Planned parenthood.

Catholics and Contraception

An American History

Leslie Woodcock Tentler

Cornell University Press, $29.95, 335 pp.

The American birth rate dropped steadily throughout the nineteenth century, but the cause for the fall in births began to shift sometime before the Civil War. In the first half of the century, the causes were "Malthusian"--marriages were later and the mortality rate among wives was very high. After the war, though, the decline in births looks intentional, since they dropped especially fast among the burgeoning new middle and upper-middle classes. Correcting for infant mortality rates, by the 1880s middle-class American birth rates were about at replacement level, or roughly what they are today.

Post-Civil War America was home to the world's first mass middle-class culture. Most of the population did not live on farms, and comparatively well-paid clerical and managerial jobs were booming, in department stores, insurance companies, railroad shipping departments, and publishing. There was an explosion of consumer goods, including store clothing and branded food--Cream of Wheat, Coca-Cola, Heinz's pickles--as well as decent mass-produced roller skates, bicycles, furniture, carpets, tableware, even houses. By previous standards, the education and economic dependence of children were inordinately prolonged.

Being middle-class, in short, was expensive, and in an age without social safety nets the possibility of slipping backward was a constant anxiety. Limiting the number of children was a key part of the strategy. There is sparse, but reasonably high-quality, field research from the period that suggests that families not only followed the Victorian-era strategy of "careful love," but employed a range of contraceptive methods, including jellies, douches, condoms, cervical caps, and others besides the traditional peasant strategy of coital withdrawal.

All major nineteenth-century American religious denominations were suspicious of contraception, retreating only grudgingly from the traditional insistence that couples "increase and multiply," with Catholics giving ground most grudgingly of all. Indeed, official Catholicism has not retreated yet, although among the vast majority of American Catholics the procreative mandate is now a dead letter. Leslie Tentler's Catholics and Contraception is a competent, and comprehensive, history of the American, and to a lesser degree the Roman, church's grim holding action from the late nineteenth century to the final digging-in with Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, Humanae vitae.

Tentler is aiming for cultural history, but given the sketchiness of source material for lay opinion, especially for the earlier portions of her story, her dominant perspective is from inside the chancery and rectory. The clergy were unanimous on the sinfulness of birth control through roughly the first half of the twentieth century, although they already felt the laity slipping away from them on the issue.

The traditional Catholic natural-law argument--procreative faculties are only for procreation--did not play well from the pulpit, and even many theologians found it unconvincing. So priests fell back on arguments that, if occasionally striking for their lurid violence, make for long stretches of dreary reading. Women using birth control were committing "that terrible murder ... making slaughter houses of their bodies"; or they turned marriage into "harlotry"; or, as the laity grew more sophisticated, "the refusal of parenthood" caused women to suffer "neuroses and psychoses." Chicago's Cardinal George Mundelein (1872-1939) apparently thought that birth control usurped God's plan for the white race: Americans would become "a slave people subjugated to the yellow races of the Orient."

The broad outlines of Tentler's story are well known--the spreading cracks in the theological edifice after Pius XII appeared to endorse the "rhythm method"; John Rock's anovular pill; the growing theological sophistication of the laity; the impact of John Noonan's studies of the shifting theologies of usury and slavery; the loss of confidence of the clergy in the face of laypeople who were more experienced and better educated than they were; the rhetorical respect accorded lay opinion by Vatican II; the growing expectation of doctrinal change; the shock and disappointment that greeted Paul's long-delayed encyclical; and, finally, its widespread rejection among clergy and laity alike.

Tentler's contribution is to have diligently filled in the details. Her archival work is extremely thorough, and she has conducted a large number of interviews, especially with working priests who tried to bridge a virtual schism that only deepened as the Vatican line hardened. She is also quite good on tracing the importance of the American Jesuit John Ford--he played a key role in the pope's final decision to disregard the recommendation of his birth-control commission, and also to make a stand on the authority of the "ordinary magisterium"--anything the church had taught for so long could not possibly be wrong.

Why was the Catholic response to contraception so different from that of Protestants? The deductive, dogmatic, nature of Catholic theology is clearly part of it. Since Protestantism begins with the individual's conversation with God, it more readily adapts to "situationist" and "personalist" constructions. Cultural factors were also important. Catholic Americans, on average, achieved middle-class status a generation or so later than Protestants did, and twentieth-century American bishops consciously built a separatist Catholic culture that forestalled full assimilation for maybe a generation longer. In the 1940s and 1950s especially, birth control was touted as one of the more egregious symptoms of the godless external world that threatened to engulf a struggling church.

Tentler's tone is inevitably elegaic. My personal view is that the birth-control controversy was less a cause of the break-down of the powerful Catholic consensus than a symptom of powerful centripetal forces already at work. As history of the controversy, though, Tentler's book may well be the last word.

Charles R. Morris is the author of American Catholic (Times). His next book, Tycoons, will be published in the fall.