Encyclical Supported

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31755, 12 August 1968, Page 13

Encyclical Supported

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright)

MEXICO CITY, August 12.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy of Mexico City, capital of a country with one of the highest annual population increases in the world, has urged the faithful to obey the Papal encyclical banning artificial contraception, the New York Times News Service reports.

After their annual meeting

that ended on Friday, 77 archbishops and bishops yesterday warned Mexican Roman Catholics that the encyclical was “not a simple opinion” from which one might dissent but “a solemn confirmation of a constant teaching of the (Church) authority.” The opinion of the hierarchy had been generally expected by those who are involved either as administrators or as patients in Mexico’s limited and private birth control programme.

A survey of family planning organisations and clinics in Mexico City, made before the hierarchy took its stand, showed no disposition to halt or modify the programme—in which 80,000 women at the lower economic levels in the capital are believed to be participating. But one clinical director expressed fear that one of the main effects of the encyclical would be to drive even higher Mexico’s already high abortion rate. The foundation for the study of population, a private group that runs 20 clinics throughout the country, said that Mexico had 600,000 known abortions a year and that 32,000 women were estimated to die each year as a result.

The bishops expressed sympathy with those who found it difficult to raise their children decently.

“The Church,” they said, “shares the suffering of those couples who today find themselves in unfavourable conditions to receive more children. With maternal solicitude, it consoles them, it encourages them to obey the requirements of well understood conjugal love and responsible parenthood and it brings them its help to comfort them with the supernatural means of which it is the depository and the administrator.”

The bishops denied that the encyclical was inhuman or showed little understanding.

Less categorical than his colleagues, however. Bishop Sergio Mendez Arceo, of Cuernavaca, a Church liberal, said in a previous statement that the encyclical “will be received by all true Christians, I hope, in a spirit of deep faith, faith in the mystery of the Holy Spirit and his ultimate guidance of the Church’s teaching authority.

“In the meantime, we must seek to understand the precise teaching of the encyclical and the extent to which the faithful are bound by the norms that it expresses.” Bishop Mendez was reported to be in Rome and did not attend the meeting of the hierarchy.

In Sydney, Roman Catholic laymen who had criticised Pope Paul’s encyclical would be asked to do “public penance” on television and in the press, the “Sun-Herald” newspaper reported today. The newspaper said local priests also would be required by their bishop to take an oath swearing “external and internal" assent to the encyclical. The “Sun-Herald” did not name the bishop, who, it said, would ask rebellious Roman Catholics “to publicly _ recant their views on the pill.”