Book review:
Limited focus leads to skewed conclusions

		A Culture of Life  Professor  Janet E. Smith

Perhaps it is a tribute to a book that the reader is able to come to conclusions quite opposite to those advanced by the author.

Leslie Woodcock Tentler maintains in her book, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Cornell University Press, 2004, 335 pp.), that as Catholics became more mature and autonomous, they rightly reject the Church's teaching on contraception.

She also believes that when the Church becomes more sensitive to the realities of married life and sexuality, it will abandon that teaching.

I, on the other hand, think much of her book indicates that it is possible for the Church to form Catholics in accord with its teaching, even in the face of a hostile cultural climate.

Records from the past

For the last several decades Catholics who embrace the Church's teaching on sexuality, including the condemnation of contraception, lament that they have never heard a homily supporting the Church's teaching on any sexual matter, let alone contraception.

Tentler's book has thoroughly disabused me of the misimpression that it was always thus. Her use of diocesan archives shows that at various junctures before 1960, Catholics were remarkably well instructed about the Church's teaching on contraception (through homilies, parish missions, pamphlets, the confessional, pastoral letters from bishops, even the public debate over legalization of contraception) and lived by it, apparently quite happily.

The discontent began largely in the late 1950s and Tentler does consider all factors that created pressure on Catholics to contracept. One factor worthy of consideration was the prevalence of bottle-feeding that eliminated the natural child-spacing provided by breast-feeding - babies were coming too fast (family size in Catholic Quebec doubled with bottle-feeding).

Research flaws

What is very questionable and what severely compromises her work is that she confined her conversations to 56 priests, "informants," who had been ordained between 1938 and 1963, and that her research basically ends with the 1960s: Humanae Vitae was widely rejected, end of story, it seems.

Tentler speaks of the courage of those who dared to speak out against the Church's teaching; another story could be told of the persecution of those who have defended it.

She provides pages of testimony of those who got pregnant while using rhythm and of those who believe their marriages were harmed by the abstinence involved; to balance the picture she might have attempted to get testimony from those who get pregnant while using contraception and the strain that contraceptive sex puts on a relationship.

Tentler makes no mention of modern movements to promote the Church's teaching on contraception; again, the whole period after 1970 is treated in a brief epilogue.

She dismisses as papal loyalists those many priests under 45 and seminarians who enthusiastically support Church teaching and condescendingly predicts that young couples who presently are using NFP will defect as their families grow.

The wildly popular work of Christopher West and the distribution of over 750,000 copies of my talk "Contraception: Why Not" have escaped her notice (as did my book Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later).

Vibrant revival

She notes that the widespread use of contraception might have something to do with the "hypersexualization" of our time but does not take a long sober look at the likely connection between widespread contraceptive use and promiscuity, unwed pregnancy, abortion, and divorce.

But I am enthusiastically recommending the book as a portrait of a vibrant time in the Church's past, one I think young priests and young couples might well revive.

Prof. Janet E. Smith is the Fr. Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. This column is licensed by J. Smith and is syndicated by www.OneMoreSoul.com