Pope on Birth Control

William Montalbano’s account of Pope John Paul’s barnstorming birth-control plea to his Mexican audience is no doubt true if unbelievable (Part A, May 11).

His Holiness is quoted as saying that Roman Catholic couples “must keep in mind that if the possibility of conceiving a child is artificially eliminated . . . the couple is shutting itself off from God and opposing his will.” But how does anyone, the Pope included, know what shuts off a person from God?

This awesomely simplistic view on birth control by a man who speaks for millions is as out of touch with today’s realities as Ptolemaic astronomy.

One needn’t be a follower of Karl Marx to feel the sting of his observation that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world. It is the opium of the people.”

That continence or baby-making should be in 1990 the only options for uncounted multitudes of the world’s disenfranchised is scarcely good news. I was taught that the “good news” of Christianity had something to do with liberation from oppression, not least institutional oppression, and the offer of abundant life.

REV. DUANE A. WALKER

First Presbyterian Church

Oceanside