Their 20-page report, significantly influenced by Coward’s research, will be distributed at Cairo. It covers many contentious issues, but here is what it and Coward say about just four:

Contraception

Although the Catholic church steadfastly opposes artificial contraception, almost all of the world’s religions endorse contraception to contribute to population stabilization, says the report.

Buddhists, Jews, Protestants and adherents of native religions actively encourage birth control. They see contraception as one means of reducing abortions.

And while Islam and Hinduism have not exactly trumpeted the virtues of contraception, Coward says they’re now more flexible on the practice than official Catholicism.

Islamic law, for example, generally allows contraception when it’s seen as necessary to protect the mother’s health, to space childbirth or to conserve an impoverished family’s resources.

The Vatican’s ban on artificial birth control, says Coward, is also widely ignored by Catholics in North America and Europe — even by Catholics who are loyal in other areas of religious discipline.

Abortion

This would seem to be the big stumbling block, yet abortion may not be as crucial to population regulation as screeching headlines would make us believe.

All religions consider abortion a serious moral concern. But the scholars in Belgium concluded that most religious traditions — unlike Roman Catholicism — do not forbid abortion altogether.

Some religions, like Hinduism and Islam, limit the conditions under which abortion may be permitted — saying it’s possible after a rape or if the mother’s health is in danger.

And the idea that abortion is a matter best left up to individual conscience exists within Protestantism, Judaism, Chinese religions and native traditions.

The lack of agreement on abortion among religions (and within each religion) shouldn’t be used to forever hold up population-stabilization measures, say the multifaith scholars.

To the contrary. Everywhere, desperate, often poor women continue to have abortions, frequently in dangerous circumstances. At the least, the report says, abortion should be decriminilized.

“Given the moral concern about abortion and the range of stances toward abortion taken by religious communities,” the report says, “the view of any particular religious tradition should not be imposed on others.”

Women’s freedom

Throughout the millenia, religions have failed to offer unambiguous support for equal rights, dignity or freedom for women. To put it kindly.

But now, at the same time that demographers are discovering birth rates go down as women’s rights go up, the multifaith scholars say many religious traditions are rediscovering once-obscured scriptures that promote the advancement of women.

It’s just a matter of time, suggests Coward, before the official positions of the major religions catches up with the grassroots movement to afford women full equality.

Humans and nature

Consensus on population and the environmental crisis will emerge when more people take seriously what each world religion has to teach about the relationship between humans and nature, says Coward.

Religions offer a firm answer to one major population-related problem — that a middle-class person, whether in the north or south, consumes the Earth’s resources 30 to 50 times faster than a poor person.

The gathering in Belgium found all religions speak out against waste and extravagance, greed and selfishness and unwillingness to share. All talk of attending to the needs of the poor.

Although religions have been blamed for promoting the exploitation of the Earth, Coward says most religions, including Christianity, have much to say about caring for the Earth and its resources.

As well, Buddhism and native religions have long been green. They’ve emphasized the interconnectedness of all things; that humans must live in harmony with nature.

Recently, Buddhism and native religions have been successful in resensitizing Christians, Hindus, Jews and Muslims to ancient texts in their traditions that suggest that not only the human race, but nature as well, is sacred.

Headlines should not mislead people into thinking that proclamations by either the Vatican, or its Muslim equivalent, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, are the last word on the population crisis, says Coward.

Throughout the millenia, those in religious authority have often played catch-up with the laity on social and moral issues. Family planning, he predicts, is just another area where official dogma will evolve.

And anyway, says Coward, the solution to the population crisis cannot come from the top down in strongly worded declarations by either religious or political leaders. That approach was tried in India and failed.

The solution must come from the bottom up.

The solution must reside in the hearts and minds of the people who actually create families.

Copies of the report can be obtained by writing to: The Park Ridge Center, Population and Development Project, 211 E. Ontario, Suite 800, Chicag

o, Illinois 60611. Phone (312) 266-2222.