Steve Shaw, the "poor in central and South America, and in many African nations" have more crucial things to do than argue with priests about birth control; and the priests have more crucial things to deal with, also. And I haven't encountered any U.S. Catholic women who have expressed any particular feelings of sinfulness for having used birth control. Birth control is more-or-less a forgotten issue in the Catholic Church, and has been for over thirty years.

There's no more argument about birth control in the Catholic Church. Pope Paul VI issued his Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968, which included maybe a paragraph on contraception and a mildly-worded statement that said the Catholics were not allowed to use "artificial birth control." There were some rumblings for a while, and then the issue was forgotten.

Give me some evidence to the contrary.

Oh, and give me some proof of this "cast iron grip" that you imagine.

Ake, I suppose you're right that the Catholic Church doesn't change what's moral and what's not. But when its interpretation of moral principle isn't working, the interpretation is gradually forgotten. And then, one day, the Church says that "we never actually taught that." That's how Limbo gradually disappeared from Catholic teaching, until the day that Pope Benedict declared that wasn't really what we had been teaching.

And the birth control think is not a basic moral principle. It's an interpretation (an official interpretation). It's clear to me that the birth control interpretation is now in the process of being forgotten. I predict that in the near future, Catholic prelates will forget what they said about gay marriage.

-Joe Offer-