Vatican gaffe appears to sanction contraception

The Vatican blundered into controversy yesterday when the Italian version of the Church’s new Youth Catechism (YouCat) appeared to give the nod for young Catholics to use birth control.

Media across the world leapt upon a mistake in the Italian translation of the question and answer book, which had translated “birth regulation” as “birth control”.

The question “may a Christian married couple regulate the number of children they have?” was mistranslated in Italian as “may a Christian married couple use methods of birth control?”

The answer was a clear affirmative: “Yes, a Christian married couple may and should be responsible in using the gift and privilege of transmitting life.”

700,000 copies of the book, which was unveiled in the Vatican yesterday, will be distributed in 15 languages to young pilgrims at the next World Youth Day, to be held in August in Spain.

An embarrassed Vatican scrambled to produce an explanatory note which will be inserted in Italian copies of the text.

The Holy See advocates natural methods of contraception in line with Pope Paul VI’s 1968 Humaneae Vitae – subtitled On the Regulation of Birth – which condemns the use of artificial birth control.

At a press conference yesterday, the Vatican said there had been several other translation errors in the book, regarding euthanasia and the place of other religions in the eyes of Catholics.

A work group had been set up to make the necessary corrections, said Cardinal Christop Schonborn, Archbishop of Vienna, one of the driving forces behind the YouCat project.

The first French edition had already been pulped due to translation errors.

“The German language is very difficult, as we have discovered on several occasions,” joked Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi.

YouCat, a slim yellow book which sets out to explain the catechism for a youth audience, was launched by the Pope in the West because he felt that the Church’s official Catechism did not speak to today’s young people.

Young Catholics should know their faith “with the same precision with which a computer specialist knows the operating system of a computer,” the Pope said in the book’s foreword.

The Pontiff puts young people on their guard against “the seductions of consumerism”, pornography and the risk of “betraying the weak and remaining indifferent to life’s victims”.

“A crime novel is compelling because it involves the fate of other people, but it could be our own. This book is compelling because it speaks to us of our own destiny and therefore is closely related to others and ourselves,” he said.