Catholics and Contraception: An American History (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Catholics and Contraception: An American History John T. Noonan Jr. Catholics and Contraception: An American History. By Leslie Woodcock Tentler. [Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America.] (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 335. $29.95.) In 1873, the Congress of the United States enacted a bill gingerly described in the Congressional Globe as prohibiting the use in commerce of "obscene and immoral things." The bill banned the use of the mail for the distribution of "any article whatever for the prevention of conception" or for the advertisement of such articles. Imprisonment up to ten years was the penalty for violation. The bill employed the federal arsenal's most powerful tool against crime: not much could be accomplished in this country without using the mail. Modeled on English statute, the bill was enacted by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Grant. It was named for Anthony Comstock, the Secretary of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice. At the date of the Comstock Act's enactment, public opinion in this country was united. No special Catholic position on contraception existed. Catholics and Contraception is the story of how, in the ninety years following enactment of the Comstock Act, the Catholic Church became conspicuous as the condemner of contraception. The story is ably told by Leslie Woodcock [End Page 873] Tentler, professor of history at the Catholic University of America. The author of a history of the Archdiocese of Detroit and a study of women wage-earners in the United States from 1900 to 1930, Tentler employs her experience to draw on a range of sources that give concreteness to the tale. Among these sources are mission sermons or notes for mission sermons (missions having once been a staple for strengthening parish life); oral interviews with priests recalling their experience as confessors (sometimes fifty years ago); and, most touching and most troubling, the letters of married women when, in the 1960's, they were invited, in connection with the examination of the existing rules, to recount their own efforts to observe them. The data are fragmentary for the first part of the twentieth century. They become thicker after Pius XI's Casti connubii in 1930. They are abundant for the decade of Vatican Council II and the debate that principally centered on "the pill." Among the surprises of the story is the role of "the reformers" to invigorate the inculcation of an anti-contraceptive morale. That such reformers included John A. O'Brien of Notre Dame; Reynold H. Hillenbrand, the Chicago liturgist; and John A. Ryan, later famous as "Right Reverend New Dealer," is a sign of how deeply the opposition to birth control had become entrenched in the Catholic clerical conscience. The arguments against contraception ranged from that of John Montgomery Cooper, a priest-anthropologist at the Catholic University, to that of Patrick Hayes, archbishop of New York. Cooper's case Tentler finds to have been "humane and engagingly argued." Hayes, in a pastoral letter appearing in the New York Times, December 18, 1921, described contraception as worse than murder, "a diabolical thing." His reason: "an immortal soul is denied existence in time and eternity." It is difficult today to empathize with the passions engaged in the struggle. What seems significant now is the seriousness with which all sides saw the connection between sexual conduct and salvation. It is also probably difficult for anyone born after 1955 to comprehend this seriousness and believe that there was a struggle. But the struggle occurred and reached its climax in the 1960's, as Tentler accurately records. In 1968, Paul VI issued Humanae vitae. The hierarchies of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands read the encyclical as less than an absolute directive; English-speaking episcopates were more literal-minded. In the United States, after a few years, what followed was silence. Humanae vitae had the impact on public pronouncements on sexual subjects by Catholic authorities that Benedict XIV's encyclical in 1745 reiterating the condemnations of usury had had on public pronouncements on economic subjects by Catholic authorities. It took a century and a half for the Church to...