The Abominable Crime of Onan

Catholic Pastoral Practice and Family Limitation in the United States, 1875-1919

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3333228
AutoresLeslie Woodcock Tentler (University of America, autor de correspondencia)
Año2002
Volumen71
Número2
Páginas307-340
Fecha de publicación2002-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaChurch History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0009-6407 • E-ISSN: 1755-2613
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0009640700095706
OpenAlexW2129107573
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas11

By the 1930s few Catholics in the United States could have been unaware of their church's 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 laity's heightened awareness of their church's stance on birth control and their growing consciousness of this position as a defining attribute of Catholic identity

Birth control · Blessing · Confessional · Context (archaeology) · Family planning · Identity (music) · Political science · Politics · Population · Protestantism · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Catholicism and Religious Studies · Demography · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies