I was going to post this in treadingwater's thread about her upcoming birth, but it belongs here.  

Article on witch-hunts on Wikipedia.

"While the previously mentioned theories mainly rely on micro level psychological interpretations, another theory has been put forward that provides an alternative macroeconomic explanation.[45]  According to this theory, the witches, who often had highly developed midwifery  skills, were prosecuted in order to extinguish knowledge about birth control in an effort to repopulate Europe after the population catastrophe triggered by the plague pandemic of the 14th century (also known as the Black Death).[46]  Citing Jean Bodin's "On Witchcraft", this view holds that the witch hunts were not only promoted by the church but also by prominent secular thinkers to repopulate the European continent.[47]  By these authors, the witch hunts are seen as an attempt to eliminate female midwifery skills and as a historical explanation why modern gynecology - surprisingly enough - came to be practiced almost exclusively by males in state run hospitals. In this view, the witch hunts began a process of criminalization of birth control that eventually lead to an enormous increase in birth rates that are described as the "population explosion" of early modern Europe."

So midwives were associated with witches, and were known for helping women use birth control to reduce the population.  

Do you see where I'm going with this?  THE ENCYCLICAL WHERE PIUS XII TAUGHT NFP, WHICH SOME SAY IS BIRTH CONTROL, WAS CALLED ALLOCUTION TO MIDWIVES.  Was he a male witch, was this some kind of signal?  Look at how the Catholic countries now have the smallest population growths.

I realize that not all the connections I make in my mind are correct, but I really think there is something to this.  There's no denying the numbers, there's no denying the birth control mentality of many Catholics.  The problem is that what Pius XII did could be read two ways -- either Pius XII was opening the floodgates, or he was trying to prevent people from falling into the worse sin of condom use.   Just like with his other relaxed disciplines, you don't know if he was trying to destroy the Church, or if he was helping people adjust to the exigencies of their lives in the non-Catholic democracies.  

See?  I can look at both sides.  But I wish more people would at least acknowledge the striking weirdness of Pius XII's papacy.  Maybe they have.  I have to go back and check my other thread.

'Many scholars have argued that it was the women who seemed most independent from patriarchal norms -- especially elderly ones living outside the parameters of the patriarchal family -- who were most vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft. "The limited data we have regarding the age of witches ... shows a solid majority of witches were older than 50, which in the early modern period was considered to be a much more advanced age than today." (Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, p. 129.) "The reason for this strong correlation seems clear," writes Katz: "these women, particularly older women who had never given birth and now were beyond giving birth, comprised the female group most difficult to assimilate, to comprehend, within the regulative late medieval social matrix, organized, as it was, around the family unit." (The h0Ɩ0cαųst in Historical Context, Vol. I, pp. 468-69.) As more women than men tended to survive into a dependent old age, they could also be seen disproportionately as a burden by neighbors: "The woman who was labeled a witch wanted things for herself or her household from her neighbors, but she had little to offer in return to those who were not much better off than she. Increasingly resented as an economic burden, she was also perceived by her neighbors to be the locus of a dangerous envy and verbal violence." (Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England, p. 65.)

One theory, popularized by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in their 1973 pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, proposed that midwives were especially likely to be targeted in the witch-hunts. This assertion has been decisively refuted by subsequent research, which has established the opposite: that "being a licensed midwife actually decreased a woman's chances of being charged" and "midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters" than being victimized by them. (Gibbons, Recent Developments; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History.)