Pontifical Secrecy

THE NIXON administration is not alone in its battle against troublesome security leaks. The Times of London recently published a front page article entitled "The Vatican Widens Its Birth Control Campaign" which included several excerpts from a "confidential" Vatican document. The papal instruction was issued last October to establish a uniform Church position towards the United Nations' World Population Year. According to The Times, the document urges "mobilisation of all legitimate forms of pressure on governments and international agencies in order to have Catholic teaching on birth control spread as far as possible and accepted as widely as possible."

The document itself sheds no new light on the subject of birth control or family planning, but reiterates the stand taken by Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae; it states flatly that "some questions are not open to controversy." However, it encourages Catholics to "avoid giving the impression that the concern of the Church regarding contemporary demographic trends is determined by its teaching on the morality or immorality of birth control methods."

The instructions presumably came in response to the more conciliatory stand taken by some Catholic officials at the national level. The Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference recently published a directive calling for respect for "the inalienable right of married couples" to make final decisions on matters of family planning, and suggesting that birth control, while not ideal, might be legitimately practiced "for the common good of the family."

WHAT IS CURIOUS is that the Vatican document should have ever been judged "confidential." It contains nothing more inflammatory than the established Church position on family planning, and simply instructs churchmen to add their own unified voice to the current discussion of population issues. Yet it was such a well kept secret that many bishops had never heard of it before its publication in the media.

Troubled by recent such disclosures of sensitive information, and amid rumors of illegal papal wiretapping schemes, the Vatican has issued a new set of regulations tightening up security procedures. The instructions, which appeared within a week of The Times article, quoted from Ecclesiastes that there is "a time to keep silence and a time to speak."

The rules listed a wide range of matters falling within the classification of "pontifical secret," and called for "appropriate sanctions," including excommunication, to be applied to violators. The strictest secrecy is imposed on "all those who have culpably gained knowledge of documents or questions protected by pontifical secret or who, having gained knowledge without any guilt, know with certainty that they are still covered by pontifical secrecy."

Pontifical secrecy? Papal wiretaps? It all sounds strangely familiar.

The Catholic Church has recognized for centuries what power there is in a monopoly of information. By her standards, therefore, the Nixon administration must appear hopelessly amateurish in its desperate attempts to deal with the Watergate scandals.

If the Vatican's defensive posture on this matter invites comparison to that of the White House, it is not at all clear to whom the comparison is more unflattering.