How Pope Paul VI's most controversial work led me from atheism to the Catholic Church

[Michie]

When I was first exploring Catholicism after a life of atheism, it never occurred to me that I would accept the Church’s teachings against artificial contraception. Like most other people of my generation, I understood contraception to be a universal good. From high-school health classes to messages in popular media...

How Pope Paul VI's most controversial work led me from atheism to the Catholic Church...

 

[Ave Maria]

Blessed Paul VI was truly a prophet when he wrote Humanae Vitae. Contraception has truly had a devastating effect on society. Not only has it caused men to use women as objects for sexual pleasure but it has also resulted in the contraceptive mentality where an unplanned pregnancy is looked at as a bad thing rather than as a gift from God.

 

[Sword of the Lord]

Great article. I'm not Catholic, but I'm wondering where this leaves my wife and me. As many of you know, we are 24, married, been together 8.5 years, and have 3 children. We don't use contraception EVER, but I do pull out every time. Is spilling seed a no-no?

 

[Fantine]

I always have difficulty understanding how anyone can look at an era of cataclysmic change and look at one small aspect--contraception--as the sole cause of society's ills.

It's sort of like those who look at Vatican II as the source of all the Church's problems without paying a bit of attention to all the societal changes that would have occurred with or without Vatican II ever having been convened.

Contraception didn't occur in a vacuum, and I think it would be impossible to weigh its effects apart from all the other changes that occurred simultaneously.

On the other hand, if one's vision is 'sexual sin-centric,' one might always look at sexual sin as the causative factor in every situation.

Certainly contraception has had an effect on society--along with numerous other equally strong factors that occurred concurrently.

And while I am delighted that Ms. Fulwiller was brought back to God by Pope Paul VI's encyclical, there were many, many, many others who decided that Catholicism was irrelevant for the very same reason.

 

[Michie]

Like most reasonably bright sophomores in college, I knew pretty much everything about everything and I was certainly an expert on anything I chose to take a position on. That included, among matters ecclesiastic, contraception. Not that I had ever read Pope Paul’s Humanae vitae, mind...

Blessed Paul VI was not the greatest pope ever, but I owe him a special debt of gratitude...

 

[Michie]

It’s an exciting time to be a Catholic. Yesterday’s beatification of Pope Paul VI is yet another indication of this time. We now have three popes that served nearly one after the other in the 20th century as saints of the Catholic Church. Although Paul VI has not been officially canonized, we know that he is there in Heaven with his predecessor, Pope St.

10 quotes from Blessed Pope Paul VI on the Blessed Virgin Mary...