When a child is planned through the use of contraception the relationship between the child and parents is profoundly altered, and the child may be unhappy and resentful, according to Dr Desmond Connell, Archbishop of Dublin.
He also linked the use of contraception to broken families, promiscuity and a blindness towards "the injustice of abortion", and said it had led to the denial of respect and equality to women.
It has introduced insincerity into the love of couples who practise it by putting selfish gratification before "patience, under standing and the sacrifice of even legitimate interests".
Dr Connell was speaking to the Life Society at St Patrick's College Maynooth last night on the 30th anniversary of the papal encyclical which denounced contraception, Humanae Vitae.
He opened his address by quoting St Thomas More about the relationship between power and moral goodness in the context of King Henry VIII, and compared it to the relationship between scientific technology and "right reason, confirmed and enlarged by divine revelation" today.
While priests defending the truth of the church today may not face death, as Thomas More did, they were threatened with "ridicule, dissent and betrayal".
He acknowledged the difficulties which the issue of contraception had caused for the church, and said that this had given rise to "a dissenting mentality" and the phenomenon known as "a la carte Catholicism".
However, he warned against changing church teaching on the grounds of expediency and said that the fundamental question was whether contraception was right or wrong.
He reiterated the church's view that it was wrong, because it broke the bond between intercourse and procreation, a bond which situated sexual relations "within a whole order of meaning, which includes the nature of love as an interpersonal mutual gift of self, the complementarity between male and female, the institutions of marriage and family".
It seemed to him that the issue of contraception was the linchpin of the whole of sexual morality.
In a passage which is likely to provoke controversy, he argued that reproductive technology, including contraception, had altered the relationships within families for the worse, turning children into products rather than gifts, and inevitably producing resentment against parents which may lead to teenage revolt.
Referring to the "wanted child" he said: "The wanted child is the child that is planned; the child produced by the decision of the parents begins to look more and more like a technological product." He cited in vitro fertilisation and other forms of reproductive technology.
"A profound alteration in the relationship between parent and child may result when the child is no longer welcomed as a gift but produced as it were to order." He added: "No child can be happy as a product."
He said that control over the forces of nature was the mainspring of the progress of civilisation, but warned, "if it is exercised without due moral constraint it tends towards destruction".