To what did Western Europe and the United States demonstrate a negative response?
Paul VI was concerned but not surprised by the negative reaction in Western Europe and the United States. He fully anticipated this reaction to be a temporary one: "Don't be afraid", he reportedly told Edouard Gagnon on the eve of the encyclical, "in twenty years time they'll call me a prophet." His biography on the Vatican's website notes of his reaffirmations of priestly celibacy and the traditional teaching on contraception that "[t]he controversies over these two pronouncements tended to overshadow the last years of his pontificate". Pope John Paul II later reaffirmed and expanded upon Humanae vitae with the encyclical Evangelium vitae.