"Pope Paul VI was right about contraception." So says Mike McManus, once Catholic but now an evangelical Protestant and president of Marriage Savers, a nationwide marriage preparation and renewal program, active in 116 cities. He forsook Catholicism in part because of the church's firm opposition to artificial means of birth control. Now he's rethinking the matter entirely.

In 1968, Pope Paul VI predicted that widespread contraception would lead to soaring rates of premarital sex, out-of-wedlock births, divorce, abortion-on-demand, and euthanasia.

Sadly, his warning was rejected by a number of influential "liberal" priests, academic theologians and hosts of others who were certain that Paul VI was both overstating the case and meddling in none of his or the Church's business. They resolved to ignore, if not actively subvert Church teaching on the subject, and managed in their misguided zeal to not only confirm the truth of Paul VI's prophetic warning, but to help lay the foundation of what Pope John Paul II has aptly described as a "culture of death."

Contraceptives are a snare and delusion. By eliminating even the possibility of new life, they corrupt the meaning of marriage, reduce sex to sheer entertainment, and lead souls to abandon hope that God can and will provide for them in times of need, especially after they inevitably fail to prevent pregnancy and the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases.

By the way, marketing the "culture of death" has been immensely profitable for pharmaceutical companies and their abortionist allies, yet I don't suppose that they'd ever care to calculate the astronomical cost to the nation of destroyed marriages, families, and children. That's not their "business."

In all of this, the most troubling question is why so many of a supposedly Judeo-Christian worldview have still not recognized the danger.

I could hazard some guesses, but the one that springs immediately to mind is that they've simply never been warned from the pulpit.