It is embarrassing to utter a screaming banality in public: yet love, in all candour, is what the Catholic Church, to say nothing of the world in general, does desperately need. Think of a Christian. Then of Christians as a group. Busy. Long-suffering. Self-effacing. Can you think of them making little sacrifices for one another? Of course. Or perhaps laying down their lives for their brethren? Yes, again. Some of them at least. But do you think of them unzipped and uninhibited, actually loving each other? Ah, well now. . . . Auch unter ihnen sind Helden; viele von ihnen litten zuviel-: so wollen sie andre leiden machen. Amen, Zarathustra.

A French magazine carried out a survey among its readers (Catholics, nearly all of them) on birth control: What the readers thought or did about it, what they thought the Church in general should do about it. What is to the point here is not that the views expressed showed wide divergence, nor even that they revealed such a mass of human suffering: