Project MUSE - Catholic Birth Control?: Father John O’Brien, Rhythm, and Progressive American Catholicism in 1930s Contraception Discourse Father John O’Brien, Rhythm, and Progressive American Catholicism in 1930s Contraception Discourse Alexander Pavuk (bio) Father John A. O’Brien (1893–1980), longtime Catholic chaplain at the University of Illinois and influential priest-social scientist, engaged both mainline thinkers and other Catholics on key social questions of the interwar era by employing rhetoric heavily seeded with science. Partly hoping to demonstrate Catholic openness to modernity while parrying longstanding accusations of Church obscurantism, O’Brien was one of a small, yet influential, cadre of progressive Catholics who wrote on topics straddling public ethics and public policy by using ground rules favored by non-Catholic, even non-religious, interlocutors. O’Brien thereby sought a via media between the Church and thought currents of the age. In the 1930s, his works on contraception emphasized the newly-configured “rhythm method” as a scientifically infallible way for married couples to separate sex from procreation in good conscience.

The manner in which O’Brien argued in favor of rhythm—and the ends he emphasized—may have unintentionally contributed to a broader shift in the public sphere’s framing of the contraception issue. Consequently, contraception became primarily a technical question for scientists to deal with, a question that increasingly did not concern putatively obscurantist churches. Introduction Just as World War II’s nightmare of a scientifically-engineered Nazi utopia was evaporating in the fumes of Adolph Hitler’s bunker, across the Atlantic Ocean Catholic physician J.E. Kempf, Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, was complaining to Msgr. John Montgomery Cooper (1881–1949) about progressive Catholics’ excessive concessions to scientism in American society. Kempf wrote as a believing scientist to say that the churches had ceded too much [End Page 53] cultural authority to scientists, and the latter, in turn, appointed themselves arbiters of even religious and ethical questions in public culture: “[T]he scientist has set himself up as the final judge on matters where he has not the slightest scientific knowledge. If his convictions disagree with revealed truths, he repudiates the revealed truths.

Science has also encroached upon some moral problems, such as birth control….” 1 The anthropologist Cooper and especially his sometime confidante, Father John A. O’Brien of the University of Illinois, was among a small cadre of Catholic priest-social scientists who had worked diligently in the interwar period to connect science to Catholicism in the American mind. In no way did these figures consciously intend to advance the kind of scientism other liberal Christians seemed to endorse, as in the Unitarian Christian Register, which asked in 1930, “What has birth control to do with religion?” opining that it “is fundamentally a hygienic and economic matter.” 2 Instead, figures like O’Brien used the lingua franca of science to engage American intellectual culture on issues they saw as possessed of both moral import and social ramifications calling for psychological, medical, and demographic responses. However, in consistently framing their discourse to fit the scientific categories of debate favored by most American public intellectuals, progressive Catholics like O’Brien helped push the symbolic public construction of birth control away from connections to religion and into a realm of scientific concern subject to controlled human planning. Subject to technical manipulation, conception could thus become a matter for social engineering.

American birth control debates in the early 1930s had taken on special importance for Catholics not just because of the Great Depression’s challenge to the family economy but also because of the precedents set by both the Anglican Church’s Lambeth Conference and the American Council of Rabbis in endorsing the practice of artificial contraception within a few months of each other in 1930. 3 The Catholic Church responded with Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii, issued on December 31, 1930, definitively outlawing artificial contraception on natural law grounds. In the pope’s words, “[N]o reason, however grave, may be put forward by which [End Page 54] anything intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good.” 4 But the broader momentum was already discernible, and the pan-Protestant Federal Council of Churches brought its official position on marital birth control in line with Lambeth in 1931. 5 The scientific development that Catholics like O’Brien relied on to navigate all this—while maintaining fidelity to the Church’s teaching—presented itself in a 1929 volume that accurately mapped female ovulation patterns.

This map facilitated a calculated, non-interventionist birth control, the “rhythm method,” as a third alternative to total abstinence and artificial contraception for separating pregnancy from intercourse. While anthropologist Cooper and economist Msgr. John A. Ryan’s roles in these debates have been addressed to varying extents in recent books like Leslie Tentler’s Catholics and Contraception (2004), John McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom (2003), and Sharon Leon’s An Image of God (2013), one of the most active and successful in reaching out to both non-Catholics and Catholics on the rhythm method was Father John O’Brien. However, considerably less has been written about his efforts in this arena. It was O’Brien, after all, who most openly popularized phrases that tied together the words “Catholic” and “birth control” in a positive way.

In addition to publishing explanatory articles urging the rhythm method in forums like the Catholic periodical Our Sunday Visitor and an influential long booklet titled Legitimate Birth Control (1934), O’Brien authored an expanded version of the latter in the form of the book, Natural Birth Control (1938), this time replete with elaborate tables and instructions on how to implement the procedure. This volume was especially notable in that it continued his vociferous advocacy for rhythm even after other Catholics quieted their calls for it following decisions by both the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) and important bishops like Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago near the end of 1934 telling Catholic advocates to tone down propaganda for rhythm so as not to create a birth control mentality among Catholics. 6 Indeed, for the rest of the interwar era, advertisements for rhythm largely vanished from American Catholic publications and [End Page 55] priests were instructed to mention it only in the confessional and as an extreme option. But O’Brien did not abate. Natural Birth Control saw O’Brien defend rhythm as legitimate Catholic birth control, laying out litanies of medical and psychological quotations to support his position.

7 O’Brien’s ebullient rhetoric was such that it could even be directly quoted—albeit out of context—by pro-contraception luminaries like Margaret Sanger to bolster claims that the Catholic Church had finally come to agree with the desirability and pragmatic usefulness of separating sex from pregnancy while now merely quibbling about methods. 8 Beyond his contributions to birth control discourse, O’Brien is notable for being the first Catholic priest in America to earn a social science doctorate at a non-Catholic university; he obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in 1920 with a dissertation on silent reading and served as the school’s Newman chaplain from the end of World War I to 1939. 9 O’Brien departed after a series of dissonances boiled over with his ecclesial superior, Bishop Joseph Schlarmann of Peoria, Illinois, and with the powerful Archbishop Michael Curley of Baltimore. Until 1927, O’Brien had also served on the progressive and social science-oriented National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), an organization that has been characterized as tied to the turn-of-the-century Americanist and Modernist movements.

As seen below, his dismissal from the NCWC coincided with a controversy in which Curley and others accused him of extreme liberalism. O’Brien’s participation in broader conversations about science and sexuality at this point is important in and of itself but also because it offers a window into how progressive Catholics tried to mediate between a complex and sometimes internally-divided subcultural Catholicism and broader [End Page 56] American public culture in the interwar era. These attempted mediations could lead to various unintended consequences. In O’Brien’s case, his manner of argumentation helped serve the interests of those wanting to expand the public authority of scientific experts over topics hitherto conceived, in part, as moral or religious questions. 10 O’Brien’s Overlapping Worlds John Anthony O’Brien was born in January 1893 in Peoria, Illinois and graduated from St. Patrick Catholic School in Washington, Illinois. After spending one year at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, he returned to his home state to enroll at St. Viator’s College in the town of Bourbonnais. O’Brien earned a B.A. in 1913 and an M.A. in 1914 from St.

Viator’s, it being customary at the time to receive a master’s degree for remaining in studies for a year after graduation. In 1916, the local bishop, Edmund Dunne, ordained O’Brien a priest of the Diocese of Peoria. The same Bishop Dunne would three years later ordain another Peorian and St. Viator alumnus to the priesthood, Fulton J. Sheen. O’Brien spent the 1916–1917 academic year at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., studying what Winton Solberg characterized as graduate-level “education, psychology, and sociology.” 11 It was, however, at the non-Catholic University of Illinois where O’Brien made his most significant contributions during our time-frame. While Newman chaplain at Illinois he had controversially argued that religion courses offered in denominational residential colleges would give Catholic students enrolled at state universities an equivalent education to that obtained at Catholic institutions of higher learning. Many American Catholic officials adhered to the idea that religion could not be isolated from the other subjects and the only way to receive a holistic Catholic education was to attend a Church-run college.

12 In viewing Catholic religion as teachable in isolation from the rest of the curriculum, O’Brien enjoyed the support of his friend and fellow-cleric John Montgomery Cooper. In the later 1920s, Cooper had devised a full [End Page 57] and distinct religion curriculum for use by Catholics. 13 Bishop Dunne, too, approved of O’Brien’s educational philosophy and methods and, thus, appointed him superintendent of the Peoria diocese’s schools in 1924. 14 Click for larger view View full resolution Father John A. O’Brien (Courtesy of the Archives of the University of Notre Dame). O’Brien’s administrative and educational philosophies, and his model of public engagement, bore the marks of three lines of overlapping influence from prior decades: the American Progressive Movement—particularly its emerging field of professionalized education—and two controversial discourses in early-century Catholicism: the Americanist and Modernist movements. The early social sciences undergirding the Progressive Era’s social reform agenda emerged alongside the later nineteenth century liberal Protestant [End Page 58] turn to the Social Gospel. The embryonic social sciences offered both the religious and the secular an option for actualizing the promises of modernity.

A variation on the postmillenial Protestant notion of social evolution was, for all intents and purposes, at the center of even secular reform visions. For example, John Dewey’s ideals were essentially de-Christianized versions of the millennial vision of progress. 15 Both religious and secular cohorts shared a singular faith in science’s ability to actualize progressive goals; the new sciences thus offered a highly attractive and practical union of interests. 16 German historicism’s introduction into the American intellectual scene further led early social scientists to conclude that positivist-conceived objective science would facilitate humanity’s increasing mastery of nature. One can see this in the foundational works of Auguste Comte, Lester Ward, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and others. 17 Relatedly, the American Pragmatist tradition urged the widest possible application of the scientific method, too, lending greater vigor to the scientific reform impulse. By the early twentieth century, books like Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909) persuaded many reformers that the social sciences were just as “scientific” as the natural sciences. 18 This optimistically-conceived potential of social science to improve American life guided the trajectory of intellectual culture well into the twentieth century.

Those hoping to influence social debate—Catholic and non-Catholic—believed they could best achieve their goals by embracing the language and methods of the social sciences. Given the social-scientific emphasis on empirical, inductivist models of analysis and intervention, it is unsurprising that at least some Catholic social scientists would have negotiated or resisted the deductive-centered philosophy the Catholic Church advocated with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). This decree directed Catholic thinkers to neo-Thomist thought as the means of engaging scientific modernity. 19 It was the lot of Catholic social scientists to inwardly attempt a reconciliation of these competing interests. [End Page 59] As the topical breadth of O’Brien’s brief studies at Catholic University suggests, the education field saw wide overlap with psychology in the era in which O’Brien was trained; practitioners in both disciplines crusaded for their recognition as true sciences. 20 Graduate students of education frequently had to take psychology courses as part of their normal study as statistically-grounded learning models rose to prominence within progressivism’s field of virtues. O’Brien’s above-cited Illinois dissertation and related articles on silent reading also evidence the conjoining trends.

Though trained at Illinois, O’Brien’s year of study at Catholic University and his work with other Catholic social scientists connected him to the Catholic version of these trends. Scholars have shown how social science models were appropriated and negotiated in the halls of Catholic universities and their social science departments; at the Catholic University of America, in particular, the negotiation took place alongside the Americanist and Modernist movements in the early century. 21 Those two episodes informed American Catholic efforts to come to grips with modernity in the United States; their influence was especially seen in liberal Catholic circles where several of the most important Catholic social scientists dwelt. Despite the papal encyclicals Testem Benevolentiae (1899) and Pascendi Domenici Gregiis (1907) stunting the currents enlivening those two movements, their residual influences lived on in subaltern Catholic intellectual discourses. Such currents, including cultural developmentalism and assimilationism; [End Page 60] compatibility with modern scientific trends, including prevalent philosophies of science; and desire for “a rapprochement with leaders of the intellectual world … [and with] secular culture” were by no means cut off at the time of O’Brien’s formation.

22 While trained theologians espousing full-fledged theological immanentism and openly scorning neo-Scholasticism were silenced or abandoned their advocacy, it was precisely figures in the social sciences (and literary studies) who managed to keep alive certain elements of both movements. 23 Indeed, historian William Portier suggests why modernism’s spirit lived on in Catholics seeking to connect with contemporary culture: “Those who came to be called ‘Modernists’ insist[ed] that intellectual life after Kant required … address[ing] questions about the subject’s constructive role in the process of human knowing—even knowing God. They found the neo-Scholasticism of the day inadequate to that challenge.” 24 This subtle distaste for neo-Scholasticism rubbed off on O’Brien and other liberal Catholics who influenced him, though he never openly repudiated it. O’Brien’s membership in the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s Education Commission from just after World War I to 1927 amplified his trust in science-centered activism. Growing out of the National Catholic War Council, the postwar NCWC became an officially-sanctioned arm of the U.S.

Catholic bishops which largely validated Catholics who sought a role for the Church in influencing American social policy and gaining acceptance from non-Catholics. Created in part to balance the postwar influence of the liberal Protestant Federal Council of Churches, the NCWC’s visionaries enjoyed direct links with the Americanist and Modernist thinkers, as historians Christopher Kauffman and Douglas Slawson have shown. 25 [End Page 61] The NCWC vision of reaching the era’s intellectuals centered on the dialect and idiom of science. A NCWC editorial on the eve of our timeframe titled “Science and Religion” related how the press had recently been discussing the “conflict between religion and science.” The editorialist responded, “From the Catholic standpoint, the best solution of [sic] the conflict will be attained… not by writing books explaining away the conflict but by active entrance on the part of Catholics into the scientific field and by original contributions made to science.” He continued, “If Catholic truth is to receive a sympathetic hearing from intellectual leaders today, one important approach is by way of the natural sciences.” 26 Conservatives within the Church like Boston’s powerful Cardinal William O’Connell were not impressed.

He characterized the NCWC—and O’Brien—as “Americanism reincarnate.” 27 Even given the context of the NCWC’s liberalism, O’Brien managed to turn himself into a quasi-radical figure. In 1927, Ku Klux Klan agitation fomented by an ex-nun in the town of Champaign (the location of the University of Illinois) saw O’Brien agree to a Methodist minister’s request to endorse an ecumenical prayer the latter had composed in order to implore tolerance. The prayer was addressed only to God the Father, in part to permit its use by local Jewish rabbis. The NCWC news service published a piece erroneously attributing co-authorship of the prayer to O’Brien, an inaccurate claim repeated in the popular press. Baltimore’s powerful and conservative Archbishop Michael Curley fumed over both O’Brien’s involvement and the NCWC’s distribution of the story, the latter of which gave the secular press the chance to “warmly praise” O’Brien’s ecumenism. 28 Certain Catholic officials concluded that O’Brien was guilty of religious indifferentism and a host of them complained to the NCWC’s overseer of committees, Father John Burke.

Having publicly questioned O’Brien’s theological orthodoxy, Archbishop Curley even went to Rome to indict O’Brien. Denouncing him to Vatican representatives, Curley [End Page 62] said O’Brien and the NCWC had created an atmosphere “redolent of unbelief and sheer materialism” and that O’Brien’s attitudes were “liberalising [sic] and un-Catholic.” 29 Cardinal Rafael Merry Del Val, secretary of the Holy Office in Rome and adviser to several popes, instructed Curley to let the issue quietly drop, but O’Brien was dismissed from the NCWC that same year. Undeterred, O’Brien continued writing and speaking in this same progressive Catholic vein to as many as would listen. O’Brien the Author O’Brien had inaugurated his authorial career in the conjoined realm linking socially active liberal Catholicism with social science. Though an initial scholarly publication presented the fruits of his dissertation material, his writing efforts were not concentrated on academic scholarship. 30 Rather, he harnessed his pen for outreach to Catholics and non-Catholics on various social topics, usually in the language of the sciences.

One of his more prominent published collections during the interwar period was Catholics and Scholarship (1938), a set of essays whose titles suggest O’Brien’s view that scientific study was the best means to Catholic respectability. 31 The book included O’Brien’s own “Catholics and Cultural Leadership”; Karl Herzfeld’s “Filling the Gap in Science”; James Reyniers’ “Ways and Means of Developing Catholic Scientists”; David McCabe’s “The Path to Eminence in Economics”; and Jerome Kerwin’s “Enhancing Catholic Prestige.” 32 In total, O’Brien published over forty books and hundreds of pamphlets (though it should be remembered the publishing standards of the time allowed some verbatim repetition of one’s own material from book to book). Among the most prominent of his volumes directed at non-Catholics was The Faith of Millions (1938), which presented Catholicism in a manner approachable to non-Catholics and which sold over 200,000 copies by 1945, having been translated into ten languages and seeing twenty-seven printings.

[End Page 63] His long pamphlet, Religion in a Changing World, extended O’Brien’s claims about the sacrality of science: “[S]cience … will aid us in securing a better vision of God…. In this sense there is something priestly in the labors of the scientist in his laboring…. For [he] too [seeks] to clarify the application of ethical and eternal truth to the changing social and economic conditions of modern life.” 33 O’Brien dedicated his 1946 volume Truths Men Live By to the famous French priest-evolutionist Canon Henri de Dorlodot. In 1932, O’Brien published a very popular book called Evolution and Religion as a contribution to public evolution discourse. Catholic scholar John Morrison claimed it achieved the largest non-Catholic readership of any Catholic work in the interwar period. For that effort O’Brien received much-desired plaudits from non-Catholic scientific experts, including renowned public palaentologist Henry Fairfield Osborn.

Osborn complimented the book and O’Brien “for his liberalism.” 34 Top-flight evolutionary biologist Edwin Grant Conklin of Princeton University also delivered a glowing assessment of the book in the internationally-circulated Scientific Book Club. Morrison described the book itself as a “synthesis of the Mivart, Seton, Zahm tradition with the very latest findings of scientists like Conklin and Osborn.” 35 Correspondence between O’Brien and John Montgomery Cooper when that book was in gestation suggests consensus efforts to craft discourse that would befriend the non-Catholic elite and reorient Catholics’ intellectual rhetoric in the direction of science rather than deductive or authoritative religious categories. One O’Brien letter referred to Cooper’s prior counsel to excise certain material and tone down harshly critical rhetoric aimed at Catholic theologians who had criticized Darwin; the reason was not to stir up those in the Catholic Church who might oppose their own plans to shift Catholic discourse.

As O’Brien explained, “The preparation of Chapters … on Copernicanism and the Theological Furore [sic] first raised against Dawinian [End Page 64] Evolution … as you point out … may antagonize [the theologians] and accomplish nothing in bringing about the attitude we desire.” 36 Click for larger view View full resolution Msgr. John Montgomery Cooper (Courtesy of the American Catholic Research Center and University Archives, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.). By this time, O’Brien had become known inside and outside the Church for liberal commentary on modern American culture, especially in relation to birth control, population, sex education, evolution, and science in general. Some of his strongest opponents argued that he was tying himself to webs of reform that were taking society in a secularizing direction—replacing moral codes with social engineering. Interwar birth control debates operated within this larger social reform skein and its organizational, politically-related outgrowths.

As Angela Franks put it, the progressive impulse exploited to promote contraception encouraged the goal of “social control at a time of rapid change, and [the belief] that the government should intervene in matters of social and economic welfare in a rational way, with scientific tools … a true panacea for poverty, illness, marital problems and even war.” 37 [End Page 65] Space does not permit a discussion of the complexities of the Catholic Church’s response to the contraception question. Still, it can be said that the Holy Office’s decrees of 1851 and 1853 probably offered the most definitive statement until the twentieth century on prohibiting mechanical contraception as contrary to natural law, although priests were not directed to initiate interrogations in the confessional without good reason. 38 Both in Europe and in the United States, the Church’s tone stiffened around the turn of the twentieth century in response to an increase in the breadth and influence of the organized movement favoring artificial contraception. Father John A. Ryan—the progressive cleric who was to head the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference—played no small role in this stronger response in the United States.

His 1916 piece in the Ecclesiastical Review argued that priests should henceforth “overcome their inhibitions to publicly address the problem of contraception.” 39 The following year, the Catholic Church issued a new codification of canon law. Although conceding that in a neo-Scholastic sense there were secondary benefits to marriage, the state of matrimony was defined almost wholly in terms of procreation. 40 The U.S. Catholic bishops then issued a joint pastoral address in 1919 that included discussion of contraception, purportedly using Ryan’s arguments as a baseline. 41 Finally, after the Anglican Church guardedly endorsed marital contraception at its Lambeth Conference in the spring of 1930, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Casti Connubii (“On Christian Marriage”) on the last day of 1930, therein restating the objection to artificial contraception on a natural law basis. Rhythm: Moral Science for All? Rhythm, the method that O’Brien and others presented as the ideal, non-artificial scientific birth control for Catholics and other Americans had [End Page 66] arrived on U.S. shores from Japan and Austria.

42 O’Brien was emboldened to write about it after two books by American Catholic physicians explained and endorsed it. The first was Chicago physician-professor Leo Latz’s The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women (1932). 43 The other was The Sterile Period in Family Life (1933), coauthored by Father Valere Coucke and Pennsylvania physician James A. Walsh. 44 Both books received the formal seal of approbation of the dioceses in which they were published. 45 These books explained the mutually reinforcing conclusions arrived at independently by the Japanese researcher Kyusaku Ogino and the Austrian [End Page 67] Hermann Knaus on the natural workings of the ovulatory cycle in menstruating females in the industrialized world. Although there was a one-day difference in the two scientists’ original estimates of the monthly sterile period, Ogino and Knaus independently concluded that ovulation occurred between twelve and sixteen days prior to the next menstruation.

Allowing for the shelf life of sperm and ova, women with a perfectly “regular” cycle—said to be every twenty-nine days—had to abstain from intercourse in a monthly rhythm of eight days if they wanted to avoid conception. 46 By mapping out what was seen as a natural process, the argument went, one was not interfering in any way with the system of reproduction implanted in creation even if one used it to plan sex without the possibility of conceiving. For Catholics who supported such an approach, the rhythm method was nothing other than new fruit stemming from the tree of God-given human intellect and its amazing ability to investigate and understand the workings of nature. But was the method, in reality, predicating a novel position for Catholics? Was it moral and scientific to purposely exclude what was—if the method worked—the possibility of procreation from the act of intercourse simply because one wanted to preclude it? After all, the aforementioned Catholic deductive argument said that conception was the exclusive primary end of intercourse. The liberal-progressive Catholics who most enthusiastically endorsed the rhythm method of birth control in the public sphere did so almost exclusively based on empirical-inductive evidence wedded to arguments for the social and economic good, rather than deductive philosophical grounds.

47 Because rhythm’s efficacy could be (and was) challenged by some scientists, many wondered what exactly was supposedly distinctive and superior about this Catholic birth control compared to other methods of contraception. There is [End Page 68] ample proof the rhythm method was spoken of publicly in the interwar period by physicians, politicians, and others as one among various types of “birth control” and even—by those who wished to specifically disparage liberal Catholics—one type of “contraception” among many. 48 The pursuit of a scientific map of the ovulation process was, unsurprisingly, conducted within the same matrix of research and reform as other efforts at birth regulation.

49 After reading O’Brien’s long 1934 booklet Lawful Birth Control—and its expanded book version, Natural Birth Control (1938)—one sees John Montgomery Cooper’s quip about Latz’s The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women might have applied even more so here: “I think he makes an excellent case for the birth controllers without intending to do so.” 50 O’Brien extensively referenced medical, physiological, sociological and psychological authorities to buttress his case that “[p]arents have not only the right but may have at times even the duty to space their offspring in the interests of health and conjugal happiness… Modern science discloses the method by which parents may space their offspring in a natural, rational, ethical manner. It is the method … unfolded by the two great scientists, Drs. Ogino and Knauss.” 51 In one span of five pages, O’Brien employed the word “science” or “scientific” eight times; four times on one page alone. 52 The putatively scientific yet hyperbolic tone was perhaps even more triumphalist here than it had been in his earlier book on evolution.

One understands why Margaret Sanger and others complained that O’Brien’s works could be sent through the mails legally whereas information on other types of contraception could not. 53 O’Brien predicated his arguments on social and biological science with a few contentions about natural law inserted at the start. However, the latter [End Page 69] were not framed as absolute but rather as useful because beneficial to human happiness. 54 As Tentler has noted, the German Catholic ethicist Dietrich von Hildebrand particularly influenced O’Brien’s divergence from the all-encompassing emphasis on marital sexuality’s procreative nature that had frequently characterized Catholic works driven by neo-Scholasticism. Von Hildebrand’s 1928 book In Defense of Purity appeared in English in 1931, helping reorient the traditional Catholic natural law construction of marital sexuality by elevating its “secondary ends.” 55 Rather than isolating a primary function of procreation, von Hildebrand argued that marital love facilitated a unique interpersonal union which gave sexuality in marriage its greater meaning. In making this case, he had opened the door to an increased emphasis on the psychology of marriage in discussing its sexual elements.

Given O’Brien’s approach, it is unsurprising he would gravitate toward psychological framings of the goal of marital union. 56 Lawful Birth Control and Natural Birth Control were not just explications of a moral birth control method. They were meant, as O’Brien wrote, to “proclaim [that method] from the house-tops” and advocate that method as “the findings of medical science….” 57 Here he saw himself as contributing to American culture writ large. At one point he asked, “Is it not evident to every fair-minded citizen, regardless of religious faith” that by expanding the American Medical Association’s prescription that physicians learn about it, “we are rendering a valuable contribution to the health and happiness of every home in America?” 58 O’Brien went further than most in testifying to the absolute scientific infallibility of Ogino and Knaus’s measurements of the female sterile period.

In so doing, he employed grandiose rhetoric: “Great numbers of the outstanding leaders in gynecology have declared [Ogino and Knaus’s results] to be not a theory but a biological law, thoroughly tested and verified.” 59 He [End Page 70] extended that point by lauding the method as healthier and more effective than almost any other form of contraception. 60 O’Brien made sure to report on existing enthusiasm for the method within the Catholic Church, especially among priests. 61 This was probably done to assuage potential concerns among Catholic readers that the rhythm news was too good to be true and that the Church could not really have approved of it.

In point of fact, O’Brien’s progressive diocesan hierarch, Bishop John Francis Noll of Fort Wayne, Indiana, had not only given official “ecclesiastical approbation” to publish the 1934 edition but had also penned its introduction, saying “I believe this book by Father O’Brien is the best ever written on the subject of Birth Control.” 62 Bishop Noll later declined to officially endorse the 1938 expanded version, though O’Brien and the Newman Foundation publishers still included the notation “published with ecclesiastical approbation.” 63 Noll’s shift was tied in with the broader cooling of enthusiasm for rhythm among key figures in the American Church after 1934. They felt the over-emphasis on rhythm as a sort of panacea for Catholics was leading to the development of a birth control mentality. O’Brien, however, continued to assert that the discovery of the safe period meant God was working through modern science as revealed in nature. 64 O’Brien quoted the Jesuit Joseph Reiner in his volumes to support that notion. 65 But the Jesuit order, too, was divided in its opinion of the rhythm method.

America magazine had strongly criticized Latz and the rhythm method in general throughout the 1930s. 66 Francis LeBuffe, S.J., conservative science editor of America magazine, complained to Reiner that O’Brien had damaged the integrity of Catholic teaching in the public square by giving fodder to artificial contraception advocates who made use of O’Brien’s excessive material on rhythm to support their own cause. 67 [End Page 71] O’Brien, however, contended that Catholics themselves badly needed rhythm during the extraordinary economic crises they faced as a result of the lingering Great Depression. In fact, he claimed his inspiration to write Lawful Birth Control came from the “joyous refrain which [sprang] spontaneously from the hearts of all upon learning how modern science confirm[ed] the Church’s teaching and show[ed] the way out of the [economic] difficulty,” after couples had read his articles lauding the rhythm theory in the popular devotional newspaper, Our Sunday Visitor. O’Brien attested to receiving “[a]n avalanche of letters from every state of the Union [sic], averaging hundreds a day…” after the series appeared. 68 Other aspects of O’Brien’s presentation on rhythm created problems for his more circumspect coreligionists.

One, in particular, related to an idea common to theological modernists: the belief—as historian Christopher Kauffman wrote—“in the utility of scientific methodology to elucidate religious truths.” 69 O’Brien indicated in his birth control writings that science now made it possible to achieve something in the religious realm that had not been possible before. Specifically, since “the laws of nature [are] a reflection of the mind of the divine Legislator,” using them to one’s own advantage opened up even greater opportunity for one to cooperate freely with the Creator than had been the case before modern science had mapped out these menstrual laws. Because parents would know when, or when not, they should expect to conceive a child, they could “deliberately accept,” or else decline, the chance to “cooperate” with God “in His work of Creation” rather than relying on “blind chance.” 70 In O’Brien’s schema, modern inductive science served as catalyst for individuals’ religious advancement. This claim applied to both the techniques of the rhythm method and to the broader goal of controlling exactly when one would, or would not, have children.

Even as O’Brien extolled the religious possibilities that modern science had created, he revealed what can be called a common inferiority complex vis a vis science found especially in liberal Catholic writings of the day. Following a decade of unremitting anti-Catholicism in America, overcompensation for alleged past sins against science was one way figures like O’Brien parried accusations of the Church’s longstanding anti-scientific actions, the Galileo trial cliché being the most frequently invoked. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, distorted historical redactions of the Galileo episode continued serving as major springboards for attacks and accusations of obscurantism by [End Page 72] those hostile to Catholicism; John William Draper’s anti-Catholic broadside, History of the Warfare Between Religion and Science (1874) had provided a blueprint for such salvos. 71 Hoping to persuade readers that he and the Church had always been celebrators of science, O’Brien completely reversed the terms of the warfare myth: “In her [the Church’s] vast temple of truth every new secret teased from any of the varied segments of nature finds a prompt and hearty welcome.

For the Church knows that every newly discovered truth … will give additional reinforcements to [her known truths].” 72 He also made use of the “twin books” model of divine truth common to eighteenth and nineteenth century Protestant natural theology. Here, the book of written Biblical revelation and the book of nature acted a coterminous parts of divine revelation. Critics inside and outside the Catholic Church complained that distributing books and pamphlets on technical aspects of natural birth control meant Catholics were providing contraceptive knowledge to anyone who sought it without expert authorization and supervision, which was ironically the same charge Catholics had made in the 1920s against Margaret Sanger and her Birth Control Review. The accusation of Catholic distribution created particular difficulties when highlighting that young people often obtained such knowledge in that way. Michael Williams of Commonweal magazine printed an article in the summer of 1932 in which a female Catholic civic leader argued against loosening the Comstock mailing restrictions: “[T]he dissemination of birth control information … is to let loose a flood of temptation upon a younger generation…. Statistics backed by the Birth Control League itself show that contraceptive articles sold in this country annually amount to one hundred million….

[T]hat the youth of the nation is being perverted in large and steadily increasing numbers is certain.” 73 O’Brien turned to medical authority in his books to deflect precisely these expressions of social-moral concern. Quoting from a 1934 American Medical Association report on the availability of contraceptives in western Florida, O’Brien wrote that they were already widely obtainable: “[P]reventives were sold in 376 places besides drug stores, including gas stations garages, restaurants, soda fountains, barber shops, pool rooms, restaurants, cigar stands, newsstands, shoe shining parlors, and grocery stores [sic]….” 74 [End Page 73] By contrast, he advocated offering a moral method of birth control as an alternative to already widely-utilized artificial contraception. Just as O’Brien parried accusations similar to those that contraception advocates had faced for putting birth control in the wrong hands, so, too, did he advocate rhythm by employing a scare tactic common to the contraception lobby: people inevitably would be forced to choose between birth control and abortion. O’Brien argued that without workable birth regulation methods, people would turn to the abhorrent alternative of abortion.

It was novel indeed to have a Catholic use the same warning as the Birth Control League to sell readers on the necessity of a particular form of birth control. 75 In O’Brien’s words, rhythm would “preven[t] … the enormous number of criminal abortions now converting our land into a whitened sepulcher … filled with the bones of unborn children. 76 He added that abortion was connected to “a high maternal death rate,” since women resorted to it after having unwisely put their trust in other contraceptive techniques that were not only immoral but also, he claimed, less effective. 77 Moving away from social arguments, several later chapters in O’Brien’s birth control volumes included antiphonal litanies of, on the one hand, scientifically-framed allegations about what would happen to married women if rhythm were not used and, on the other hand, promises of what would happen if they employed artificial contraceptive measures. O’Brien added an extensive series of quotations from expert scientists substantiating his claims about the ineffectiveness and recklessness of those alternatives in physiological and psychiatric terms.

O’Brien proffered some extraordinary claims by physiologists asserting that female genitalia not only benefited from the intake of spermatic fluid delivered during male orgasm, but also that “fruitless stimulation of the genital organs leads to more or less serious chronic pelvis [sic] disorders and very frequently to sterility.” 78 Toward this end, O’Brien cited “the distinguished scientist” Dr. H. L. Long arguing as though he were advocating a health food store’s products: “[t]he semen is the most powerful stimulant to all female sex organs and to the whole body of the woman.

The organs themselves will absorb quantities of semen and it is most healthful and beneficial,” [End Page 74] and the women who had the good sense to seek out these fluids “improve in physical well being after they are married by availing themselves of this healthful nourishment.” 79 As if the point about females’ purported need for semen had not been graphically clear enough, O’Brien quoted an address from the 1929 Congress of Gynecologists: “It is perfectly well-known and universally admitted that the female organism absorbs spermatic products introduced during the sexual act and that these products act on women in a manner favorable to her development.” 80 Conversely, O’Brien averred, female developmental disorders would result from mechanical contraception, including frightful afflictions like “inflammations in the womb” that “nearly all scientific publications dealing with the subject” indicated could “lead to cancer.” 81 The putative “development” that semen conferred on women manifested itself not just in the biophysical sense. O’Brien argued that substantial psychological and psychiatric needs had been found to depend on seminal intake; he presented any course that denied women of seminal fluids as clearly dangerous.

In fact, such deprivation could evidently lead to madness: “lack [of absorbed semen] leads to both physical and psychic disorders.” 82 O’Brien called upon Long again to characterize male ejaculate as the best nerve tonic available for the mentally anxious woman: “There are multitudes of nervous women, hysterical even, who are restored to health through the stimulative effects of satisfactory coitus and the absorption of semen.” 83 For more support on the psychological front, O’Brien turned to Sir Robert Armstrong-Jones of London, “a recognized authority on neural diseases,” who put matters very succinctly: “Birth control often leads to lunacy in women.” 84 Apparently, excessive abstinence could also have the same devastating consequences, or so claimed O’Brien’s experts. This information must have troubled Catholics who had argued in previous years for abstinence. 85 By including a strong physiological argument against depriving women of necessary seminal intake, O’Brien, perhaps unthinkingly, called into question the Church’s perennial wisdom in encouraging celibate chastity. Nuns, of course, experienced lifelong deprivation of these supposedly essential spermatic benefits. Was female monasticism also a practice that modern science would reveal as no longer tenable?

[End Page 75] Conclusion Father John O’Brien’s advocacy for birth regulation by rhythm can generally be classified in two columns. One column repackaged the arguments of the birth control lobby that, since the early 1920s, emphasized a scientific defense of contraception as both a biological and a social good. The other column consisted of another kind of argument from expertise: medical and psychological testimony about women’s need for the many benefits of intercourse with completion lest physical and mental disease develop. The relatively short, early sections of O’Brien’s birth control publications touching on the Catholic understanding of natural law in effect tried to couch his subsequent inductive arguments in ill-fitting deductive garb. This manner of argumentation was consistent with the progressive and liberal Catholic perspective O’Brien inherited from earlier twentieth-century influences. Ironically, even if not his overall goal, O’Brien’s discourse contributed to rhetorical currents in the broader culture that further conceptually separated intercourse from procreation even for married couples. This was not generally the institutional Catholic Church’s goal.

At one point, O’Brien even offered a demographic-utilitarian argument that it was acceptable for a fertile Catholic married couple to produce no offspring at all, provided that “the propagation of the race is not being endangered….” 86 It is no wonder that by the 1940s, even Daniel A. Lord, an American Jesuit who had believed in the rhythm method, wrote a story in which the Catholic priest-protagonist complained of his encounters with parishioners about children and birth prevention, saying: “I’m getting awfully sick of telling people just how far they can go without actually going to hell.” 87 This was perhaps an unintended consequence of O’Brien’s moderate success in influencing Catholics and others through popular science discourse, a realm where he and some fellow forward-thinking Catholics were ever keen to be seen and heard. [End Page 76] Alexander Pavuk is assistant professor of history at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland. He is preparing a monograph examining progressive Catholic evolution and contraception discourse in American public culture. Footnotes 1. J.E. Kempf, M.D., to Msgr. John M.

Cooper (June 21, 1945), folder “Miscellaneous-K,” box 16, John Montgomery Cooper Papers, American Catholic Research Center and University Archives, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. (henceforth ACUA). Kempf also included euthanasia, castration, abortion, and psychotherapeutic theories in his list of topics with moral implications being treated exclusively as technical issues. 2. Quoted in Kathleen A. Tobin, The American Religious Debate Over Birth Control, 1907–1937 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2001), 166. 3. For more on these shifts as well as Tobin’s argument that the economics of the Great Depression actually did not play as much of a role as one might assume, see Tobin, American Religious Debate, 148–157, esp. 154. 4. Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, quoted in Anne Fremantle, ed. The Papal Encyclicals in their Historical Context (New York: New American Library, 1956), 236; also available at .

5. Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, Annual Report, 1931, 81 quoted in Tobin, American Religious Debate, 164–165. See also “Concerning the Report on Birth Control,” Federal Council Bulletin (May 1931): 2. 6. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 116. 7. Beyond medicine and psychology, which will be addressed below, see also O’Brien’s demographic (65) and economic (69–70) arguments for rhythm as found in Natural Birth Control. Also, although outside the time-frame of this article, O’Brien continued for many decades advocating for Catholics’ use of birth regulation. O’Brien edited a post-Vatican II volume, Family Planning in an Exploding Population (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1968), in which he employed a broadly neo-Malthusian argument in favor of birth control.

See O’Brien’s chapters: “The World’s Soaring Population” (3–14) and “Responsible Parenthood,” (45–53), the latter being where he advocated “family planning” (45–53). Also in that book, O’Brien positively recalled his efforts on behalf of birth control in the 1930s (xvii–xvii). It is also worth noting, as Tentler points out, that O’Brien was one of the American thinkers who urged Pope Paul VI to change the Catholic teaching prohibiting artificial contraception before that pontiff’s issuance of the Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968 (Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 122). 8. See Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 114. 9. O’Brien’s dissertation research was published as Silent Reading With Special Reference to Methods for Developing Speed: A Study in the Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1921). 10.

For a related example of this process in the case of 1920s evolution discourse, see Alexander Pavuk, “Evolution and Progressive Catholics in the Age of the Scopes Trail,” Religion and American Culture 26, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 101–137. 11. Winton U. Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” The Catholic Historical Review 76 (October 1990): 769. The social science disciplines were fluid in the early twentieth century; all were at various times part of Catholic University’s larger department of Social Sciences. See C. Joseph Neusse, “The Introduction of the Social Sciences in the Catholic University of America, 1895–1909,” Social Thought 12 (Spring 1986): 30–41. 12. For more details on this situation and criticisms of O’Brien, see Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois.” 13.

See Cooper’s multi-volume set—the first volume printed in 1924 (with the set revised and re-issued in 1935), John M. Cooper, Religion Outlines for Colleges (Washington, DC: Catholic Education Press, 1924–1930). 14. Bishop Dunne was quoted as lauding O’Brien’s “progressive mode in the right direction” (Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” 773). Dunne’s successor, Joseph Schlarmann, shared none of his predecessor’s enthusiasm for Catholic progressivism; the latter dismissed O’Brien from the diocese in 1939. O’Brien spent the 1939–1940 year in residence at Oxford University and then moved to the University of Notre Dame in 1940. It was at the latter where he spent the remainder of his long career. Schlarmann so strongly disapproved of O’Brien’s educational and public relations tactics that he forbade O’Brien from ever serving as a priest, or even staying overnight, in his diocesan boundaries (Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” 796).

15. Dewey could be characterized as the apotheosis of this trajectory. Initially operating within liberal Protestantism, he turned to the nascent field of psychology to accomplish his social goals. Historian Bruce Kuklick pointed out that Dewey came to see the New Psychology as the method of philosophy; in this way, Dewey felt philosophy could examine metaphysics using the scientific method. See Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 235. 16. For more on this, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 54. 17. Ross, Origins, 55, 93, 96. 18. Ibid., 157–158. 19. See Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html.

For more on this plan as an intellectual program, see James Hennessey, S.J., “Leo XIII: Intellectualizing the Combat With Modernity,” U.S. Catholic Historian 7, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 393–400. 20. See Eldbridge C. Grover, “The Status of Education as an Academic Subject in American Colleges,” Educational Research Bulletin 7 (January 11, 1928): 12–15. The emerging field of psychology can be understood as secularizing the older discipline of moral philosophy. See Jon H. Roberts, “Psychology in America,” in A History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition, ed. Gary Ferngren (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 2000), 502–507. 21. Early twentieth-century Catholics connected to social work sought especially to apply their social science training to effect social change. See, for example, Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

At Catholic University, professors like historian Thomas J. Shahan, who had studied under renowned modernist Adolf von Harnack, and was made rector in 1909; and Henry Poels, critic of scholasticism who relied generously on the work of modernists Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell, played important roles in establishing the intellectual orientation of the university. William Kerby, long-time sociology professor who reflected the spirit of Americanism and Progressivism was a formidable influence, hoping to recast ecclesiology in sociological principles. See R. Scott Appleby, Church and Age Unite!: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 208–210, 219–220. For more on Kerby, see Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 66–77. 22.

This quote, on the overarching mentalite of the liberal Catholicism nurtured by these trends, comes from Robert Cross’s classic work, The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 13–14. See Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae, Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, . Appleby maintained that among American Catholics, modernism “[p]ull[ed] together threads of European Catholic modernism, American Protestant liberalism, and American Catholic progressivism….” See Appleby, Church and Age Unite!, 2. 23. On the latter, see Arnold Sparr, To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), and Una M. Cadegan, All Good Books are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 24. William L.

Portier, Divided Friends: Portraits of the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis in the United States (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), xx. 25. See Christopher J. Kauffman, Tradition and Transformation in American Catholic Culture: The Priests of Saint Sulpice in the United States from 1791 to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1988), ch. 10. In Kauffman’s words, “the Americanist vision … [was close] to those second-generation Americanist bishops and priests … who were active in the formation and development of the NCWC [National Catholic Welfare Conference]” (Kauffman, 242). Douglas Slawson has also argued that “[T]he Welfare Council inherited dreams. Isaac Hecker had envisioned a spirit-filled laity taking the lead to win the nation for Catholicism. His disciple, [John] Burke, saw a nationally unified Catholic church acting as leaven of American progress.” See Douglas Slawson, The Foundation and First Decade of the National Catholic Welfare Council (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 44.

26. NCWC Editorial, March 1, 1929, Catholic Research Roundtable Articles (1929–1930), box 21, John Montgomery Cooper Papers, ACUA. See also Philip Gleason, Contending With Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 201–202. 27. Slawson, The Foundation and First Decade, 276. 28. Solberg, “The Catholic Presence at the University of Illinois,” 789. For more on the Romanizing Curley’s distaste for the NCWC’s liberalism, see Thomas W. Spalding, The Premier See: A History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1789–1989 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 328–329. 29. Slawson, The Foundation and First Decade, 273–274. 30.

In addition to his above-cited published dissertation, see O’Brien’s “The Development of Speed in Silent Reading,” 54–76 in Guy Montrose Whipple, ed., The Twentieth Year-book of the National Society for the Study of Education Part I, Second Report of the Society’s Committee on New Materials of Instruction (Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing Company, 1921[?]). 31. John A. O’Brien, ed., Catholics and Scholarship (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1938). 32. See O’Brien, Catholics and Scholarship, including these contributions: O’Brien, “Catholics and Cultural Leadership,” 27–37; Karl Herzfeld, “Filling the Gap in Science,” 86–96; James Reyniers, “Ways and Means of Developing Catholic Scientists,” 107–129; David McCabe, “The Path to Eminence in Economics,” 146–152; and Jerome Kerwin, “Enhancing Catholic Prestige,” 154–164. 33. John A.

O’Brien, Religion in a Changing World: Christianity and Modern Thought (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1938), 20. 34. Osborn’s commendatory letter to O’Brien and Conklin’s review are mentioned by John L. Morrison in “A History of American Catholic Opinion on the Theory of Evolution, 1859–1950” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri, 1951), 344. Morrison went on to note that Evolution and Religion “was extensively noticed by leading non-Catholics.… Michael Pupin, a distinguished physicist, bestowed lavish praise on it…. J. Howard Beard, a Protestant and Chairman of the Illinois Board of Health, reported to Fr. O’Brien that his book was making a good impression upon rural Protestant clergymen.” See Morrison, 344–345. According to Morrison, some Catholics were critical, “feeling that Fr. O’Brien had catered overmuch to popular tastes, but on the whole they were … complimentary towards his abilities” (Morrison, 345).

Morrison characterized even Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a “supporter” who acted to “stav[e] off criticism” of O’Brien” (Morrison, 346). 35. Morrison, “A History,” 344, 265. 36. My emphasis. John A. O’Brien to John M. Cooper, March 21, 1931, folder “O’Brien, Rev. John,” box 13, John Montgomery Cooper Papers, ACUA. See other letters in this general vein between Cooper and O’Brien beginning with 1930 in folder “Correspondence with Fr. John A. O’Brien,” ibid. 37. In her critical history of Margaret Sanger and the eugenics movement, historian Franks argued that birth control plans proffered by elite radicals like Sanger and Dr. Hannah Stone fit in seamlessly with the Progressive Era’s “utopianism, scientism, and proclivity for elitist social engineering.” Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Company, 2005), 25. 38.

See John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 397–399. When cold vulcanization of rubber was perfected in 1843 allowing for the production of rubber condoms the Church expanded its concern for artificial contraception. A bishop had asked Rome’s Sacred Penitentiary if the priest should interrogate a penitent in confession if he suspected use of contraception or if he should allow good-faith ignorance to persist (401). 39. John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2003), 158. 40. Codex Iuris Canonici (1917 Code of Canon Law), canon 1081, §2, (in Latin). Marriage fell short of its own definition if no such exchange occurred. 41. Noonan, Contraception, 423–424. 42.

The method was based on a new scientific measurement of fertility periods in women’s monthly cycles, contrasted with an older theory also purporting to tell when during the month women were not physically able to conceive. The older model, referencing a “safe period” when couples could have sex without the threat of pregnancy, originated with nineteenth-century American physician Frederick Hollick. It was popular for a time in the second half of the century but soon became associated with French biologist Felix Pouchet’s erroneous claims about the timing of human ovulation. Pouchet’s published figures derived from the study of female dogs (James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 [New York: Basic Books, 1978], 12–13). As a consequence, up until the 1930s, the common understanding of ovulation was badly out of line with the workings of the female body, and any idea of a safe period was rendered quite suspect. This only changed with the new research undertaken during the interwar period. A rhythm method of birth prevention that could claim any success obviously needed to rely on legitimate studies. 43.

See Paula Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm: The Determination of the Woman’s Time of Ovulation and its Social Impact in the United States, 1920–1940” (Ph.D. dissertation, SUNY Stony Brook, 2000). Viterbo argues that by 1937, Latz had advised more than 25,000 women, most by mail and at no charge (253, fn 381). Latz described himself as a devout Catholic (Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 115). One contemporary author in The Pictorial Review went out of her way to label Latz “a deeply religious Catholic” (see Maxine Davis, “The Rhythm,” The Pictorial Review 39 [May 1938]: 18). The same author also said of Latz’s enthusiasm for the rhythm method: “He teaches it with the ardor of an apostle” (ibid.). Another active Catholic physician-researcher of note in this era was John R.

Rock, the future co-inventor of the Enovoid birth control pill (Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 252, 255–257). 44. Leo Latz, The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women: A Discussion of the Physiological, Practical, and Ethical Aspects of the Discoveries of Drs. K. Ogino (Japan) and H. Knaus (Austria) Regarding the Periods When Conception Is Impossible and When Possible (Chicago: Latz Foundation, 1932); Valere J. Coucke and James J. Walsh, The Sterile Period in Family Life (New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1933). Latz learned about the method when he was in Cologne, Germany, having heard a presentation on it at the Cologne Medical Society. Soon afterward, he returned to the United States and began advising his patients to use it (Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 252). His official presentation to the American medical community came in Leo John Latz and C.

Reiner, “Natural Conception Control,” JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association 105 [1935] (cited in Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 253, fn 381). 45. Latz’s book carried the endorsement of the Chicago archdiocese’s Cardinal Mundelein; Couke and Walsh enjoyed what was an even more prestigious sanction—that of Cardinal Patrick Hayes of New York. Technically, both books derived from the work of a Dutch Catholic physician, Jan M. Smulders. Smulders’ book popularizing the idea of a sterile period had appeared in Germany earlier in 1932. See J. N. Smulders, Periodische Enthaltung in der Ehe Methode: Ogino Knaus (1932). Knaus’s book bore the seal of the venerable Diocese of Regensburg, Germany. 46. As both authors noted, most women do not have perfectly regular cycles. Women with irregular menstrual cycles (such as a variation of twenty-six to thirty days) would have to be abstinent for twelve days per month.

Stress and other factors could increase the irregularity (Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 105). 47. In a forum aimed at other priests, Cooper had gone so far in the late 1920s as to suggest Catholics had never yet made the restrictive argument properly on natural law grounds. He specifically asked, for example, why Catholic teaching skipped over the usual assignment of venial sin for violations of the natural order in the particular case of contraception and only in that case; the Church classified contraception always as a mortal sin. How, he wondered, was that justified? He pointed out that eating “for pleasure alone” (rather than for nourishment) was simply a venial sin. Why not sex as the expression of a couple’s love, or for pleasure alone, etc.? See John M. Cooper, “Birth Control and the ‘Perverted Faculty’ Argument,” The Ecclesiastical Review 79 (November 1928): 527.

Cooper targeted the deductive “perverted faculty” argument by saying that Catholic authorities have offered “facile assumptions” in place of “objective evidence” as to “what precisely is the natural function of the faculty (sex) under consideration?” (529). 48. See, for example, Frank A. Smothers, “New Light on Birth Control,” The Common-weal 17 (March 8, 1933): 511–513; A. M. Turano, “Contraception by Rhythm,” American Mercury 35 (June 1935): 164–168. A pamphlet advertising a cardboard wheel device used to calculate the rhythms of ovulation and sterility is found in John Ryan’s papers, advertising that it “Assumes Perfect Birth Control” (1937), folder 17, box 17, John A. Ryan Papers, ACUA. 49. Viterbo, “The Promise of Rhythm,” 294–295. 50. John Montgomery Cooper letter to Edgar Schmiedeler, quoted in Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 113.

51. John A. O’Brien, Natural Birth Control without Contraceptives, According to Nature’s Law in Harmony with Catholic Morality (Champaign, IL: The Newman Company, 1938), 96. 52. O’Brien, Natural, 71–75. 53. The Methodist Anthony Comstock had succeeded in getting a federal law passed in 1873 that prohibited using the U.S. mail to circulate contraception-related materials. Under this law, “contraceptives” and related information were specifically prohibited under the categories “articles of immoral use” or “obscene literature.” See . In 1937, the American Medical Association endorsed medically supervised contraception as an aspect of preventive medicine while a series of court decisions effectively dismantled the Comstock laws. 54. See O’Brien’s manner of garbing natural law in the trappings of ends-based utility in Natural, 34–38. 55. Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 107. 56. See, for example, O’Brien, Natural, 53.

Noonan has emphasized the importance of von Hildebrand’s novel argument in this period and for future Catholic moral theology. See Noonan, Contraception, 494–495. 57. O’Brien, Lawful, 71; O’Brien, Natural, 71. 58. O’Brien, Natural, 97. 59. O’Brien, Natural., 147, 42. O’Brien acknowledged that while he was “not a medical scientist,” he had the assistance in compiling the book of the Belgian physician Raoul Guchteneere, the Loyola of Chicago medical school professor of gynecology Henry Schmitz, and the Austrian researcher Herman Knaus (O’Brien, Natural, 146; O’Brien, Lawful, i). O’Brien also listed numerous specialist scientists throughout the books supporting the rhythm method. 60. O’Brien, Natural, 20–21. 61. See, for example, O’Brien’s citation of The Clergy Review [London] from May 1933 (ibid., 44).

Raoul Guchteneere was said to have written positive articles on the method in The Homiletic Monthly (ibid., xvii–xix). 62. Noll quoted in ibid., xv. 63. For the shift in Noll’s attitude, see Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 116. 64. O’Brien, Natural, 44.

Question: In the 1920s Japanese and Austrian physicians Kyusaku Ogino and Hermann Knaus devised the contraceptive method called popularly?
Answer: Rhythm