It is not “safe to say” that the Church would ever change its teaching on anything; it never has, and never will.
That’s a good one!
How about the relative motions of heavenly bodies?
Or all of the prohibitions regarding Catholics associating with Jews?
Or usurious interest rates such as we all pay monthly on our Visa card accounts?
Regarding birth control specifically, I mentioned this in a previous thread, and I think it bears repeating:
I have lived in three foreign countries, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. In the two German-speaking countries, I NEVER, in almost 10 years, heard birth control discussed from the pulpit or mentioned in Catholic publications. It seems to be a non-issue there, and it is rare to find a German family, especially in urban areas, with more than two or three children.
Also, billboards promoting condom use, for both the prevention of AIDS and of unwanted pregnancies, are very common, and some of them quite amusing, for example, a condom covering an ear of corn, with the caption, “Poppt sicher!” (“It’s sure to pop!”)
I don’t understand the Dutch language, but the people there are known for their tolerance and broad-mindedness, so I doubt the situation there is much different from that of their German neighbors.
I once worked, here in the USA, with a young man from Ecuador, a devout Catholic, who told me that he and his wife were AMAZED at the American Church’s attitude toward contraception. In Ecuador, he said, abortion is of course strongly condemned, but contraception is taken for granted, in a largely poor country where couples just can’t afford large families.
What the situation is in other mostly-Catholic countries such as Ireland, France and Poland, I don’t know, perhaps another poster knows.
So rather than ‘changing its teaching’, it seems to me that one day, hopefully not far in the future, the Church will simply have the good sense to do in the USA what it seems to be doing elsewhere, let Humanae Vitae take its place in Church history with all of the other outdated and now ignored encyclicals, and let American Catholics follow their consciences and their God-given COMMON SENSE in matters of family planning.