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FORTY YEARS ago today, Pope Paul VI issued probably the most controversial encyclical letter in the history of the Catholic Church. In Humanae Vitae, he reaffirmed the Church's official ban on artificial contraception, stunning the Catholic world at a time when there were strong expectations of some easing in the traditional teaching.

The ban was becoming such a sensitive issue at a time of a world-wide pressure for population control that Pope John XXIII had set up a Pontifical Study Commission in 1963 to study United Nation policies on the matter. It was also to make recommendations to the Holy See on what action the church should take in the light of increased acceptance of contraceptive birth control in western society. Pope Paul increased the size of the commission but also removed any discussion of the matter from the Vatican II Council, then meeting, by announcing that he would issue his own statement on the birth control issue. Nevertheless, the Council document "Gaudium et Spes" (Joy and Hope) on the place of the church in the modern world, in its reference to marriage, dropped the traditional phraseology on the primacy of procreation over conjugal love.