A new European approach to birth control has here and there gone from theory to practice. Sales of the pill in the Catholic south of Holland reportedly rose 40% last year.

Revisions in theology start inconspicuously enough—usually as footnote-laden articles in grey, learned journals with modest circulations. Future church historians may well date a profound change in Roman Catholic thinking on marriage from the current issue of a scholarly Belgian periodical called Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, There, the Rev. Louis Janssens,…