| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Catholics and Contraception: An American History. By Leslie Woodcock Tentler. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xiv, 335 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8014-4003-3.)
One of the most puzzling aspects of contemporary American religious history has been the discrepancy between the Catholic Church's continuing ban on birth control and its adherents' rejection of the church's teaching on contraception. In Catholics and Contraception, Leslie Woodcock Tentler has provided a superbly even-handed treatment of the Catholic Church's perorations on this sensitive and consequential theological issue.	1
Tentler shows that until the 1920s parish priests steered away from homilies on marital sexuality, and their teachings on contraception differed little from those of most other religions in the United States. Matters turned decisively in 1930, however, when Pope Pius XI formally denounced contraception as a sin against "God and nature" in the encyclical Casti Connubii. This initiated a period in which American bishops, parish priests, and confessors were called upon to speak with one voice against birth control. Not surprisingly, Catholic birthrates fell out of step with the plummeting fertility of non-Catholics during the Great Depression.	. . .

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