I’ve read and studied HV since 1978. In concept it’s reverential to God and family and sort of a country ideal for very healthy and resilient couples. But in reality, who may justly (not a celibate old man in a palace surely?) order a woman today to have 6 or 8 children - or if trying to keep down the number of births so she isn’t totally overwhelmed, tell her to refuse her husband on the days he is most interested? NFP, if applied with scientific rigor, can work but it’s not fun. Should we really have faith and live at such a level of bestial instinct which is nature’s openness to life?
Well, I certainly think he was prophetic when he commented on the consequences for a contraceptive society. From an article in Aleteia from 2014:
“Paul VI met the same sort of contempt. Perhaps that’s why his warnings went unheeded. In hindsight, they were ignored at society’s collective expense.
He warned that severing sex from fertility, disconnecting passion from responsibility, would make it easier to rationalize sexual immorality. At that time, things like fornication, adultery, and pregnancy outside of marriage deviated from the norm. Today, they are comparatively normal.
He also believed the instrumentalization of sex would make it easier for men to treat women like objects. In our day, the proliferation of internet pornography is but one symptom of that dominant, disordered tendency.
The Pope foresaw that, if the world came to see contraception as morally neutral, then keeping it from becoming a tool of the state would be far more difficult. Indeed, across the globe, programs for the elimination of poverty often amount to plans for eliminating poor people.
Finally, the Pope cautioned that contraception would habituate humanity to unlimited, intrusive control over the human body. In reality, almost 25 years after Humanae Vitae the U.S. Supreme Court decreed these chilling words: For two decades, people have “organized intimate relationships and made choices… in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” “
God bless