Cardinals Back Vatican on Population Stance

Roman Catholic cardinals from around the world gave their backing Tuesday to a Vatican campaign to keep abortion and contraception off the agenda of a U.N. conference on stabilizing population.

A message supporting Pope John Paul II, who has been lobbying world leaders on the issue, was presented by Cardinal John J. O’Connor of New York and unanimously approved by the 114 cardinals at a two-day meeting on church matters.

“The failed social policies of many developed countries should not be foisted on the world’s poor,” the message said. Problems of population growth “cannot be legitimately resolved by the introduction or imposition of artificial, unnatural or immoral means.”

The Clinton Administration is committed to reversing policies of its Republican predecessors that denied U.S. funds to international organizations that support abortion. The issue has strained relations between Washington and the Vatican.

The U.N. International Conference on Population and Development is scheduled for September in Cairo.

The Cairo conference should not “lend itself to cultural imperialism or to ideologies that isolate the human person in a self-enclosed universe, wherein abortion on demand, sexual promiscuity and distorted notions of the family are proclaimed as human rights or proposed as ideals for the young,” the cardinals said.