We need to do more than just explain why contraception is immoral. We need to speak about why having children, according to God’s plan is good. Humanae vitae failed to do this, only proposing an alternative to artificial contraception. It is false to say it is “prophetic,” though it is, at least, not heretical. These days, NFP methods are being pitched as forms of contraception by health conscious people, since it has finally dawned on some people that pumping one’s body full of hormones in order to thwart a healthy bodily function is bad (maybe someday they’ll realize that thwarting their immune system is bad too, if they’re still alive). As long as the Church keeps partnering with politicians who are, at best, cynical in their dealings with Catholics, priests and bishops will have no credibility in speaking against contraception. The United States used to believe that every man is good, in and of himself, and that the world’s wealth is only limited by man’s ingenuity. In this paradigm, freedom is a blessing, and children are a blessing, economically and otherwise. The paradigm that has been adopted in the Post War era says that the world’s wealth is strictly limited, and thus one’s goal is to accumulate as much of it as possible. Here, only the “right” children are considered to be blessings. The Church has been ineffective against this.