Pope Francis is firmly upholding church teaching banning contraception, but said Monday that Catholics don't have to breed "like rabbits" and should instead practice "responsible parenting."

Speaking to reporters en route home from the Philippines, Francis said there are plenty of church-approved ways to regulate births. But he said most importantly, no outside institution should impose its views on regulating family size, blasting what he called the "ideological colonization" of the developing world.

African bishops, in particular, have long complained about how progressive, Western ideas about birth control and gay rights are increasingly being imposed on the developing world by groups, institutions or individual nations, often as a condition for development aid.

St. Peter's Basilica is seen behind a hand of a demonstrator holding a condom, on the edge of the Vatican's St. Peter's Square, in Rome, March 23, 2009. (AP / Alessandra Tarantino)

"Every people deserves to conserve its identity without being ideologically colonized," Francis said.

The pope's comments, taken together with his defence of the Catholic Church's ban on artificial contraception during the trip, signal that he is increasingly showing his more conservative bent, which has largely been ignored by public opinion or obscured by a media narrative that has tended to highlight his populist persona.

On the trip, Francis gave his strongest defence yet of the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which enshrined the church's opposition to artificial birth control. He warned against "insidious attacks" against the family -- a reference to gay marriage proposals -- echoing language often used by overwhelmingly conservative U.S. bishops. And he insisted that "openness to life is a condition of the sacrament of matrimony."

At the same time, however, he said it's not true that to be a good Catholic "you have to be like rabbits." On the contrary, he said "responsible parenthood" requires that couples regulate the births of their children, as church teaching allows. He cited the case of a woman he met who was pregnant with her eighth child after seven Cesarean sections.

"That is an irresponsibility!" he said. The woman might argue that she should trust in God. "But God gives you methods to be responsible," he said.

He said there are many "licit" ways of regulating births that are approved by the church, an apparent reference to the Natural Family Planning method of monitoring a woman's cycle to avoid intercourse when she is ovulating.

During the Vatican's recent meeting on the family, African bishops denounced how aid groups and lending institutions often condition their assistance on a country's compliance with their ideals: allowing health care workers to distribute condoms, or withdrawing assistance if legislation discriminating against gays is passed.

"When imposed conditions come from imperial colonizers, they search to make people lose their own identity and make a sameness," he said. "This is ideological colonization."

Lakewood Church co-pastor Victoria Osteen received backlash from the Christian community after video footage of an August sermon surfaced showing Osteen encouraging congregants to "do good for your own self."

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The U.S. has become significantly less Christian in the last eight years as the share of American adults who espouse no systematic religious belief increased sharply, a major new study found.

For what is likely first time in U.S. history – certainly the first since the early days of the country – the actual number of American Christians has declined. Christianity, however,  remains by far the nation’s dominant religious tradition, according to the new report by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
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The rapid increase in the number of adults without ties to traditional religious institutions has strong implications for other social institutions and for politics.

Whether a person attends religious services regularly is among the strongest predictors of how he or she will vote, with traditional religion strongly tied to the Republican Party, at least among white Americans.

The decline in traditional religious belief adds to the demographic challenges facing the GOP, which already faces difficulties because of its reliance on white voters in a country that has grown more racially diverse.
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The interaction between religion and politics may work both ways. Some scholars believe that close ties between traditional religion and conservatism, particularly on issues such as same-sex marriage, have led many younger Americans to cut their ties with organized religion.

Almost 1 in 5 American adults were raised in a religious tradition but are now unaffiliated, the study found. By contrast, only 4% have moved in the other direction.

Because the U.S. Census does not ask questions about religion, the massive religion surveys by the Pew Research Center have become a chief source of information on the U.S. religious landscape.

The current survey questioned 35,071 U.S. adults last summer. Its huge size allows detailed analysis of even fairly small religious groups. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus six-tenths of a percentage point.

The U.S. still remains far more religious than most other economically advanced countries. But the significant increase in the share of Americans who do not follow a traditional religious belief mirrors trends in Europe and elsewhere.

Just short of 1 in 4 Americans now describe themselves as being agnostic, atheist or simply “nothing in particular,” up from roughly 1 in 6 in 2007, according to the new study. The ranks of the “nones,” as the study labels them, have grown in large part from people abandoning the religion in which they were raised.

By contrast, Christian ranks have eroded. Roughly 173 million adult Americans identify as Christian, just under 71% of the U.S. population. That’s down from 178 million, or 78% of the U.S., in 2007. The total U.S. adult population grew by about 8% during that eight-year period.

Protestants, who once dominated the U.S. population, no longer form a majority, the study found. About 47% of the U.S. population identifies with some Protestant denomination, down from just over half in 2007.

The decline has been uneven, with mainline denominations, such as Methodists and Presbyterians, shrinking more quickly than evangelical churches.

Slightly fewer than 1 in 6 adult Americans identify with the mainline Protestant churches. Evangelicals, by contrast, make up about one-quarter of the adult U.S. population. They now form a majority among those who identify as Christian.

Another 7% of American adults identify with historically black Protestant churches, a share that has remained relatively stable.

Catholics, about 1 in 5 Americans, have also seen some decline in numbers since 2007, the study found, although some other studies have found a more recent uptick. Almost 13% of American adults are former Catholics – the largest single group of people who have left a faith in which they were raised.

Among non-Christian faiths, Judaism remains the largest in the U.S., although only about 2% of the U.S. population identifies as Jewish. The number is up very slightly from what the survey found in 2007.

Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism each have less than 1% of the U.S. population, although the Muslim and Hindu population have both grown rapidly, reflecting immigration from Asia.