Margaret Sanger VS. Catholicism
The only reference to Margaret Sanger in the Knights of Columbus history is a fleeting mention as "a leading spokesperson of the American birth-control movement." Sanger may have deserved more attention because her crusade for contraception aroused Catholic resistance in 1940 especially in the two states where the Order originated. It is inconceivable that the Supreme Council in New Haven, CT, was unaware of the fight that pitted Catholics against Sanger in Holyoke, MA.



Margaret Sanger

Public opinion regarding birth control changed about 1930 when many Protestants approved of contraception, a practice that the Catholic Church con­demned as "intrinsically evil." Many states liberalized their laws; Connecticut and Massachusetts were among the few that still prohibited the distribution of contra­ceptives or information about their use. The New England Mothers' Health Council, an affiliate of what to­day is known as Planned Parenthood, sought repeal of these laws; in the fall of 1940 Margaret Sanger toured on the Council's behalf.

In early October the First Congregational Church in Holyoke agreed to lend its meeting room for a Sanger speech on the 16th. Unbeknownst to the Congregation­alists, however, Catholic Bishop Thomas M. O'Leary was determined to prevent a public discussion of birth control in his diocese. His pastoral declaration on the subject began

We have been informed ...that a campaign is about to be launched...in the interest of the detestable practice [and Sanger] is to be featured as a speaker in its defense. The plan, ultimately, is to arouse enough people in its promotion to pass a state law enabling physicians to pass out this type of advice freely, and even to establish clinics for the general distribution of information now prohibited by law.

Monsignor Edward McGuire, the senior-most Catholic pastor in town, released the Bishop's statement to the Holyoke newspaper along with two observations. One, said McGuire, "every Pope has cried out against this sin so contrary to the very end for which the sacrament of matrimony was instituted." And two, the sponsors of "this lecture are engaged in a work that is unpatriotic and a disgrace to the Christian community." Catholics, he added, "will be guided by the mind of Christ and His Church."

On the morning of October 15, non-Catholic businessmen expressed fear of a Catholic boycott. A trustee at First Congregational who was also a banker met with Monsignor McGuire. He recalled that the priest stated that Mothers' Health was not really for mothers' health but for birth control. According to the banker Fr. McGuire also said "It is the same outfit that met in New York and exhibited all the devices of birth control, indeed did everything but commit the sex act in public." The priest said further that the Catholic Church was established by Christ to defend divine laws; that God told Eve and Adam to multiply; and that birth control violated the Fifth Commandment which tells us not to kill. The priest ended by pledging that the Church would "fight birth control with all the means at its command [including]...the use of economic boycott against those who foster the birth control movement and violate divine law."

Because of Catholic pressure the First Congregational Church reneged. By noon of October 16 Sanger had no place to speak except, possibly, a street corner. "This certainly does not seem like the United States. It's more like Russia or perhaps nαzι Germany," she told a reporter. Sanger was in fact familiar with eugenic experiments in nαzι Germany. Indeed, some of her statements in Birth Control Review, which she edited, could well have come from Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Enlightenment under Adolph Hitler: "Birth control­more children from the fit, less from the unfit"; "Birth control to create a race of thoroughbreds"; "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the negro population.."14 At the last minute in Holyoke in 1940 the Textile Workers offered space to Sanger because "Most of the girls [in the Union] are young and want to keep their jobs." The Union Hall manager added that many were nominally Catholic and had fallen for quack birth-control schemes or tried induced abortions.

In her speech Sanger threatened that Americans would not be deprived of civil liberties by Catholics. As for birth control, she averred "What we are trying to do ...is level the unequal birth rate in this country, so that people with intelligence, means and health will have more children, and the poor, sickly mother will be allowed to space her pregnancies." Bishop O'Leary's Catholic Mirror commented that "these `people with intelligence, means and health' are not reproducing in sufficient numbers to guarantee their future existence ...." The local Grand Knight of the Knights of Columbus summarized the significance of the incident in 1947 when he explained why "we chased out Margaret Sanger:"

No individual has any right whatsoever to interfere with divine law. And birth control is an interference with divine law. The priest doesn't have to place on me any moral obligation to fight against birth control; the obligation is already on me in divine law. We chased out Margaret Sanger, you might as well say, on a pure and simple religious issue. Wouldn't you stand up for your religion and fight damn hard if anyone openly attacked it the way the Sanger crowd did.15

The defenders of Catholic doctrine recognized that while Margaret Sanger was intent on making contraception socially acceptable she was also planting seeds for legalized abortion, race ѕυιcιdє, and forced sterilization. Bishop O'Leary obviously saw this when he warned that the real aim was to establish "clinics" for the performance of acts "now prohibited by law." Catholics in Holyoke may have been primed because Sanger had been at war with the Church for some 30 years.

In the early 1930s she brought the attack into the halls of Congress during hearings on federal family planning proposals. "Before we can have birth control we must have Church control," said Sanger at a hearing in 1932. She had written earlier that Catholics had "degenerated terribly" due to the celibacy of priests and nuns. They were from "the more intelligent and splendid types" and their failure to reproduce left the "Catholic race in very inferior racial health."16

The NCWC picked Fr. John A. Ryan, a left-leaning professor of sociology at the Catholic University, to answer Sanger. Known as "Monsignor New Deal" because he served as an assistant secretary in Franklin Roosevelt's Department of Labor, Ryan was dismissed derisively by Sanger as "an amateur economist." But the priest-bureaucrat, a better quipster than Catholic apologist, gave as good as he got. As an expert on labor problems he noted pointedly how "the lady's idea that birth control will ease unemployment is fantastic." On another occasion Ryan described the world sought by birth controllers as "the Sangerian Shangri La"-Shangri La being the name James Hilton gave to his Utopia in the 1931 novel Lost Horizon. Ryan never quite addressed a salient point, however why the Catholic Church opposed birth control.

John Augustine Ryan was born in the diocese of St. Paul, Minnesota, and ordained by Archbishop John Ireland in 1898. In his autobiography Ryan remembered Ireland as "a patriot, a liberal, and a progressive." In the same work Ryan recalled his delight when Rome refused to condemn the Knights of Labor, thereby vindicating "the vigilance and social vision of Cardinal Gibbons and the American hierarchy." Of incidental interest, Margaret Sanger's father, an apostate Irishman named Michael Higgins, was a member of the Knights, a secret society which escaped Rome's vigilance only because of persistence by Ireland and Gibbons.17

With his Americanist background, Monsignor Ryan was an unlikely apologist for Catholic orthodoxy. As an advocate for the semi-socialist programs of the New Deal, Ryan never gave more than lip-service to opposing family planning schemes. Such was the priest that the NCWC picked to uphold Catholic doctrine regarding the scourge of birth control! The choice of such a man sent a message to Catholics: Do not let any controversy over contraception disturb Catholic tranquility under America's religious liberty.

The wider context of Holyoke proves the point. Immediately after Sanger's speech the local paper pleaded for tolerance, saying "No one anywhere wants any division among our churches." It called for a return to the status quo ante bellum: "We have through the years established a high degree of unity among our churches on all civic community problems. We want to hold on to it; to develop it further." Catholics could hardly be blamed if they did not understand non-Catholic concerns that opposition to birth control on religious grounds violated the religious liberty of Protestants. No less a personage than the highest ranking prelate in New England gave Holyoke Catholics their cue in the mid­1930s when city fathers solicited statements to inscribe on the facade of the Veterans' Building, "the most costly and modern municipal structure in the city." Along with "Banish War" and "Enthrone Peace" was found the slogan "Religious Freedom Glorifies America." These last words "were sent by the Rt. Rev. William Cardinal O'Connell [Cardinal Archbishop of Boston] to a committee seeking... `sentiments which would represent all the people of Holyoke... Emphasis added].18

Holyoke generated national attention because it suggested that American Catholics sometimes acted like integral Catholics. When they did they were perceived by Protestants as dangerous to American freedom. While locals in the suffragan city of Holyoke did not understand the implications, their hierarchy in Boston did. So Sanger's tour continued without further Catholic opposition. In fact, the silence of William Cardinal O'Connell and his Auxiliary, Bishop Richard J. Cushing, was deafening throughout September and October. Only Cardinal O'Connell's assertion that "Religious Freedom Glorifies America" can explain the silence. Better to be mute than perceived as antagonistic to American religious liberty. That also was why the national office of the Knights of Columbus was silent on Holyoke, and why the Catholic hierarchy in the US never rallied openly behind a straightforward opposition to family planning and concomitant evils. In the tradition of Americanism dating back to Bishop John Carroll in 1789, nothing must upset the comfortable accommodation between American Catholicism and American Freedom.

Two weeks after Sanger spoke in Holyoke, Franklin Roosevelt ended his campaign for a third term with a nationwide radio address from Boston. "I would like to say a few words to the mothers and fathers of America," said the President. "I have said this before and I shall say it again, and again, and again-your boys are not going to fight in any foreign wars." Roosevelt won the election but could not keep his word to America's parents. After the United States became a belligerent, the President explained what the Second World War was really all about. With a vision even more grandiose than Wilson's in 1917, he declared that America fought not for Democracy or to end war. No! America now fought "so all men everywhere might enjoy Four Freedoms." Two of Roosevelt's Freedoms from fear and from want­came from the New Deal. The other two Freedoms-of religion and of speech-came from the Bill of Rights. Roosevelt overlooked two other First Amendment freedoms-of the press and of assembly-perhaps because the phrase "Four Freedoms" was nice and alliterative while "Six Freedoms" was not. The president always had an orator's ear for a resounding phrase.

At any rate Roosevelt included freedom of religion even though the nation was allied with the officially atheistic Soviet Union. And so it came to pass in the Second World War that American religious liberty was spread to the four corners of the earth. At the time few Catholics understood that their religious liberty protected unbelief as well as belief, to the ultimate detriment of all religious belief. The condition of Church and State in the United States of the 1990s is roof of the depth of this Catholic misunderstanding.