A Crisis of Conscience: A Catholic Doctor Speaks Out for Reform

In an anecdotal, wide-ranging polemic, a Catholic doctor explores his departures from current Church teachings. Barber was formerly staunch and even rigid in his obedience to Catholic moral teachings; as an intern in the 1940s, he refused to work in the hospital's contraception clinic, nor would he scrub on either abortions (legal, at that time, to save a mother's life) or tubal ligations. By 1962, when he was appointed director of obstetrics and gynecology at Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital, he was outspoken in his opposition to liberalizing abortion law. In the '80s, however, when the New York archdiocese refused to appoint a favored candidate to the faculty of a church-affiliated medical school, Barber came to believe that, ``where my religion might always be right, the Church might well be wrong.'' Despite some extravagant claims, among them that he speaks for ``the majority of the 600 million Catholics who are denied a dialogue with the male hierarchy of the Church,'' Barber presents an ambitious agenda for change, with thoughtful views on such explosive issues as clerical celibacy, divorce, Catholic feminism and abortion. (Apr.)