A Deep Split Between U.S. and the Vatican : To Clinton, the U.N. population conference signals a mere disagreement. To the church, it is a moral tragedy.

If President Clinton believes that he and Pope John Paul II have simply agreed to disagree at September’s U.N. Conference on Population and Development, or that there has been any narrowing of the gap between U.S. population policy and the Vatican’s rejection of abortion as a universal “reproductive right,” then we may be heading for the most serious confrontation between the U.S. government and the Holy See since Woodrow Wilson helped block Pope Benedict XV’s participation in the Versailles peace conference after World War I.

The Administration would like to think that, in international public life as well as in American domestic affairs, the Catholic position on abortion is a sectarian anomaly of no real political consequence. The Holy See’s understanding of the matter is entirely different. For Pope John Paul II, the abortion debate engages basic questions of universal human rights, including the integrity of the family as the basic building-block of civil society and democracy. Viewed through that prism, the American insistence on abortion as an instrument of family planning around the world is the real act of cultural imperialism.

The draft document that will be debated at Cairo in September was bitterly contested during a preparatory conference in New York in April. Those who have plowed through the result of those labors--118 pages of turgid U.N.-speak--have discovered a population-control program of astonishing ambition and scope. Indeed, were the Cairo conference to adopt the draft document in its essentials, it would enshrine in international law a view of human relationships and human sexuality that is far more reflective of Western feminist orthodoxies and the eugenic fevers within the “population control” movement than of any sustainable international moral consensus. In that respect, the draft Cairo document is the worst form of elitism: the enlightened (upper-class Westerners and U.N. bureaucrats) instructing the benighted masses about the pursuit of real happiness.

And here--rather than in any arcane Catholic moral theology--is the root of thePope’s profound concerns about the Cairo conference. For Cairo is emphatically not about demographics and numbers. Nor is it about the relationship between population and development (only six of the 118 pages of the draft document deal with the formal topic of the meeting). Rather, the Cairo conference is about lifestyles and about promoting the sexual revolution through coercive state power.

An exaggeration? Hardly. The draft document mandates states to override the prerogatives of parents on adolescent sexual education and envisions large-scale propaganda campaigns: “Governments . . . should . . . use the entertainment media, including radio and television soap operas and drama, folk theater and other traditional media” to persuade the recalcitrant.

In a truly Orwellian move, the document even demands that governments “ensure” that “health-care providers” have the proper “attitudes” toward their teen-age patients. That the “attitudes” in question are those in Planned Parenthood clinics or school-based condom-distribution offices seems a reasonable assumption.

It is precisely this soft totalitarianism, which violates America’s historic commitment to human freedom, that the Pope urged Clinton to reject. Nor is the Pope alone in his concerns; on the very day that John Paul met with Clinton, Argentina’s President Carlos Menem wrote all Latin American heads of government, requesting that they develop a common approach to the Cairo conference to address problems of population, development and women’s health without conceding the argument over humane family-planning to the most radical population-controllers. In an Administration not notable for its foreign-policy dexterity, Menem’s letter ought to provoke some serious reflection.

Thus Clinton and his advisers would be making a grave error if they persist in regarding the Catholic Church’s approach to the Cairo conference as tactical or confessional. It may be a quirk of history (though some of us believe it Providence) that the world’s most influential moral teacher today is John Paul II. For the world’s leading political power and the world’s greatest moral authority to conflict on a fundamental question of human rights is a tragedy. And the way to resolve that conflict is not to agree to disagree. It is for the Clinton Administration to disentangle itself from the ideology of population control that it is trying to impose on the world in the name of “reproductive rights.”