Birth control and church’s power grab

Never mind that the bishops have been had. Conservative Republicans, knowing which buttons to push, have successfully conscripted the Catholic hierarchy into the battle to unseat President Obama. As the right cheers the bishops on, they can dream that the long-settled issue of birth control is still lively.

The administration, and many Catholics who ignore church teaching on birth control, attempted to show respect anyway. But the bishops rejected Obama’s compromise, refusing to yield their point even after winning it. Such deluded lust for power would be sad, but they brought this embarrassment on themselves. A short history of the Catholic contraception argument shows how.

The book “The Time Has Come’’ was, in fact, published in 1963 by Harvard gynecologist John Rock, inventor of the birth-control pill. He argued that the pill, in using “natural’’ responses of a woman’s body, was not “artificial.’’ Therefore the pill was birth control the church could approve. That this was a genuine opening to change was reinforced when Pope John XXIII convened the six-member (three clergy, three laity) Papal Commission on Population, the Family, and Natality, and when the Second Vatican Council put “responsible parenthood’’ on its agenda. The time had come.

But in 1964, the new pope, Paul VI, diluted the papal commission by expanding its membership to 72, almost all clerics, including 16 cardinals and bishops (and only five women). This stacked the deck against any change in church teaching on contraception, which became even more unlikely when the pope abruptly ordered the council not to take up the question, reserving it to himself alone.