Pope Francis Is Shifting Catholic Thought

By James Donahue

He is still the pontiff and he still promotes the basic dogma of the Christian belief system, but the Catholic Church’s new pope is beginning to force his flock to reappraise some age-old concepts that needed to be tossed in the trash ages ago.

One of his most recent shock waves was a call for Catholic families to stop breeding like rabbits. Although he stopped short during a news conference of allowing the use of contraception devices, the Pope made it clear that he promotes "responsible" parenthood.

In this overpopulated world, a call by the Pope for the poverty-stricken Catholic families of the world to start producing fewer children was a major step for the Vatican to take. The church has always taken the verse in Genesis 1:28 as a literal commandment from God to "be fruitful and multiply."

What has been terribly wrong about that interpretation of the line in Genesis is that it refers to an early moment of Creation when God allegedly made a single male and female of each species, and then sent them out into the world to replicate. At the time there was room for a few billion people and lots of animals.

Now we have overdone it. The numbers, which now reach some 7 billion in human numbers alone, have caused for intense overpopulation problems. We have crowded out the other species of God’s creation, we have stripped the planet’s once abundant supply of natural resources, we have poisoned the earth, the sky and the water, and we are all consequently rushing headlong toward extinction.

Yes, it was due time for the leader of one of the world’s largest religious bodies to call for mankind to start putting the brakes on the issue of reproduction. The only problem as we look at it, the Pope didn’t go far enough. He should have at least demanded the use of contraception devices in every home and offered a free distribution of prophylactics to every male.

The latter would have gone a long way toward stamping out sexually transmitted disease and making the world not only less populated, but much healthier.