This is a symposium in which Archbishop Roberts and ten American Catholics argue that the usual teaching in the Church about contraceptives is in need of revision. They seek to show that their use in some circumstances may be morally justified. A great many Catholics will, like the present reviewer, open it eagerly; the more critical may not find their enthusiasm invariably sustained. Contributions to any symposium vary in value and the first duty of any reviewer is to indicate which, in his opinion, are important and which may safely be left until we have a lot of time to spare.

In this book there are three chapters which an educated Catholic in England must read if he is to inform his conscience properly in this matter: these are by Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth A. Daugherty and Leslie Dewart. If these alone had been published, I believe the effect on English-speaking Catholicism would have been electrifying; as it is their voice may be muffled by the wool in which they are wrapped. Next I would place articles by Gregory Baum and (with serious reservations), Justus George Lawler, the contents of which are good but not unfamiliar. After this we descend rapidly through the ponderous and the incoherent to two almost compulsively skippable essays by professors respectively of dogmatic and moral theology.

In his introduction. Archbishop Roberts says that the natural law arguments against contraception are inconclusive. He gives reasons for this which I do not find cogent. In the first place he holds that since precepts of the natural law do not depend for their validity upon revelation they must easily be known without revelation.