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Reviewed by:
  • An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics by Sharon M. Leon
  • Kathleen Brian
An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics
Sharon M. Leon
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013, ix + 226 p., $45

In the midst of charged and ongoing debates about the Vatican’s official position on reproductive health, it is an apt time to be looking toward the history that informs it. Sharon Leon does just that by recounting the varied encounters between eugenicists and “Catholic clergy, writers, and activists” in the United States between 1910 and the postwar era (5). Historians may expect a story of counterpoint and resistance; however, as Leon carefully emphasizes, it was much more nuanced than a simple dichotomy between religion and science. The relationship between Catholicism and eugenics–and, indeed, between religion and science more generally–cannot be captured by a metaphor of battle. Rather, it consisted of surprising moments of acceptance and collusion alongside more expected moments of tension and dissent. An Image of God thus continues a line of inquiry pursued by historians such as Christine Rosen and Phillip Thompson, bioethicist John Evans, and historian-philosopher Charles Taylor. Indeed, Rosen recognized the “spectrum of Catholic opinion” nearly a decade ago, a spectrum that Leon determinedly excavates here.1 Although Leon and Rosen come to similar conclusions, Leon’s book-length treatment necessarily offers a more textured analysis of Catholic thought than Rosen’s single chapter.

Leon weaves personal papers, official documents from the Vatican and the US government, Catholic and eugenic periodical literature, and institutional records into six chapters that tell the story of dominant US Catholic thought before and after Pope Pius XI’s 1930 papal encyclical Casti Connubii (On Christian Marriage). The encyclical represented the Catholic Church’s first official stance on eugenics. The period predating its publication was of course the more inchoate. It witnessed the conditional support of the Reverands John A. Ryan and John Montgomery Cooper, men whose dual positions as priests and academics precipitated their intimate connections with certain strains of the movement. Domestic opposition to eugenics also predated the Vatican’s teaching, but the encyclical galvanized and invigorated those in the oppositional line. Official backing, in other words, bolstered the confidence of Catholic thinkers who publicly opposed certain elements of the agenda proposed by eugenicists. Their confidence also grew in response to a number of successful challenges to proposed eugenic legislation, including the defeat of an [End Page 228] Ohio bill to legalize compulsory sterilization. It was not just what American Catholics thought, Leon emphasizes, but what they did that made them an easily recognized–and for some eugenicists, much-lamented–body of opposition and critique.

The book thus also contributes to histories of political mobilization among religious devotees. It paints a portrait of politically savvy Catholic thinkers who played down theological commitments in the public sphere to appeal more directly to some of the core tenets of American political thought. They grounded their public opposition in two primary arguments, neither of which had much to do with moral theology. They suggested, first, that eugenicists legitimated their agendas with questionable science that served as a veil for vehement racial prejudices. Indeed, American leaders of the Catholic Church took this line in part because it targeted the racial minorities that constituted a large portion of its coreligionists (that is, European and Latin-American immigrants). Second, Catholic thinkers focused on the questionable role of the state in the codification of eugenic agendas and in the implementation of the resultant policies. As Leon’s title suggests, they argued for the supreme authority of the individual upon whose body the state had no claim.

Leon suggests that the history of Catholic opposition has a great deal to say about individual rights, church–state relations, and political participation more broadly in the 20th century–and this reader is inclined to agree. Her attention to these issues, and her archaeology of how Catholic thinkers engaged them while eugenics was at the height of its popularity, is particularly welcome amidst the emergence of a “liberal” eugenics that finds recourse in the ostensibly autonomous individual. One wonders whether and how eugenic advocates may have...

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