Leslie Woodcock Tentler

“The Abominable Crime of Onan”: Catholic Pastoral Practice and Family Limitation in the United States, 1875–1919

By the 1930s few Catholics in the United States could have been unaware of their churchs absolute prohibition on contraception. A widely-publicized papal encyclical had spoken to the issue in 1930, even as various Protestant churches were for the first time giving a public blessing to the practice of birth control in marriage. Growing numbers of American Catholics had been exposed since at least 1920 to frank and vigorous preaching on the subject in the context of parish missions. (Missions are probably best understood as the Catholic analogue of a revival.) And by the early 1930s Catholic periodicals and pamphlets addressed the question of birth control more frequently and directly than ever before. As a Chicago Jesuit acknowledged in 1933, “Practically every priest who is close to the people admits that contraception is the hardest problem of the confessional today.” A major depression accounted in part for the hardness of the problem. But it was more fundamentally caused by the laitys heightened awareness of their churchs stance on birth control and their growing consciousness of this position as a defining attribute of Catholic identity.

Present at the Creation: Working-Class Catholics in the United States

Although Protestants have always been a substantial majority in the United States, the nation’s industrial working class has been heavily Catholic. By European standards, moreover, and especially in comparison with Italy and France, America’s Catholic workers have as a group been remarkably disciplined in their religious practice. ‘It is not our people who miss Mass on Sunday, refuse the sacraments and vote the Communist ticket’, as Auxiliary Bishop Steven Leven reminded Curial conservatives at the Second Vatican Council. ‘We have not lost the working class. They are the foundation and support of the Church.1 Like most ‘American exceptionalists’, Bishop Leven saw only in part: American Catholics by the 1960s were more disaffected than he evidently knew, while the situation in Europe — even in Italy — was more complex than his rhetoric allowed. Still, Bishop Leven for all his provincialism was clearly onto something, and not only with regard to religion.

Confidence and Crisis: A History of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, 1959–1977 by Steven M. Avella (review)

Victor Hammer was a father figure and an intellectual partner for Merton. Both men were European immigrants, deeply spiritual Catholics, and serious explorers of art and faith (as master of scholastics, Merton gave conferences on the topic “Notes on Sacred Art” in October and November 1954). Their friendship was rooted in this mutual interest, in Merton’s need for books, and in projects involving editions of Merton’s works. The Hammers’ press published Merton’s long poem, Hagia Sophia (which inspired Hammer’s painting), and works on the early Fathers. The weightiest letters discuss art and spirituality topics such as Conrad Fiedler’s theories (pp. 19–29), Hagia Sophia (pp. 64–69), and Hammer’s painting of the woman caught in adultery (pp. 173–81). Thus the book will surely interest art historians.

Contending with Martyrdom

The cult of the North American Martyrs does not loom large in the annals of Catholic sainthood, being of neither great antiquity nor geographic reach. The eight martyrs—six Jesuit missionaries and two lay assistants—were canonized only in 1930, almost three centuries after they died. Their devout have come almost entirely from Canada and the United States. Only in Quebec can the cult be said to have figured for any length of time in local culture and politics. Despite its seemingly minor status, the cult has nonetheless generated a colorful historical literature, much of it hagiographic, which is centered almost exclusively on the martyrs themselves and the circumstances of their deaths. Emma Anderson’s remarkable book breaks with this tradition, providing a full narrative of the cult’s evolution in a mode that is anything but hagiographic. Its principal purpose, she tells us, is to “explore multiple interpretations of the martyrs’ deaths and legacies, some of which fall well outside the familiar Catholic devotional perspective that has for centuries dominated the analysis of these figures” (p. 6). The missionaries who came to New France in the seventeenth century were products of an intensely eschatological Catholicism. Hell was real to them in a way almost inconceivable for believers today, and it was apparently a well-populated place. Heirs to a spirituality marked by asceticism and a nearobsession with the state of the soul at death, the Jesuits who served in New France were probably pushed to spiritual extremes by the trials they faced there: the rigors of life in a land with brutal winters, frequent famine, and an indigenous population unexpectedly resistant to Christianity. Their writings, initially optimistic, were increasingly suffused with metaphors of living martyrdom—“a rhetorical change that shifted the focus from the conversion of native peoples to the suffering servanthood of the missionaries themselves” (p. 20). Does this mean that some of them deliberately courted martyrdom, as Anderson asserts? That, in my view, is too facile a judgment. We would need