Catholicism and American Freedom by John T. McGreevy

Author:John T. McGreevy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

Publicity for 1948 campaign against the liberalization of Massachusetts birth control laws.

The behind-the-scenes director of the archdiocesan effort was the Boston auxiliary bishop John Wright. That Wright—a friend of Jacques Maritain, later bishop of Worcester and Pittsburgh and then a Roman cardinal—directed the effort suggests the importance Catholic leaders placed on the issue. Privately, Wright warned that greater access to birth control rested on a par with “euthanasia, abortion, sterilization and other practices which do not lack defenders in our day.”84 John Ford, teaching in suburban Weston, Massachusetts, in 1948 urged New England Jesuits to “avoid a rhetorical or denunciatory tone.” But Father Ford also thought that for a Catholic to vote in favor of greater access to birth control might be a mortal sin.85 And he brushed aside claims that Catholics imposed their morality on Massachusetts citizens. “The same argument,” Ford noted, “is even now being urged in favor of the so-called ‘mercy killings’ of the aged and helpless; but the civil law still brands so-called ‘mercy killings’ as murder, and therefore immoral.”86

On election day Catholics again emerged victorious, with the birth control amendment losing by only a slightly smaller margin than in 1942. The Boston Pilot, the archdiocesan newspaper, congratulated “fellow citizens who so wisely saw this whole matter as a community, not a sectarian problem.”87

IV

Triumph at the Massachusetts polls masked a growing isolation. If for John Ford and other Catholics the experience of World War II confirmed the necessity of adherence to a universal natural law, most American intellectuals understood the European crisis of the 1930s and the war differently. Instead of a uniform moral code, these intellectuals stressed the importance of tolerance and critical debate in a democratic society and warned against unreflective obedience. The “genius” of American life, according to influential scholars such as Daniel Boorstin, was the absence of “dogma” in either politics or religion. “Whatever the dogmatist may feel about it,” explained a young Columbia professor, Jacques Barzun, “this relativist-instrumentalist philosophy is the philosophy of free democracy par excellence.”88

Armed with these convictions, American intellectuals inevitably found the Catholic position on contraception distressing. Already in 1938 a contributor to the Annals of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences had framed the contraception debate as one of “freedom of inquiry,” emphasizing the importance of physicians’ autonomy and speculating that Catholics secretly rooted for a “differential birth rate.”89 After the 1942 Massachusetts birth control referendum, a stunned New Republic contributor lashed out against Catholic “destroyers and wreckers of too many of the fundamentals of democracy” employing “the same weapons of attack which they [Catholics] used to destroy democracy in Austria and Spain.” A Nation counterpart hoped for an “anti-Catholic reaction.”90

Non-Catholics’ incredulity at Catholics’ resistance to contraception swelled after the war. Paul Blanshard devoted a chapter to the subject in American Freedom and Catholic Power, expressing his eugenic fear that “the feebleminded” were producing “future Americans at a much faster rate than our normal citizens.”91 Less strident voices also joined the fray. When a group of

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