Birth Control

Many people think that the reason the pope was against birth control in 1968 was because it was the traditional teaching of the church, and the church was against change in tradition not to say morality too.  But there is a reason that is rarely heard: Europe lacked children.  Birth rates had been down due to World Wars, Depression Era, infant death, lack of men all after the end of WW II.  If Europe was going to recover, it needed people, young people.  With the improvement of medical care, more prosperous economies, the chances of living past birth and into adulthood picked up.  Italy was one of the latter countries to get onto the economic bandwagon, though it did too.  Most of the lifetime of Italian Pope Paul VI in his early formative life was in this era of low birth rates.  One of the engines of morality is often economics.