What kind of Church has the Catholic Church become in the last 40 years? One change is immediately obvious when I attend Mass on Sundays. When I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies, it would not be unusual to find a pew filled by one family – mother, father, and five, six, seven or eight children. Today, a family at Mass is far more likely to be parents with one or two children, with maybe the more affluent having three or four. And certainly, in the West, many of those smaller families are enjoying extraordinary affluence, as childhood is suffused with so many material goods – electronic gadgets, advanced toys – and a full programme of after-school treats.

Was that the kind of limited family that the advocates of birth control wanted? Evidence shows that the problem of family size during the twentieth century was not about having the means to buy faster cars or smarter holidays, but concerned the broken health of mothers, and the survival of both the family and the love of the spouses. It was, above all, about being free from fear.

Take this letter from a mother, aged 37, written in 1922: “I have had 14 children, nine living. The eldest is 17, the youngest six months. I am likely to have more at my age. I had my last at the maternity home and the matron and doctor told me that I have a very weak heart and if I have any more it could prove fatal. My husband is only a jobbing gardener … If I should sink with having another, what would become of the little ones?”

Or this, written in 1923: “My last two children I had in 18 months. My husband being out of work, I had to leave my children to be looked after by their father while I had to go into a poor law institute to have my baby because I did not have the means of providing for it at home. I feel it is a great injustice and unChristian to think that rich women should have knowledge [of birth control] and a poor woman should live in ignorance.”

For others, the issue has always been more complicated and proper to the realm of theology rather than economics. Catholics through the years have struggled with their consciences, trying to find a means to honour church teaching, yet wanting to ensure that their families and their loving relationships with their spouses thrive.

Here is an insight from a Catholic mother of eight, written in 1964: “I have never resorted to artificial contraception. I know of Catholics who have; however, most of my friends have relied unsuccessfully on the so-called ‘natural’ methods. We have at last been forced to twin beds. One priest suggested separate bedrooms, which was absurd as I didn’t have enough bedrooms for the children, let alone one apiece for us … I have been at least twice on the brink of suicide … I am torn most of the time. My conscience not allowing me to be disobedient to my authorities – my better judgement telling me it is not natural for married couples to live the way we have to.”

One can imagine the disappointment and frustration that people in this kind of predicament must have felt when Humanae Vitae was published. But to focus only on its rejection of artificial birth control would be to do the encyclical a disservice. For it is not without its understanding of love and acknowledges the unitive purpose of sexual intercourse.

The encyclical was published at a time when Victorian prudery had been undermined by dramatic social changes in postwar Britain – and in Europe – and literature and film offered radically different ideas about the nature of sexual love from the conventions of Christianity. Humanae Vitae acknowledged how changes in society affect marriage and family life. It refreshingly recognises the “new understanding of the dignity of woman and her place in society”.

One can see the influence of the Commission on Birth Control set up by Pope John XXIII in its recognition of the challenges to church teaching from arguments about the need for moral responsibility in family planning and about how openness to procreation concerns the whole of a marriage rather than every individual sex act.

But ultimately the encyclical insisted that there must be no division between the unitive and procreative aspect of sexual intercourse. The alternatives were abstinence or natural family planning, restricting sex to the infertile periods of a woman’s cycle. Its critics argue, of course, that the very fact that women have this infertile period suggests that for a woman at least nature makes a division between the unitive and procreative aspects of sex.

In the past 40 years that division between sex and reproduction has become ever more marked, certainly in Western societies. That has meant, for Western women at least, that they are mostly free from the fear, the strain and the physical problems that additional children can bring to a family.

But with liberty has also come licence. Single women, in particular, seem often burdened by the modish expectations of society: that sex should be readily available; that sex is a form of recreation, rather than the bedrock of a relationship marked by stability and fidelity.

The cost to family life is also considerable. Large families are now often considered freakish. Mothers who have more than four children sometimes find themselves treated by people as stupid, or to be pitied. The emphasis today is on material wellbeing, with many children treated as “little emperors” by their parents. No wonder that Pope Benedict spoke out last week in Sydney against the insidious consumerism that is so damaging our society.

One of the greatest ironies of the last 40 years is that the pressures on couples now seem to have reversed. For many of them, the difficulty is not avoiding pregnancy but getting pregnant at all. Research suggests that professional couples are often too exhausted for lovemaking during their most fertile years so that procreative sex is the problem today. The interest in the natural cycle of a woman is to often

track her fertility in order to conceive. Pharmacy shelves are filled with kits to analyse ovulation. Even natural family planning practitioners are often asked to help people conceive, rather than help avoid pregnancy. They do so by encouraging a more holistic approach to life, helping people find ways of dealing with stress, the most insidious cause of damage to the contemporary relationship.

Does this therefore make Humanae Vitae prophetic, given the sexual dysfunctioning of society? The theologian Tina Beattie has argued the opposite – that in fact “Humanae Vitae has had a disastrous effect on the Church’s capacity to influence the public sphere with respect to sexual morality”. It damaged the authority of the Church for many loyal and faithful Catholics, she says, and also gave those outside the Church reason for ignoring it. While it is not the role of the Church to bend to the will of society, it clearly has a role to play in dialogue with the world. Both are losing from this breakdown in communication.

This article was first published in The Tablet on July 26, 2008