So the Pope finally ignored the work and issued his own statement in 1968: the encyclical Humanae vitae (‘Of Human life’), which gave no place for artificial contraception in Catholic family life.13 To his astonishment and dismay, the case was not closed when Rome had spoken. There were open and angry protests both lay and clerical all over the northern Catholic world, and worse still, demographics soon revealed that millions of Catholic laity paid no attention to the papal ban. They have gone on rejecting it, the first time that the Catholic faithful have ever so consistently scorned a major
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