Rev. Peter M.J. Stravinskas, The Catholic Thing - To hear some people talk, one would get the impression that the Church’s prohibition against artificial contraception, as reaffirmed in Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) came out of the blue. In fact, there’s a strong and consistent ban on all such practices from the earliest days of the Church, right into the twentieth century, with statements to the same effect by Pope Paul VI’s three immediate predecessors, as well as Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes. ...