Oh, yes, there most certainly was pressure. In many large families — and there were a lot of those — the ideal was to give one son to the priesthood, and one daughter to the convent. As I have said in these forums previously, getting married and having a family wasn’t the universal ideal that it is now. For a man, it meant working very, very hard all of his life to provide for a large family without using birth control, and the “rhythm” method was primitive and notoriously unreliable. Likewise, a woman could foresee having to bear many children, with all of the hardships and sacrifices that this entails. Compared to this, a priestly or religious vocation could look very tempting — a fairly easy life, free education, a job for life, security in one’s old age. I am not suggesting that these people didn’t have vocations. It was just an easier choice to make. You basically had a very good life, the only down side being that you had to give up marriage. For many, that didn’t look like a bad deal at all. You were able to serve God totally, and in the case of religious (as opposed to priests), it would seem much easier to save your soul. (It is actually harder for a priest to save his soul, in that he has responsibility for the souls under his care that a layman does not have.)
Nowadays, especially if a person is willing to use artificial birth control, marriage is a much more inviting prospect. You have only the children you want, when you choose to have them. If a man can get into a secure, financially advantageous career, or if a woman is able to marry such a man, married life can be a very good, easy, prosperous life. If a woman chooses to have a career of her own, she can do that, or if her husband makes enough money, she can be a stay-at-home mom. If everything falls into place, life can be pretty near perfect. The children can be educated well, and if they replicate their parents’ success, they can continue the cycle and have very happy, prosperous lives of their own. When the family is “done” having children, one or both partners can have themselves sterilized, and no longer is there the prospect of having unwanted children. There is no longer the phenomenon of “oh, no, I’m pregnant again, how in the world are we going to feed one more mouth?”.
However, and this is a big “however”, if they have chosen to defy God and His Church, and use artificial birth control, they have made a deal with the devil. How God will punish this in the next life, we cannot know, for we cannot judge souls. We do know that it is a mortal sin and merits eternal punishment. People die suddenly and don’t have the ability to manifest final repentance. They die in their sins.
If everyone abstained from immoral methods of birth regulation, I think you would see a lot more vocations, or perhaps I should say, fewer vocations would be lost to the allurements of prosperity and happiness in the secular world.
