years of studying the dilemma, the laymen voted 60 to 4 and the clerics 9 to 6 to change the Church’s teaching on birth control even though it would mean a loss of papal authority because it was the right thing to do. The minority also submitted a report to the pope.

In 1967, two newspapers published without authorization the full texts of the Papal Commission’s report. Thus the world knew that a substantial majority of the double commission had recommended liberalization on birth control.[39] The commission, of course, failed to find an acceptable way to accomplish this, and the result was the publication In 1968 of the encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which banned the use of contraception.

It was not until 1985 that Thomas Burch, in the 1960s a professor at Georgetown University and more recently chairman of Western Ontario’s Sociology Department, revealed to the world the real assignment of the commission. When Pope Paul issued Humanae Vitae, he admitted to the world that the Church cannot change its position on birth control without undermining papal authority--an unacceptable sacrifice. However, it was not until 1979, when August Bernhard Hasler published his book, How the Pope Became Infallible, that the world was given the text of the minority report which persuaded Pope Paul VI to reject the majority position.[40] Hasler was a Catholic theologian and historian who served for five years in the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity. During this period, he was given access to the Vatican Archives where he discovered numerous documents, which had never been studied before, that revealed the story of Vatican Council I. Dr. Hasler died suddenly at age 43, four days after writing a critical open letter to Pope John Paul II and six months after completing the second edition of this book.[41]

“The Declaration of Papal Infallibility“ was a product of Vatican Council I, which preceded Vatican Council II more than a century ago, and was considered vital to the continuation of papal power. According to Vaillancourt,

During the Middle Ages and under feudalism, when the Catholic Church was a dominant institution in society, papal power grew in importance, relying often on force to attain its ends, which were political as much as they were religious. The Crusades and later on, the Inquisition, stand as the two most notorious of these violent papal ventures. But with the decline of the Portuguese and Spanish empires, with the advent of the Reformation and of the intellectual, democratic, and Industrial revolutions, the Catholic hierarchy lost much of Its influence and power. Unable to continue using physical coercion, the Papacy was led to strengthen its organizational structure and to perfect a wide range of normative means of control. The declaration of papal Infallibility by the first Vatican Council (Vatican I), in 1870, was an important milestone in that direction. The stress on the absolute authority of the pope in questions of faith and morals helped turn the Church into a unified and powerful bureaucratic organization, and paved the way for the establishment of the Papacy-laity relationship as we know it today.[42]

Pope Paul VI was faced with the prospect of personally destroying the concept of papal infallibility, a concept vital to the continuation of papal power. Hasler notes, “But for Paul VI there already were infallible declarations of the ordinary magisterium on the books concerning contraception. And so, unlike the majority of his commission of experts, the pope felt bound to these declarations by his predecessors.” Thus the pope was forced to agree with the minority report of the commission.

Hasler quotes from that report:

If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti conubli was promulgated), in 1951 (Pius XII’s address to the midwives), and in 1958 (the address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved.[43]

Hasler concludes, “Thus, it became only too clear that the core of the problem was not the pill but the authority, continuity, and infallibility of the Church’s magisterium.”

This is at the very core of the world population problem. The papacy simply cannot survive the solutions--i.e. contraception, abortion, sex education, etc. The Vatican believes, probably correctly, that if the solutions to the population problem are applied, the dominance of Vatican power will soon wither. Grasping the implications of the principal of infallibility are crucial to understanding the underlying basis of the world population problem.

The security-survival of the papacy is now pitted directly against the security-survival of the United States. The Vatican simply cannot accommodate U.S. security interests.

It is most important to understand that the Vatican leadership can visualize a world where it no longer exists. It was this chilling vision that drove the conservative members of the Vatican leadership and Pope Paul VI to reject the majority report and accept the minority report of the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control in 1968. This vision has driven Vatican behavior on family planning ever since. Thus, the security survival of the papacy is now pitted directly against the security-survival of the United States. The Vatican simply cannot accommodate U.S. security interests.

This is not the first time our security interests have been in conflict. There are many examples of the American Catholic hierarchy supporting papal security interests at the expense of U.S. security interests. One example is the Spanish Civil War between the democratic constitutional government and the Vatican supported fascist Franco. Byrnes states, “The bishops also broke with Roosevelt over the issue of the Spanish Civil War ... The bishops instinctively supported Franco in the war ... Caught between mainstream views on foreign policy and the interests of their church, the bishops ... opted for defense of the international church."[44]

“American policy was changed as a result of the Vatican’s not agreeing with our policy.”

It is institutional survival that governs the behavior of the Catholic hierarchy in all matters. The claim that “morality” governs its behavior in the matters of family planning and abortion is fraudulent. The hierarchy has a long history of determining which position is in the best interests of the papacy--including the survival of the papacy--and then framing that position as the moral position. Father Arthur McCormack was for 23 years the Vatican consultant to the UN on development and population, leaving that post in 1979. In 1982, he went public with his conclusion that the Vatican position on family planning and population growth control is immoral.

American political will to deal with the overpopulation problem fell victim to the Vatican’s inexorable position. In the next chapter we will discuss how the Vatican achieved this vital objective, as it set about protecting its security interests.

Excerpts from: Chapter 7 “What was the Role of the Vatican?”

Did the Vatican succeed in changing U.S. policy on family planning, abortion and population growth control? Time magazine concluded that it most certainly did. The headline on the cover of the February 24, 1992 issue of Time magazine was “HOLY ALLIANCE: How Reagan and the Pope conspired to assist Poland’s Solidarity movement and hasten the demise of Communism.”[48] The cover article was written by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein. Bernstein listed Reagan’s “Catholic team,” noting that “The key administration players were all devout Roman Catholics--CIA chief William Casey, [Richard] Allen [Reagan’s first National Security Advisor], [William] Clark [Reagan’s second National Security Advisor], [Alexander] Haig [Secretary of State], [Vernon] Walters [Ambassador at Large] and William Wilson, Reagan’s first ambassador to the Vatican. They 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.”

The Pope Called the Tune

In a section of his Time article headed “The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control,” Bernstein included three revealing paragraphs:

In response to concerns of the Vatican, the Reagan Administration agreed to alter its foreign-aid program to comply with the church’s teachings on birth control. According to William Wilson, the President’s first ambassador to the Vatican, the State Department reluctantly agreed to an outright ban on the use of any U.S. aid funds by either countries or international health organizations for the promotion of ... abortions. As a result of this position, announced at the World Conference on Population in Mexico City in 1984, the U.S. withdrew funding from, among others, two of the world’s largest family planning organizations: the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.

‘American policy was changed as a result of the Vatican’s not agreeing with our policy,’ Wilson explains. ‘American aid programs around the world did not meet the criteria the Vatican had for family planning. AID [the Agency for International Development] sent various people from [the Department of] State to Rome, and I’d accompany them to meet the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, and in long discussions they finally got the message. But it was a struggle. They finally selected different programs and abandoned others as a result of this intervention.’

‘I might have touched on that in some of my discussions with [CIA director William] Casey,’ acknowledges Pio Cardinal Laghi, the former apostolic delegate to Washington. ‘Certainly Casey already knew about our positions about that.’

Thus, Bernstein makes clear what the cadre of devout Catholics in the Reagan Administration did to protect the Papacy from the recommendations of NSSM 200. Simply put, these strategically-placed Catholic laymen, and the U.S. bishops with direct papal support and intervention, succeeded in destroying the American political will to deal with the population problem.

References

Introduction
1. Ehrlich PR. The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books, 1968.
2. Hardin G. "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 1968 162: 1243-8.
3. Beck R. "Religions and the Environment: Commitment High Until U.S. Population Issues Raised." The Social Contract 1993:3: 76-89.
4. (a) Nixon, R. "Special Message to the Congress on Problems of Population Growth," July 18, 1969. Public papers of the Presidents, No. 271, p. 521, Office of the Federal Register, National Archives, Washington, DC. 1971. (b)Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. "Population and the American Future." Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972. 176 pp.
5. National Security Council. NSSM 200: Implications of worldwide population growth for U.S. security and overseas Interests. Washington, DC, December 10, 1974.
6. Ibid., p. 184.
7. Ibid., p. 78.
8. Ibid., p. 59.
9. Ibid., p. 62.
10. Ibid., p. 148.
11. Ibid., p.59.
12. Ibid., p. 65.

Chapter 5
13. Brynes TA. Catholic Bishops In American Politics, Lawrenceville, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991. P. 66
14. Ibid., p.4
15. Schmidt AW. Personal Communication. August 28, 1992.
16. Scheuer J. "A disappointing outcome: United States and World Population Trends since the Rockefeller Commission." The Social Contract 1992; Summer: 203-206.

Chapter 6
35. Vaillancourt JG. Papal Power: A Study of Vatican Control Over Lay Catholic Elites. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
36. Schwartz M. Persistent Prejudice: Anti-Catholicism In America. Huntington Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 1984. P. 132.
37. King HV. "Cardinal O’Connor Declares That Church Teaching On Abortion Underpins All Else." The Wanderer, April 23, 1992, p. 1.
38. Jones A. Vatican, "International Agencies Hone Family, Population Positions." National Catholic Reporter (reprinted in Conscience, May/June 1984. P. 7.
39. Murphy FX, Erhart JF. "Catholic perspectives on population Issues." Pop Bulletin 1975; 30(6): 3-3 1.
40. Hasler AB. How the Pope Became Infallible. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981.
41. Ibid. (cover)
42. Vaillancourt, op.cit., p. 2.
43. Hasler, op. cit., p. 270.
44. Byrnes, op. cit., p. 29.

Chapter 7
48. Bernstein C. "The Holy Alliance." Time, February 24, 1992.

The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy (580 pp.) is available in hardback ($39) and softback ($32) from the Center for Research on Population and Security, P.O. Box 13067, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709;

(919) 933-7491 phone; (919) 933-0348 fax; email: smumford@mindspring.com>.

Reprinted by permission of the author. (c) 1996, Stephen Mumford, published by the Center for Research on Population and Security, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

* Excerpts contain minor edits approved by the author.

National Security Study Memorandum 200: World Population Growth And U.S. Security delineates the development and major findings of this important study. Author Stephen D. Mumford reveals:

"In March, 1970, the U.S. Congress created The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, which completed its work in March 1972. Its final report offered more than 70 recommendations. Collectively, they constituted a detailed blueprint for a superb national population policy."

And uncovers why this commission's final report was ignored.

"In the words of a Commission member, Congressman James Scheuer (D.-NY): "The reasons were obvious--the fear of attacks from the far right and from the Roman Catholic Church because of our positions on family planning and abortion. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that this obstruction was the first of many similar actions to come from high places."

Then he goes on to describe the commissioning of the NSSM 200 study, its major findings and the Vatican’s responsibility in the failure to implement the study’s recommendations.

National Security Study Memorandum 200:
World Population Growth And U.S. Security

by Stephen D. Mumford

Stephen D. Mumford has his doctorate in Public Health. He has decades of international experience in fertility research and has recently returned from Vietnam where he spent a month studying a new technique of female sterilization. In 1981 he received the Margaret Mead Leadership Prize in Population and Ecology.

We must help break the link between spiraling population growth and poverty ... Where they have been tried, family planning programs have largely worked. Many pro-life advocates ... contend that to condone abortion even implicitly is morally unconscionable. Their view is morally shortsighted ... if we provide funds for birth control ... we will prevent the conception of millions of babies who would be doomed to the devastation of poverty in the underdeveloped world.

Richard M. Nixon

Seize the Moment
(Simon & Schuster, 1992)

President Nixon has recently reasserted his belief that overpopulation gravely threatens world peace and stability. He ranks assistance in population growth as the most important effort the United States can undertake to promote peace and stability. During his presidency he authorized the study that came to be known as NSSM 200--National Security Study Memorandum 200. In order to effectively examine the content and fate of NSSM 200, we need to backtrack a bit to the Rockefeller Commission which was discussed in the Summer 1992 issue of this journal.

From his first days in office, President Nixon understood the grave dangers of high rates of population growth--more than any other president. He responded appropriately when he perceived that his people and their way of life were gravely threatened. Seven months into his first term, in a rare move for a president, he delivered his Special Message to the Congress.[1]

The message set forth a far-reaching commitment to limiting population growth. It set in motion a broad range of government activities, both domestic and international. It called for the creation of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future to collect and analyze data that would make possible the formulation of a comprehensive United States population policy.

In March, 1970, the U.S. Congress created The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, which completed its work in March 1972. Its final report offered more than 70 recommendations. Collectively, they constituted a detailed blueprint for a superb national population policy.

WHY WAS THE COMMISSION'S FINAL REPORT IGNORED?

1972 was a presidential election year and President Nixon was facing a difficult reelection bid, so when a delegation of the Commission presented the Final Report to him on May 5, 1972, six months before election day, he sharply condemned the most important recommendations.[2] Why was he attempting to distance himself from the report? In the words of a Commission member, Congressman James Scheuer (D.-NY): “The reasons were obvious--the fear of attacks from the far right and from the Roman Catholic Church because of our positions on family planning and abortion. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that this obstruction was the first of many similar actions to come from high places.”[3]

During the following two-year period, it became increasingly clear that there would be no response to the Commission’s recommendations. In May 1974, a group of pioneer population activists acknowledged this inaction and asked Ambassador Adolph Schmidt to speak with his friend, Commission Chairman, John D. Rockefeller III. They met in June, 1974 in New York City. Schmidt noted his own disappointment and that of his colleagues because no program had been mounted as a result of the recommendations. What had gone wrong? Rockefeller responded: “The greatest difficulty has been the very active opposition by the Roman Catholic Church through its various agencies in the United States.”[4]

“... a definitive interagency study of the threat of overpopulation to U.S. security ... NSSM 200 details how and why world population growth threatens U.S. and global security.”

None of the Commission’s 70 recommendations were ever implemented. It is tragic that the American people have been kept in the dark about this bold opposition by the Vatican and other pronatalist groups. Lay Catholic Americans desire the same number of children as non-Catholic Americans,[5] use contraceptives[6] and obtain abortions[7] in the same proportions, support school-based population information and sex education[8] for their children, and advocate a halt to illegal immigration[9] into the U.S. in the same proportions. No doubt, both Catholic and non-Catholic Americans would have strongly counter-balanced this bold obstruction of American policy had they been aware of it. The quality of life for all of us has been significantly diminished by this change in policy, in substantial measure at the behest of pronatalist pressures from the Vatican.

PRESIDENT NIXON MAKES A BOLD MOVE

Despite the intense opposition of the Catholic hierarchy he encountered in the wake of the Rockefeller Commission, President Nixon’s assessment of the gravity of the overpopulation problem and his desire to deal with it remained unchanged. On April 24, 1974, in an effort to contend with this crisis, in National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), Nixon directed that a study be undertaken to determine the “Implications of World Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests."[10] Its findings would be momentous indeed.

I can only speculate, but the President must surely have been aware that this new document would meet with the same intense opposition from the Vatican and others as the earlier one. However, perhaps he felt that a definitive study of the national and global security implications of overpopulation, revealing that the very security of the United States was seriously threatened, would generate public demand for action to curb growth. That might serve to overcome the pressures being exerted by the opponents. Why else would he have undertaken this study, given his painful experience after the Rockefeller Commission?

NSSM 200

To implement NSSM 200, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, acting for the President, directed the Secretaries of Defense and Agriculture, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Deputy Secretary of State and the Administrator of the Agency for International Development (AID), to jointly undertake “a study of the impact of world population growth on U.S. security and overseas interests.” This work was completed on December 10, 1974 and circulated to the designated Secretaries and Agency heads for their review and comments.

Meanwhile, on August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford had succeeded to the presidency. Revisions to the study continued until July, 1975. On November 26, 1975, the 227-page report and its recommendations were endorsed by President Ford in National Security Decision Memorandum 314: “The President has reviewed the interagency response to NSSM 200 ...,” wrote the new National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft. “He believes that United States leadership is essential to combat population growth, to implement the World Population Plan of Action and to advance United States security and overseas interests. The President endorses the policy recommendations contained in the Executive Summary of the NSSM 200 response ...”

President Ford, recognizing the gravity of the situation, assigned responsibility for further action to the National Security Council (NSC): “The President, therefore, assigns to the Chairman, NSC Undersecretaries Committee, the responsibility to define and develop policy in the population field and to coordinate its implementation beyond the NSSM 200 response.”

NSSM 200 was intended to be and is a definitive interagency study of the threat of overpopulation to U.S. security. NSSM 200 details how and why world population growth gravely threatens U.S. and global security. It also provides a blueprint for the U.S. response to this burgeoning problem, reflecting the deep concern of those who produced the report. Because of the bold nature of the suggested initiatives, the authors recommended that the report remain classified for 5 years in order to provide time to educate the American public as to the necessity of these initiatives. The NSSM 200 report actually remained classified for 14 years.

Both the findings and the recommendations are as relevant in 1992 as they were in 1975, but too numerous to list here in their entirety. To mention a selected few:

NSSM 200 reports:

There is a major risk of severe damage [caused by continued rapid population growth] to world economic, political, and ecological systems and, as these systems begin to fail, to our humanitarian values [Executive Summary, page 10].

The sense of near emergency is electric:

... world population growth is widely recognized within the government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures [Page 194] ... 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 [Page 15].

The threat to security briefly summarized,

... population factors are indeed critical in, and often determinants of, violent conflict in developing areas. Segmental (religious, social, racial) differences, migration, rapid population growth, differential levels of knowledge and skills, rural/urban differences, population pressure and the spatial location of population in relation to resources--in this rough order of importance--all appear to be important contributions to conflict and violence ... Clearly, conflicts which are regarded in primarily political terms often have demographic roots. Recognition of these relationships appears crucial to any understanding or prevention of such hostilities [Page 66].

The report gives three examples of population wars: the El Salvador-Honduras “Soccer War,” the Nigerian Civil War, and the Pakistan-India-Bangladesh War, 1970-71. (With hindsight, we can see that the two-decade-long civil war in Lebanon is another classic example, and that the civil wars in The Sudan, Somalia and other countries on the African continent are realizations of the projections made in NSSM 200. South Africa is on the brink. War between Israel and Arab countries fueled by population growth is all but inevitable.)

Where population size is greater than available resources, or is expanding more rapidly than the available resources, there is a tendency toward internal disorders and violence and, sometimes, disruptive international policies or violence [Page 69].

(This was a vital element, surely, in the 1991 U.S.-Iraq War, much more costly than decades of successful worldwide population growth control.)

In developing countries, the burden of population factors, added to others, will weaken unstable governments, often only marginally effective in good times, and open the way to extremist regimes [Page 84].

(The Sudan is a vivid recent example.)

The depth of concern for this ominous and progressive threat to national security is reflected in the objectives and goals outlined in the report:

The World Population Plan of Action and the resolutions adopted by consensus of the 137 nations at the August 1974 U.N. World Population Conference, though not ideal, provide an excellent framework for developing a worldwide system of population/family planning programs [Executive Summary, page 19].

At the UN World Population Conference, only the Vatican opposed the Plan:

... the Conference adopted by acclamation (only the Holy See stating a general reservation) a complete World Population Plan of Action [Page 87].

SUGGESTED GOALS AND MEANS

Our objective should be to assure that developing countries make family planning information, education and means available to all their peoples by 1980 [Page 130] ... intense efforts are required to assure full availability by 1980 of birth control information and means to all fertile individuals, especially in rural areas [Executive Summary, page 9].

While specific goals in this area are difficult to state, our aim should be for the world to achieve a replacement level of fertility, (a two-child family on the average), by about the year 2000 ... Attainment of this goal will require greatly intensified population programs ... U.S. leadership is essential [Executive Summary, page 14].

It is now all too clear how crucial this leadership was. The U.S. withdrew from this role shortly after the election of President Carter, just one year after the initiation of public policy based on the report. Initiatives for curtailment of population growth have been deteriorating ever since.

After suitable preparation in the U.S., announce a U.S. goal to maintain our present national average fertility no higher than replacement level and attain stability by 2000 [Executive Summary, page 19]. Only nominal attention is [currently] given to population education or sex education in schools ... [Page 158] ... Recommendation: That U.S. agencies stress the importance of education of the next generation of parents, starting in elementary schools, toward a two-child family ideal. That AID (the Agency for International Development) stimulate specific efforts to develop means of educating children of elementary school age to the ideal of the two-child family ... [Page 159].

Despite the Helms Amendment, which clearly ruled out abortion assistance in U.S. foreign aid programs, there was a clear consensus that continued widespread use of abortion would be required to meet/attain the objective.

While the agencies participating in this study have no specific recommendations to propose on abortion, the following issues are believed important and should be considered in the context of a global population strategy ... Certain facts about abortion need to be appreciated:

--No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion [Page 182].

--Indeed, abortion, legal and illegal, now has become the most widespread fertility control method in use in the world today [Page 183].

--It would be unwise to restrict abortion research for the following reasons: 1) The persistent and ubiquitous nature of abortion. 2) Widespread lack of safe abortion techniques ... [Page 185].

An important goal in NSSM 200 dealt with leadership:

These programs will have only modest success until there is much stronger and wider acceptance of their real importance by leadership groups. Such acceptance and support will be essential to assure that the population information, education and service programs have vital moral backing, administrative capacity, technical skills and government financing [Page 195].

The report recommended spending whatever could reasonably be absorbed to achieve these goals:

We recommend increases in the AID budget requests to the Congress on the order of $35-$50 million annually through FY 1980 (above the $137.5 million requested for FY 1975) ... However, the level of funds needed in the future could change significantly, depending on such factors as major breakthroughs in fertility control technologies and LDC receptivity to population assistance [Executive Summary, page 24].

A ONE-CHILD FAMILY POLICY FOR THE U.S.

We know that even after a country reduces fertility to the replacement level, that, thanks to the phenomenon of momentum, the population continues to grow for another 70 years before stability is achieved. A goal of NSSM 200 was to attain this stability here by the year 2000. One of the chief coordinators of the NSSM 200 study recently acknowledged that the government recognized the one-child family norm would be necessary to achieve this goal and was under obligation to encourage Americans to limit family size.

NO ACCOMMODATION TO THE VATICAN

The study frankly dismissed the arguments that have been raised by the Vatican to counter efforts to reduce population growth. The position of the Roman Catholic Church on population growth centers on the need for economic development in Third World countries as a way to bring growth rates down. NSSM 200 takes an entirely different tack:

We cannot wait for overall modernization and development to produce lower fertility rates naturally since this will undoubtedly take many decades in most developing countries ... [Executive Summary, page 7]. Clearly development per se is a powerful determinant of fertility. However, since it is unlikely that most LDCs will develop sufficiently during the next 25-30 years, it is crucial to identify those sectors that most directly and powerfully affect fertility [Page 137].

There is also even less cause for optimism on the rapidity of socio-economic progress that would generate rapid fertility reduction in the poor LDCs, than on the feasibility of extending family planning services to those in their populations who may wish to take advantage of them [Page 99].

This directly opposes the Vatican position.

But we can be certain of the desirable direction of change and can state as a plausible objective the target of achieving replacement fertility rates by the year 2000 [Page 99].

These statements manifestly rule out any accommodation to the Vatican on the issue of population growth control.

IMPLEMENTATION OF NSSM 200 IS BROUGHT TO A HALT

During 1976, Catholic activists worked diligently to undermine population growth control efforts. Dr. R.T. Ravenholt, who directed the global population program of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Department of State from 1966 to 1979, tells the story. On March 4, 1991, he addressed the Washington State Chapter of Zero Population Growth (ZPG) on “Pronatalist Zealotry and Population Pressure Conflicts: How Catholics Seized Control of U.S. Family Planning Programs,” and described some of these activities:

Following a meeting of Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter and his campaign staff with fifteen Catholic leaders at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on August 31, 1976, on which occasion they pressed Carter to deemphasize federal support for family planning in exchange for a modicum of Catholic support for his presidential race ... Joseph Califano became Secretary of HEW ... When Father Hesburgh [President of Notre Dame University] declined the role of AID Administrator, the appointment was given to John J. Gilligan, a Notre Dame graduate and a former governor of Ohio ... John H. Sullivan moved from Congressman Clement Zablocki’ s office into AID ... Congressman Zablocki and Jack Sullivan had persistently worked to curb AID’s high powered family planning program. In 1973, Jack Sullivan and allied zealots helped Senator Jesse Helms develop the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act.”

AN IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE: TIME MAGAZINE TELLS IT LIKE IT IS

The headline on the cover of the February 24, 1992 issue of Time magazine was: “Holy Alliance: How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland’s Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism,” referring to an article written by prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein.

He reports:

The Catholic Team: The key Administration players were all devout Roman Catholics--CIA chief William Casey, [Richard] Allen [Reagan’s first National Security Advisor], [ William] Clark [Reagan’s second National Security Advisor], [Alexander] Haig [Secretary of State], [Vernon] Walters [Ambassador at Large] and William Wilson, Reagan’s first ambassador to the Vatican. They 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.

In a section of his Time article headed, “The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control,” Bernstein writes three very revealing paragraphs:

In response to concerns of the Vatican, the Reagan Administration agreed to alter its foreign aid program to comply with the church’s teachings on birth control. According to William Wilson, the President’s first ambassador to the Vatican, the State Department reluctantly agreed to an out-right ban on the use of any U.S. aid funds by either countries or international health organizations for the promotion of ... abortions. As a result of this position, announced at the World Conference on Population in Mexico City in 1984, the U.S. withdrew funding from, among others, two of the world’s largest family planning organizations: the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.

‘American policy was changed as a result of the Vatican’s not agreeing with our policy,’ Wilson explains. ‘American aid programs around the world did not meet the criteria the Vatican had for family planning. AID [the Agency for International Development] sent various people from [the Department of] State to Rome, and I’d accompany them to meet the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, and in long discussions they finally got the message. But it was a struggle. They finally selected different programs and abandoned others as a result of this intervention.’

‘I might have touched on that in some of my discussions with [CIA director William] Casey,’ acknowledges Pio Cardinal Laghi, the former apostolic delegate to Washington. ‘Certainly Casey already knew about our positions about that.’

Bernstein makes clear what the cadre of devout Catholics in the Reagan Administration did to protect the papacy and Catholic teaching from the potential fall-out from NSSM 200. He quotes the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson, who reveals that during the Reagan Administration, papal policy on birth control and abortion replaced the policy set forth by NSSM 200; and so the 21st century will be irredeemably less livable because of “this intervention.”

A CODE OF SILENCE CLOAKS THE FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF NSSM 200

Immediately after President Ford adopted the recommendations of NSSM 200 on November 26, 1975, a peculiar silence fell over the whole matter. The report was never printed. There are only a handful of photocopies. Those who wrote the report recommended that it be classified for 5 years. Werner Fornos, President of the Population Institute, with the aid of several members of Congress, succeeded in getting the NSSM 200 report declassified for a brief period in 1976. Despite his best efforts, and the explosiveness of this report detailing major changes in the lives of every American, he was unable to achieve any press coverage whatsoever. Instead, he found the report reclassified as a result of the objections of “members of the national security establishment” to the early declassification.

In the end, as noted, the document remained classified for 14 years, rather than the recommended 5 years. Declassification in 1989 apparently resulted from application of the Freedom of Information Act.

THE SILENCE EXTENDS BEYOND NSSM 200

The Vatican must be confronted on this issue. Says Representative Scheuer: “The Roman Catholic Church and its allies cannot be allowed to dictate the rules of the game when it comes to preservation of life on this planet at some level of decency.”[12]

Clearly, Carl Bernstein’s article in Time has been the most important development in revealing the influences of the Vatican on American policy. Rep. Scheuer’s article, published in this journal, and Ravenholt’s speech to ZPG were both major advances.

Congressman Scheuer has put it succinctly: “The issue of population growth is too crucial to the future welfare of our nation and of the world to be left to the Roman Catholic hierarchy and it allies in the fundamentalist movement.”[13] The pressures must be countered so that the rational and measured policies proposed by the Rockefeller Commission and NSSM 200 can be implemented as rapidly as possible.

NOTES

1. Nixon, R., “Special Message to the Congress on Problems of Population Growth,” July 18, 1969. Public Papers of the Presidents, No. 271, p. 521, Office of the Federal Register, National Archives, Washington, DC, 1971.
2. Nixon, R., “Statement About the Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future,” May 5, 1972. Public Papers of the Presidents, No. 142, p. 576, Office of the Federal Register, National Archives, Washington, DC, 1974.
3. Scheuer, J., “A Disappointing Outcome: United States and World Population Trends Since the Rockefeller Commission,” The Social Contract, Summer 1992, pp. 203-206.
4. Schmidt, A.W., Personal communication, August 28, 1992.
5. National Security Council, National Security Study Memorandum 200, Washington, DC, April 24, 1974. 2 pp.
6. National Security Council, “NSSM 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests,” Washington, DC December 10, 1974. 227 pp.
7. National Security Council, “National Security Decision Memorandum 314,” Washington, DC, November 26, 1975. 4 pp.
8. NSSM 200, Executive Summary, p. 10.
9. Ibid., p. 194.
10. Ibid., p. 15.
11. Ravenholt, R.T., “Pronatalist Zealotry and Population Pressure Conflicts: How Catholics Seized Control of U.S. Family Planning Programs,” Center For Research on Population and Security, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, May 1992, 27 pp.
12. Scheuer, J., op. cit., p. 206.
13. Ibid., p. 205.

BIRTH CONTROL PERCEIVED AS A THREAT TO PAPAL AUTHORITY

Why is the Roman Catholic Church obliged to halt legalized abortion and contraception despite the strong wishes of Americans?

In Papal Power: A Study of Vatican Control Over Lay Catholic Elites (The University of California Press, 1980), Jean-Guy Vaillancourt, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Montreal, closely examines the sources of papal power. It is derived in significant part from papal AUTHORITY. If the Pope’s AUTHORITY is diminished, papal power is diminished. However, some AUTHORITY is derived from papal power and if papal power is diminished, then AUTHORITY is undermined. The relationship is circular. Less AUTHORITY means less power which means even less AUTHORITY. With diminishing power, survival of the institution of the Roman Catholic Church in its present hierarchical form is gravely threatened. Thus, the very survival of the Vatican is threatened by programs to control population growth.

In April, 1992, in an exceedingly rare public admission of this threat, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, delivering a major address to the Franciscan University of Steubenville, acknowledged, “The fact is that attacks on the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion--unless they are rebutted--effectively erode Church AUTHORITY on all matters, indeed on the AUTHORITY of God himself.”

This threat was recognized decades ago by the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control which met from 1964 until 1966. According to Commission member Thomas Burch, the Pope himself assigned the Commission the task of finding a way of modifying the Church’s position on birth control without destroying papal AUTHORITY, which is absolutely essential for the continued survival of the Vatican and the Catholic Church as we know it today. The Commission failed to find a way and the result was the encyclical Humanae Vitae which banned the use of contraception.

The Vatican clearly believes that if solutions to the population problem are applied, the teaching of the church will be undermined and the dominance of the papacy will be vitiated. Thus, it is convinced that it cannot compromise on the issue of birth control, regardless of our national policy. NSSM 200 forthrightly opposes Rome on population strategy, family planning and abortion in the interest of national security.

-- Stephen Mumford

From:
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
Vol. III, No. 2
Winter 1992-93
1993

The Social Contract
3161/2 E. Mitchell St., Suite 4
Petoskey, MI 49770

A Social Contract Reprint

Papal Power: U.S. Security Population Directive Undermined by Vatican with 'Ecumenism' A Tool, Stephen D. Mumford, from: THE HUMAN QUEST, MAY-JUNE, 1992 reveals:

How "... The Vatican's anti-population growth strategy is part of the scheme to defend its own interests by influencing U.S. government policy."

How "... the National Security Council’s National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) describes in detail how and why world population growth gravely threatens U.S. and global security.

Why "... This study would become one of the most important documents on world population growth ever written."

That the study "... provides a detailed blueprint for U.S. response to this serious security threat, reflecting the seriousness with which this definitive interdepartmental study viewed over population.

Why "... Until now the study has received no public exposure since it remained classified and the recommendations ignored for sixteen years."

This report also offers selected findings of the study.

PAPAL POWER

U.S. Security Population Directive Undermined by Vatican with ‘Ecumenism’ A Tool

by Stephen D. Mumford

On April 24, 1974, President Richard Nixon directed that a study be undertaken to determine the “Implications of World Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” This study would become one of the most important documents on world population growth ever written. Until now the study has received no public exposure since it remained classified for sixteen years. The Vatican’s anti-population growth strategy is part of the scheme to defend its own interests by influencing U.S. government policy.

In the National Security Council’s National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, acting for the President, directed the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Deputy Secretary of State, and the Administrator of the Agency for International Development to jointly undertake “a study of the impact of world population growth on U.S. security and overseas interests.” The quotes in this article are taken from that Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), exceptions as indicated.

The study was completed on Dec. 10, 1974, and circulated to the secretaries and agency heads here named for their review and comments. Before this date, on Aug. 9, Richard Nixon was replaced as President by Gerald Ford. Almost a year after its completion, on Nov. 26, 1975, the 227-page report was finalized and its recommendations endorsed by President Ford in National Security Decision Memorandum 314: “The President has reviewed the interagency response to NSSM 200 ...,” wrote the new National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft. “He believes that United States leadership is essential to combat population growth, to implement the World Population Plan of Action and to advance United States security and overseas interests. The President endorses the policy recommendations contained in the Executive Summary of the NSSM 200 response.”

President Ford, in recognizing the gravity of the world population threat to U.S. security, assigned responsibility for further action to the National Security Council (NSC): “The President, therefore, assigns to the Chairman, NSC Undersecretaries Committee, the responsibility to define and develop policy in the population field and to coordinate its implementation beyond the NSSM 200 response.”

NSSM 200 describes in detail how and why world population growth gravely threatens U.S. and global security. It also provides a detailed blueprint for U.S. response to this serious security threat, reflecting the seriousness with which this definitive interdepartmental study viewed over population. Both the findings and the recommendations--as relevant in 1992 as they were in 1975--are too numerous to list here in their entirety. Selected findings are:

Degree of Concern

NSSM 200 reports, “There is a major risk of severe damage to world economic, political, and ecological systems, and as these systems begin to fail, to our humanitarian values.” (p. 10) The sense of near emergency is electric: “... World population growth is widely recognized within the government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures.” (p. 94) “... 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.” (p. 15)

Why Overpopulation Threatens U.S. Security

NSSM 200 reports in great detail how and why overpopulation gravely threatens U.S. security. Briefly summarized: “... population factors are indeed critical in, and often determinants of, violent conflict in developing areas. Segmental (religious, social, racial) differences, migration, rapid population growth, differential levels of knowledge and skills, rural/urban differences, population pressure and the spacial location of population in relation to resources--in this rough order of importance--all appear to be important contributions to conflict and violence ... Clearly, conflicts which are regarded in primarily political terms often have demographic roots. Recognition of these relationships appears crucial to any understanding or prevention of such hostilities.” (p. 66)

The report gives three examples of population wars: the El Salvador-Honduras “Soccer War”; (p. 71) the Nigerian civil war; (p. 71) and the Pakistan-India-Bangladesh war, 1970-71. (p. 72) The two-decade-long civil war in Lebanon would be regarded as a classic example of a population war. The civil war in the Sudan and in other countries across Africa are realizations of the projections made in NSSM 200. War in South Africa and between Israel and Arab countries as a result of population growth is all but inevitable.

“Where population size is greater than available resources, or is expanding more rapidly than the available resources, there is a tendency toward internal disorders and violence and, sometimes, disruptive international policies or violence.” (p. 69) This was a vital element, surely, in the 1991 U.S.-Iraq war, a war which cost more in dollars than would be required for decades of successful worldwide population growth control.

“In developing countries,” NSSM 200 continues, “the burden of population factors, added to others, will weaken unstable governments, often only marginally effective in good times, and open the way to extremist regimes.” (p. 84) The Sudan is a vivid recent example.

NSSM 200 Goals

The deep concern for this ominous and progressive national security threat is reflected in the objectives and goals outlined in the report. For example, “The World Population Plan of Action” and the resolutions adopted by consensus of 137 nations at the August 1974 U.N. World Population Conference, though not ideal, provide an excellent framework for developing a worldwide system of population/family planning programs.“ (p. 19) At the conference, only the Vatican opposed the plan. (p. 87)

“Our objective should be to assure that developing countries make family planning information, education and means available to all their peoples by 1980.” (p. 130) “... intense efforts are required to assure full availability by 1980 of birth control information and means to all fertile individuals, especially in rural areas.” (p. 9) [Emphasis added.]

“While specific goals in this area are difficult to state, our aim should be for the world to achieve a replacement level of fertility, (a two-child family on the average), by about the year 2000.

Attainment of this goal will require greatly intensified population programs ... U.S. leadership is essential.” (p. 14) [Emphasis added.] The importance of this leadership goal has been clearly demonstrated over the past 17 years. U.S. leadership ceased to exist with the election of President Carter just one year after this report was made public policy, and the U.S. population growth control effort has been going downhill ever since.

“... After suitable preparation in the U.S., announce a U.S. goal to maintain our present national average fertility no higher than replacement level and attain stability by 2000.” (p. 15) [Emphasis added.]

“Only nominal attention is given to population education or sex education in schools ...” (p. 158) “Recommendation: That U.S. agencies stress the importance of education of the next generation of parents, starting in elementary schools, toward a two-child family ideal. That AID stimulate specific efforts to develop means of educating children of elementary school age to the ideal of the two-child family ...” (p. 159)

Despite the fact that the Helms Amendment forbade the use of funds from the U.S. Agency for Inter-Development for abortion assistance, the report made it clear there was a consensus that continued widespread use of abortion was vital to U.S. and global security. “While the agencies participating in this study have no specific recommendations to propose on abortion, the following issues are believed important and should be considered in the context of a global population strategy ... Certain facts about abortion need to be appreciated: [Emphasis added.] ... No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion.” (p. 182) The obvious interpretation: Thus, all available information suggests that widespread use of abortion is essential to population growth control.

“--Indeed, abortion, legal and illegal, now has become the most widespread fertility control method in use in the world today.” (p. 183)

“--It would be unwise to restrict abortion research for the following reasons: 1) The persistent and ubiquitous nature of abortion. 2) Widespread lack of safe abortion techniques ...” (p. 185)

Two reports later published by this author offer considerable evidence to support the position that abortion is vital to U.S. and global security.

(Mumford SD. “Abortion: a national security issue,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1982; 142; 951-953. Mumford SD, Kessel E. “Is wide availability of abortion essential to national population growth programs? Experiences of 116 countries,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1984; 639-645.)

One of the most important goals in NSSM 200 dealt with leadership:

“These programs will have only modest success until there is much stronger and wider acceptance of their real importance by leadership groups. Such acceptance and support will be essential to assure that the population information, education and service programs have vital moral backing, administrative capacity, technical skills and government financing.” (p. 195)

The report recommended spending whatever could reasonably be absorbed to achieve these goals: “We recommend increases in the AID budget requests to the Congress on the order of $35-50-million annually through FY 1980 (above the $137.5-million requested for FY 1975) ... However, the level of funds needed in the future could change significantly, depending on such factors as major breakthroughs in fertility control technologies and LDC receptivity to population assistance.” (p. 24)

Accommodation by the Vatican Ruled Out

The report: “We cannot wait for overall modernization and development to produce lower fertility rates naturally since this will undoubtedly take many decades in most developing countries ...” (p. 7)* ”Clearly development per se is a powerful determinant of fertility. [This is the Vatican position which has been loudly espoused for more than twenty years.] However, since it is unlikely that most LDCs will develop sufficiently during the next 25-30 years, it is crucial to identify those sectors that most directly and powerfully affect fertility.” (p. 137)

“There is also even less cause for optimism on the rapidity of socioeconomic progress that would generate rapid fertility reduction in the poor LDCs, than on the feasibility of extending family planning services to those in their populations who may wish to take advantage of them.” (p. 99) This directly opposes the Vatican position on this matter.

“But we can be certain of the desirable direction of change and can state as a plausible objective the target of achieving replacement fertility rates by the year 2000.” (p. 99) [Emphasis added.]

These statements manifestly rule out any accommodation to the Vatican on the issue of population growth control.

The Vatican Response to NSSM 200

In an earlier article appearing in this journal, I described why the very survival of papal authority is threatened by population growth control (“‘Right to Life’ Derivation,” The Churchman’s Human Quest, Mar Apr. 1989, p. 14). This grave threat was recognized at the time by the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control which met from 1964 until 1966. Indeed, it was the mission of the Commission to find a way of changing the church’s position without destroying the pope’s authority, which is absolutely essential for the continued survival of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic church as we know it today. The Commission, of course, failed to find a way and the result was the encyclical, Humanae Vitae.

The Vatican rightfully sees that if the solutions to the population problem are applied, there will be an erosion of Vatican authority. Thus, the Vatican is in no position to compromise with the United States. NSSM 200 forthrightly opposes the Vatican positions on population strategy, family planning, and abortion--all of them.

For this reason the Vatican moved swiftly to block the implementation of this gravely threatening policy detailed in NSSM 200 and approved by President Ford. No doubt the Vatican had acquired a copy of the report by the time it was circulated among the relevant department secretaries and agency heads on Dec. 10, 1974, and recognized that it spelled the end of a powerful papacy.

Much discussion had already taken place among Roman Catholic leaders with regard to the essential response by the Roman Catholic hierarchy to the growing liberalization in the U.S. policies toward family planning and abortion and its emergence as the world leader in population growth control. I have discussed some of the elements of the proposed response in my article in this journal, mentioned above.

Jesuit priest Virgil Blum, outlining what he felt the nature of the response should be in the Jesuit magazine, America (March 6, 1971), defined what has become one of the pillars of the papal strategy to block the implementation of NSSM 200. He states: “If a group is to be politically effective, issues rather than institutions must be at stake.” [Emphasis added.] Abortion was chosen as the “issue,” the weapon with which to do battle against the protectors of U.S. security. Great care was taken to insure that there was never any public discussion of the fact that population growth control efforts, so vital to U.S. security, gravely threaten the very survival of papal authority as we know it today.

The Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities

The Vatican rightfully recognized the only way that it could insure the survival of papal power, given NSSM 200, was to boldly seize control of the population and family planning policy decision-making of the U.S. government. On Nov. 29, 1975, just six days before President Ford made NSSM 200 the U.S. policy, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops released the internal document, Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities (copies available from Center for Research on Population and Security, P.O. Box 13067, Research Triangle Park, N.C. 27709).

This papal plan was a bold, frank blueprint to seize control of these dimensions of our government. With U.S. assets of 200-billion dollars and worldwide assets exceeding 2-trillion dollars, the Vatican has the resources to fully implement this plan.

Through implementation of this plan, the Vatican has exerted exceptional pressure on the U.S. executive branch and achieved through judicial appointments a high degree of control over the U.S. judiciary on abortion and family planning matters. It has also acquired sufficient influence in the U.S. legislative branch to kill the political will of our government to implement any of the policies in NSSM 200.

(Mumford, SD. “American Democracy & The Vatican: Population Growth and National Security,” Humanist Press, 1984; “The Pope and the New Apocalypse: The Holy War Against Family Planning.” Ctr. for Research on Population and Security, Research Tr. Pk., NC 27709.)

Within months after implementation of the Papal Pastoral Plan began, the Vatican was able to stop the implementation of NSSM 200. In the March-April 1992 issue of The Human Quest, John M. Swomley described a deal between presidential candidate Jimmy Carter and the Roman Catholic bishops made at an Aug. 31, 1976 meeting at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. Carter, in effect, turned over to the Vatican control of elements of our government vital to population growth control efforts in return for the support of the Roman Catholic bishops in the upcoming election. The plan was not sufficiently implemented for the Vatican approved candidate Ronald Reagan to win the Republican Primary in 1976. However, the implementation process was sufficiently advanced by 1980, and with the election of President Reagan, control of population-related functions of the executive and judicial branches moved to completion.

Time Magazine Says It Like It Is

The cover of the Feb. 24, 1992 issue of Time magazine reveals the subject of an article by Carl Bernstein with the title: “Holy Alliance: How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland’s Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism.” The article is discussed in an editorial in this issue. But it should be noted that the most significant revelations since the Pastoral Plan was implemented in 1975 appear in the Time article. Bernstein reports, “The Catholic Team: The key administration players were all devout Roman Catholics--CIA chief William Casey, Allen, Clark, Haig, Walters, and William Wilson, Reagan’s first ambassador to the Vatican. They 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.” Protestants in the Reagan administration were apparently either unaware or unconcerned about this far-reaching maneuver.

It is clear that Vatican interests in preventing population control are diametrically opposed to American security interests as outlined in NSSM 200 and that the U.S. has succumbed to Vatican pressure.

As the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican explained: “American policy was changed as a result of the Vatican’s not agreeing with our policy. American aid programs around the world did not meet the criteria the Vatican had for family planning.”

If the American people realize what is at stake in the conflict between American security and Vatican authority, they will be able to grasp more clearly why the pope and the hierarchy are willing to go to such desperate lengths, even to the extent of invading the decision-making processes of national governments and undermining that leadership.

Protestant Leadership

Where has the Protestant leadership been during the seventeen-year implementation of the Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities? It has been skillfully neutralized by the Roman Catholic bishops’ own plan and their creation of the ecumenical movement which I described in an earlier Human Quest article (“How ‘Ecumenism’ Is Used By Roman Catholic Bishops and How Protestant Leadership Serves the Roman Cause,” May-June 1989). Jesuit Virgil Blum, in the 1971 America article cited earlier, recognized that it is essential to use “ecumenism” as a Vatican weapon to blunt criticism of the Vatican’s deep involvement in U.S. political policy-making.

Silence of the Protestant leadership has been vital to Vatican success in changing U.S. policy.

Bernstein, in Time, quotes Protestant Robert McFarlane, who served as a deputy to both Clark and Haig and later as National Security Adviser to the President: “I knew that they were meeting with [Vatican ambassador to the U.S.] Pio Laghi, and that Laghi had been to see the President, but Clark would never tell me what the substance of the discussions was.”

Reagan and the pope undermined and seized control of the Polish government because the Polish government seriously threatened papal security interests in Poland when that country outlawed Solidarity in 1981. Regarding direction of their operation to overthrow the Polish government, Bernstein quotes Laghi: “But I told Vernon [Vernon Walters, American ambassador to the U.N.], ‘Listen to the Holy Father. We have 2,000 years’ experience at this.”

This may suggest that the Vatican would stop at nothing to defend its own interests, even to the point of planning to overthrow a government. Although it has not in the Polish sense over thrown the U.S. government, it has been able to determine U.S. policy. Time reports: “In response to concerns of the Vatican, the Reagan administration agreed to alter its foreign-aid program to comply with the [Roman Catholic] church’s teachings on birth control. According to William Wilson, the President’s first ambassador to the Vatican, the State Department reluctantly agreed to an outright ban on the use of any U.S. aid funds by either countries or international health organizations for the promotion of birth control or abortion. As a result of this position, announced at the World Conference on Population in Mexico City, 1984, the U.S. withdrew funding.

Vatican policy gravely threatens U.S. security. If we do not reject its anti-population-control pressure and go back to the proposals of NSSM 200, our nation, and perhaps the world, is not likely to survive the chaos and ecological disaster sensibly projected in that very important document.*

*NSSM 200 Executive Summary.

From:
The Human Quest
1074 23rd Avenue North
St. Petersburg FL 33704
MAY-JUNE, 1992

In Crossing the threshold of credibility, published as a letter to the editor of THE LANCET, Stephen D. Mumford observes:

"Once the nature of the principle of papal infallibility and its origins are understood, it is evident that no solution to the birth control dilemma, short of the demise of the papacy as we know it, is likely."

Further:

"Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II, as co-author of the minority report[2] of the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control[5] (which was subsequently adopted) recognized that acceptance of contraception meant destruction of the principle of papal infallibility ... The Vatican cannot change its position on birth control without destroying itself."

THE LANCET

Crossing the threshold of credibility

by Stephen D. Mumford

SIR: In your editorial you repeat Verkuyl’s assertion that “there is little doubt that the next Pope or the Pope after him/her will support family planning”.[1] Acceptance of Verkuyl’s assertion could cause great harm by postponing the day when the stewards of our planet recognise that confrontation with the Holy See on the issues of contraception and abortion is vital to the survival of our species.

Once the nature of the principle of papal infallibility and its origins are understood, it is evident that no solution to the birth control dilemma, short of the demise of the papacy as we know it, is likely.[2-4] In 1966, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II, as co-author of the minority report[2] of the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control[5] (which was subsequently adopted) recognised that acceptance of contraception meant destruction of the principle of papal infallibility: “If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti connubii was promulgated), in 1951 (Pius XlI’s address to the midwives), and in 1958 (the address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). It should likewise have to be admitted that for half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved”.[2]

Pope John Paul II also recognises that destruction of the papal infallibility principle means extinction of the Papacy. In his letter of May 15, 1980, to the German Bishops’ conference, John Paul II said: “I am convinced that the doctrine of infallibility is in a certain sense the key to the certainty with which the faith is confessed and proclaimed, as well as to the life and conduct of the faithful. For once this essential foundation is shaken or destroyed, the most basic truths of our faith likewise begin to break down”.[2] The Vatican cannot change its position on birth control without destroying itself. Verkuyl should expect no change.

Stephen D. Mumford

Center for Research on Population and Security, P0 Box 13067, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA

1. Verkuyl, D.A.A., "Two world religions and family planning," Lancet, 1993; 342:473 75.
2. Hasler, A.B., How the Pope became infallible, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981. (Originally published in German under the title, "Wie der Papst unfehlbar wurde: Macht und Ohnmacht eines Dogmas," Verlag, Munchen: R Piper & Company, 1979.)
3. Vaillancourt, J.G., Papal power: a study of Vatican control over lay Catholic elites, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
4. Murmford, S.D., The life and death of NSSM 200: how the destruction of political will doomed a US population policy, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: Center for Research on Population and Security, 1994.
5. Murphy, F.X., Erhart, J.F., "Catholic perspectives on population issues," Pop Bull, 1975; 30:3 31.


SIR Your Feb 4 editorial draws attention to the illogical attitude of the Catholic Church towards the fertilised ovum. In the case of stillbirths (I have had two) the Church does not recognise the stillborn child as a human being. It gives no blessing and makes no ceremony or ritual--in short, will have nothing to do with it. If the fertilised ovum is a human being then the stillborn baby is a dead human being, yet the Church does not recognise its existence. It cannot be concerned with the fertilised ovum and ignore the stillborn baby.

Raymond Mills

23 Inverleith Place, Edinburgh EH3 5QD, UK

From:
THE LANCET
42 Bedford Square London
WCIB 3SL UK
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p. 728
Vol 345 March 18, 1995