Calderone had long before given up on the John Birchers and fundamentalists, but she thought she had a better chance working with Catholics—a confidence she retained for much of the duration of her career. Even during her years as the medical director of Planned Parenthood, Calderone had done her utmost to reach out to Catholics. By all visible measures, she did so in a spirit of deep interest and generosity, believing that if she exposed her own humanity to Catholic women and men, they would do likewise. To Catholic correspondents, she would write things such as, “I deeply respect the belief of the Catholic church and understand the principles on which it is based. I would never do anything to try and influence a Catholic in any way.”65 Words of outreach and an earnest effort to understand and empathize with Catholics characterized her correspondence, even as she sought to inform Catholics that she had the right to advocate contraception for those who wanted it. She emphasized the common ground that existed between the Catholic position and her own, writing to one Catholic journalist, “Actually you know the Catholic and the non-Catholic position is not so far apart. Our basic desire is the same: stable, happy monogamous families. The understanding shown by the Vatican in several statements of the need of parents in some instances and conditions of stress to space their children simply echoes our own feelings of concern for mothers and fathers all over the world.”66
The effort to reach out to Catholics went deep for Calderone, and she spent enormous amounts of time writing to Catholic leaders, defending herself as a “highly moral” person who deserved a hearing from Catholics. “I have written to you at such length,” she pleaded in this same letter, “hoping that these sober thoughts could be passed on by you to other thoughtful Catholics.”67 She knew that not all Catholics were the “thoughtful” kind, as she thought of them, yet Calderone remained charitable toward Catholics and hopeful about reaching them. Her 1960 book, Release from Sexual Tensions, adopted the same high-minded tone and plainly sought to draw Catholic readers no less than others. Indeed, on the very first page of the first chapter—and again on the book’s final, concluding page—Calderone nostalgically recalled a “kind old priest” she met in France as a child and who gave her a “wonderfully true” lesson about cherishing each age of one’s life. The book gave frank counsel to couples about the ordinary difficulties, sexual and otherwise, to be faced in marriage, and its list of suggested reading included The Catholic Marriage Manual, by George A. Kelly. Calderone also commended the church’s Pre-Cana and Cana conferences (for engaged and married couples) as well as the rhythm method (though urging this to be “practiced with extreme care under the guidance of a knowledgeable physician” and extolling safer contraceptive methods for those whose religion allowed them). Sounding like the liberal Quaker she was, she wrote hopefully that those who followed their religion could see that compassion was more important than creed, and that the “main purpose of religion” was “to express God’s love, not your hate.”68
Whatever optimism she conveyed in her public speech and writings, Calderone was both intelligent and experienced enough to know that Roman Catholic leaders had no plans to shift their thinking on birth control or on sexual education, and she strove to connect with them in order to melt what she considered their recalcitrance. Her address to the conference at Green Lake had exempted “thoughtful Catholic leaders” from her condemnation of Catholic intransigence, even as she piled up real-life examples of Catholic transgressions: the Protestant woman with cervical cancer landing at a Catholic hospital, “only to receive a tongue-lashing from the sisters for the source of her referral”; the employee of a Planned Parenthood clinic who was “denounced by her income tax auditor, for the source of her income”; the army wife denied contraception at the local army hospital “because the chief obstetrician was a Catholic”; nursing textbooks declaring Planned Parenthood “a vice”; and “the new young Protestant doctors, trying to get established in a community, who are denied staff privileges in a Catholic hospital unless they sign a statement saying that neither they nor their wives will have anything to do with the Planned Parenthood Center” (emphasis in original). Indignantly, she emphasized, “surely these actions are unworthy of a great Christian faith.”69 Calderone’s dislike of Catholic activism was plenty apparent, her avowed “respect” notwithstanding, and she repeatedly implied that Catholic lay people were victims of the church hierarchy.
Still, with her persistent outreach to Catholic leaders, Calderone was able to develop a reputation for a spirit of heartfelt openness and generosity to Catholics that was matched by few of her peers. When, in January 1964, the celebrated science and health reporter Earl Ubell wrote a detailed article about SIECUS’s recent founding for the New York Herald Tribune, he signaled the significance of the inclusion of “Catholics on Board” in his first section heading. “Even more significant” than Calderone’s recruitment of distinguished sex researchers and educators to the board, Ubell wrote, was “the inclusion on the board of directors of two men, who while participating as individuals, are of the Roman Catholic faith.” These two were the Jesuit John L. Thomas, a sociologist at the Catholic institution St. Louis University, and the Paulist George Hagmaier, associate director of the Paulist Institute for Religious Research in New York. Ubell also wryly noted the “inadvertent ironic twist” provided by the fact that Calderone spent the previous decade at Planned Parenthood working on contraceptive education, “an idea anathema to Catholics.”70
In underscoring the importance of SIECUS’s goal—“to establish man’s sexuality as a health entity,” he noted that “Father Thomas said it best” and quoted Thomas’s recent public comments that his interest in SIECUS stemmed from his conviction that “a serious reappraisal of contemporary sexual patterns is long overdue.” Indeed, the Jesuit scholar agreed with Calderone in noting, “We have discarded past conceptions of sex without bothering to replace them, so that current attitudes and practices have developed haphazardly, with little concern for the profound significance of human sexuality considered in terms either of personal fulfillment and happiness [or] the requirements of a technically advanced society.”71 As Ubell noted, SIECUS’s original board also included Dr. John Rock, the Roman Catholic doctor who helped develop the birth control pill, with the hope (not realized) that it was “natural” enough to become an accepted means of birth control to the Catholic hierarchy.
As we saw earlier, Calderone was inspired to leave Planned Parenthood and found SIECUS largely through her contacts with liberal religious leaders, mostly Protestants, but as Ubell rightly highlighted, she made sure to include respected Catholic authorities there as well. Calderone cherished the Catholic presence on the SIECUS board, and those she recruited certainly sounded progressive in their writing. Collegial relationships with Thomas and Hagmaier, in particular, were important to her, both personally and professionally. Both men served for several years on the SIECUS board despite the controversy their participation sometimes generated. She later told an interviewer that Father Thomas was “a beautiful man,” giving the example of “a very beautiful little piece” he wrote for SIECUS in 1965 about sexuality as “a major aspect of personality” rather than a series of “isolated acts,” which “really was new thinking.”72
Thomas, who held a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago and whose own work focused on marriage and the family, could and did speak expansively about sex. Ordained to the priesthood in Florissant, Missouri, in 1939, he had a career that flourished in a postwar context where issues pertaining to sexual morality, the family, and general “values” were at the center of American Jesuit intellectual life; indeed, his prolific writings helped to put them there. Along with many scholarly articles, he wrote numerous books and essays for Catholic readers as well as the broader public, including an accessible and widely read sociological study, The American Catholic Family, and Marriage and Rhythm, described by one historian as an “admirably pastoral” (i.e., empathic) book on the rhythm method for Catholic couples. He was known, i
n fact, for what a Jesuit historian would later call “the persistence he brought to the task of reconciling the defense of traditional values with a social scientist’s recognition of the economic and demographic transformations undermining the bastion of these values.” While Thomas’s chief goal appears to have been the reinforcement of traditional Catholic family norms (including gender roles) amid a rapidly changing society, his conservatism did not aim toward hopes of gaining political power or making Catholic morals “the law of the land” but rather toward the preservation of Catholic morale and identity in a potentially hostile world. Like his famous Jesuit contemporary John Courtney Murray, Thomas’s concern was, in one researcher’s words, “the fate of Catholicism in a pluralist setting.”73
In the 1965 essay cited by Calderone, Thomas wrote about human sexuality as a “connected whole” to which people should react with “healthy openness.” More surprisingly, at least in the context of other Catholic writings about sex, was Thomas’s affirmation that sex roles were “culturally defined” and “radically conditioned by… the social environment within which the individual develops.” From childhood, “boys and girls in a given society” were “trained” to behave in certain “culturally defined” ways that would “later determine their relative social positions, accepted areas of action and permitted aspirational goals as members of an adult community.” Thomas’s social scientific training was evident in these words, which could easily have been penned by Ruth Benedict.74
But Thomas was neither a cultural relativist nor a social constructionist on gender. To the Catholic readership of Commonweal magazine, he wrote critically of “our day of Margaret Sanger and India Edwards” (Edwards was a prominent Democratic official who strongly advocated for women’s greater involvement in US politics). American society’s view of appropriate gender roles was rapidly changing, and, “with each change, women further invade the traditional male bailiwick,” with no common framework for evaluating “these female incursions.” Woman’s domestic duties—“her core-function in the home”—had been devalued by “our permissive society,” and the divinely ordained dual role of wife and mother needed to regain the prestige it deserved. In a 1968 interview conducted after he had left St. Louis for the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Center for Social Studies, Thomas noted that in defining human sexuality his “basic starting point, of course,” was “full acceptance” of God’s gendered order in creating male and female, “and it is ultimately on the basis of, or in terms of, this complementary relationship that we determine the meaning of human sexuality.” As a Catholic scholar later summarized, for Thomas, “changes in expectations and family practices could be accommodated insofar as they did not usurp habits of gender stratification.”75
Calderone agreed with much of this rather traditional way of viewing sexuality, though she did not promote (or live) any notion of female submission to her husband’s headship—a notion Thomas took for granted. But the differences between their points of view were acute. As a Jesuit deeply committed to what he termed the “time-and-space-ignoring solidarity” of Catholicism, Thomas believed in the interdependence of Catholic precepts and in Catholic ideology as “an organic body of religious truth” based on “a universal, unchanging, and timeless consensus in basic doctrines among all the faithful of every age and condition.” Holding this view, Thomas strongly upheld the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control, blaming the “social acceptance and widespread use” of birth control for American women’s confusion about their domestic roles and the devaluation of motherhood. Elsewhere Thomas laid out the church’s view even more broadly, writing that the Christian worldview that maintained humanity’s “essential qualitative difference from other higher forms of animal life,” necessitated the rejection of birth control.76
Indeed, Thomas’s point could be extended well beyond birth control to matters pertaining to sexuality more generally, as he wrote that disagreements about the “licitness” of particular acts “must logically be based on differences concerning basic moral principles, and since these are based on our concept of the nature, origin, and destiny of man, any worthwhile discussion of disagreements must ultimately center on this point.” When, much later in 1982, he reflected on the many radical changes in belief and behavior he saw around him, including among Catholics—greater openness to premarital and extramarital sex, high rates of abortion, broad acceptance of contraception—he despaired. “Most Americans evidently have learned to accept the normalcy of the morally pathological.” This was not merely a problem about sex or even the snuffing out of fetal life; far worse, it held catastrophic implications pertaining to obedience. That is, “the widespread tacit acceptance of sexual freedom as a right,” concomitant with the elevation of the autonomous self above and against the broader social order, was “the most erosive challenge currently confronting the Church in the Western world.” This impulse, which “appears as a significant element in the various youth, minority, and women’s movements of recent years” was gravely undermining “the Church’s entire traditional teaching regarding impulse control, responsibility, and fidelity to binding commitments.” By this time in the early 1980s, he and Calderone had long ceased their working relationship through SIECUS, a tie that simply could not be sustained across the vast gulf of their differing viewpoints.77
Calderone’s other close Catholic associate, George Hagmaier, held views that appear to have been somewhat closer to her own. Ordained to the priesthood by the Paulist order in 1951, just shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, Hagmaier later grew interested in studies of religion and psychiatry and earned a doctorate in education from Columbia University before working for the Paulist Institute for Religious Research and, starting in the mid-1960s, teaching at the Catholic University of America. In his highly regarded 1959 book, Counselling the Catholic (cowritten with the Jesuit Robert W. Gleason), Hagmaier highlighted the crucial role that sex education played in one’s subsequent life. “A very important aspect of self-acceptance involves the kind of sex education, or lack of it, which the growing child is given,” he wrote. Sex education not only was about biological reproduction but “includes the concepts a child has of masculinity or femininity, his growing capacity to give and to receive affection, and the kind of relationship he has to his own father and mother.” Families were critical to the development of these concepts, as “Pope Pius XII made it very plain that it is a grave duty of parents to instruct their children by revealing gradually, simply, and truthfully each fact and detail which the child has the capacity to assimilate.”78 With these points, nearly any Catholic could agree. What was more remarkable, and closer to Calderone’s own views, was Hagmaier’s close attention to the communication of “healthy attitudes toward sex,” not mere information, and his insistence that parents were often all too “Victorian, Puritan, or Jansenist” in their inhibited prudishness when tenderly broaching the subject. “Children of such parents come to regard sex with uneasiness and misgivings, and are soon afraid to ask further about it.”79
Hagmaier expressed pride in his work with SIECUS, which he performed while working extensively in various areas of religious education: conducting mental health workshops for community organizations, interfaith clergy groups, and religious communities, for example, and revising seminary curricula in pastoral counseling. He was fully supportive of the idea that schools should develop sex education programs, a position that not all priests shared. In a report to his superior, Hagmaier wrote of his recent election to the position of executive secretary at SIECUS, noting that as one of only five executive officers who oversaw the organization’s policies and operations, “I feel I have significant influence in the formulation of important goals. I have tried to take into account the many ways in which an essentially secular concern is given Christian and religious dimensions. I feel this is another of those unique opportunities that have found Paulists involved in the beginnings of important movements.” He could be a positive Christian influence on SIECUS, Hagmaier mainta
ined. “In a way the [Paulist] Community has lent me to Siecus recently for a good part of my working hours, and I feel it has been a most happy collaboration.”80 Not all Catholics agreed. One Paulist historian later noted that his association with Calderone, “the controversial sexologist,” and his involvement with SIECUS “upset many conservative American Catholics.” But in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and the Catholic Church’s apparent “new openness to the world” in the mid-1960s, both Hagmaier and Calderone believed this to be important, necessary work.81
With that same heady, ecumenical spirit filling the air, Catholics began reaching out to Calderone, just as she had for some time been reaching out to them; indeed, her intentional collaboration with Catholic leaders at last promised some useful dividends. In May 1966, through Hagmaier, she was able to attend an important colloquium on women’s sexuality at Louvain University in Belgium that was called by Leo Joseph Cardinal Suenens, a major leader in the Second Vatican Council who strongly advocated the spirit of renewal and open-mindedness to change that was summed up as aggiornamento. According to the colloquium report Calderone later wrote (apparently to other SIECUS administrators), some sixty participants attended the event, hailing from France, Italy, West Germany, Austria, Holland, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, as well as Belgium. The group assembled was a mix of physicians, nurses, lawyers, clergy (chiefly pastoral counselors), and academics of various sorts. Despite the fact that the meeting focused on women’s sexuality, Calderone was the lone woman in the US delegation. Fortunately, a Belgian female professional at the event soon made, in Calderone’s words, “a spirited suggestion that if we were to discuss the sexuality of women, we should begin to think in terms that had reality to the women themselves, rather than in concept and terms derived by men only.” Calderone leapt at that remark in agreement and furthered the discussion. Hoping for a broader discussion of sexuality from her interlocutors, she shifted her own remarks to marriage stability—a topic of common concern for both her and the Catholic leaders heading the event.82
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