Eugenics: Forgotten History

                                                    Charles Darwin

When we think of eugenics we usually think of Hitler, perhaps the most hated man in history. We are reminded of his plan to get rid of Jews, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and others he considered sub-normal human beings.  We may also think of Joseph Mengele, known as the ‘angel of death', who conducted eugenic experiments at Auschwitz on twins, many of whom were children.

But apparently the idea of eugenics and how to improve the human race by eliminating certain people was an idea that had been around for some time before it erupted in Nazi Germany. Darwin wrote about  natural selection, a process in which the best and strongest survive. If this is the case, then the human race should improve naturally. The weak bodied, the weak-minded, those with inherited disabilitating diseases, even homosexuals, it was thought, should naturally disappear in time. But for some in the early 20th-century, natural selection wasn’t doing the job fast enough. What if science accelerated the process of improving human beings so that there would no longer be drug and alcohol addicts, the insane, and the mentally retarded? Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, coined the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883, from its Latin roots meaning ‘good in birth’ or ‘noble heredity’ and it was promoted as a science.

Some well known Americans and British jumped on the bandwagon to improve the human race by eugenics and  backed the idea with their money and their writing. As is usual, the ideas filtered across the border into Canada as we will see. Here are a few  of those in 20th century America who aided the birth of the so-called ‘science of eugenics’.

Charles Benedict Davenport -(1866-1944)  was a Harvard zoologist who said, “Prevent the feeble-minded, drunkards, paupers, sex offenders and the criminalistic from having children or marrying their like, or cousins or any person belonging  to a neuropathic strain.”

Harry Hamilton Laughlin (1880-1943), who with Davenport founded the Eugenic Record Office on Long Island, New York with their staff, compiled detailed records on 534,625 Americans whom they considered defective.  Sixty thousand of them would face sterilization, the males by forced castration. Their aim was to sterilize fourteen million people in the United States and more worldwide to replace them with ‘pure Nordic stock’. Sound familiar?

Davenport had plenty of funds to accomplish this, but soon the Rockefeller Foundation poured in thousands more. In 1914, John Kellogg, brother of the Cereal King, founded the Race Betterment Foundation in Michigan.

 Lucien Howe, was the ophthalmologist who discovered that bathing the eyes of newborns with diluted silver nitrate would save the sight of thousands.  But he was an avowed eugenicist and proposed that blind people should be sterilized and forbidden to marry. The state of New York voted against this so it did not become law there.

In some states, prohibitions of marriage between certain races were prohibited: black/white marriages in several states, white/Asian marriages in Montana, white/Native Americans in other states.  Delaware criminalized marriages of people on welfare!

Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote the decision that was voted on by the United States Supreme Court to uphold legalized sterilization. In 1917 there were only 1,422 sterilized people in institutions in the US, but by 1941 there were 38,087. Not surprisingly, public support for sterilization was not strong and the movement against it was aided by the Hearst newspaper which published horror stories of sterilizations

In 1908, Nova Scotia was home of the first ‘eugenics movement’ in Canada when the League for the Care and Protection of Feebleminded Persons was established in the province. In Quebec, Ontario, and elsewhere, academics and physicians worked to enlist others to publicly support eugenics.

The most damaging sterilization program in Canadian history was afforded via the passing of the Alberta Sterilization Act of 1928. Youths, minorities, and women were sterilized in disproportionately high numbers. Indigenous people and Métis, regardless of age, were also targeted making up 25% of the sterilizations performed even though they represented only 2.3% of the general population in Alberta.  If the persons were deemed 'mentally defective' no consent was required.

British Columbia’s Sexual Sterilization Act, legislated in 1933 and repealed in 1973, closely resembled Alberta’s legislation. In BC however, the Act created a Board of Eugenics, consisting of a judge, psychiatrist, and social worker and fewer people were sterilized there. Many were inmates of Riverview or Essendale Mental Institution.

When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, they patterned their program of eugenics on American legislation. As well, they received financial assistance from those in the American movement. As we know, it turned into something horrific and 10,000 Jews alone were murdered.  Many more who were deemed ‘undesirable’ by the Nazi regime were also killed. When the truth became known at the end of the war, the world recoiled at the very idea of forced sterilization and getting rid of so-called ‘inferior’ human beings. Instead, it turned to ‘more civilized’ methods of contraception and abortion which was supposed to rescue women from being slaves to their fertility and protect the world from over-population. Those who were deemed the undesirable segments of humanity were targeted. ‘A Woman’s Choice’ was the cry of the day and Margaret Sanger headed a new onslaught on who should be allowed to have babies. 
What will the future bring?  More couples are opting to not have children.  Although abortion has decreased in some years, it has not disappeared by any means.  Artificial contraception is now common and although it was historically forbidden by all Christian denominations, the Anglican Church was the first to say it could be used "in some situations".  Now Christians from all Protestant denominations practice artificial contraception and only in the Catholic Church is it still not allowed (even though many Catholics ignore the Church's teaching). 
China brought in the "one-child policy" which has resulted in not enough women for Chinese men to marry. Will countries bring in forced laws to abort children or limit the number of children a couple can have?  Pope Paul VI made some predictions in his encyclical "Humanae Vitae" and that was one of them.  The suggestion that we can "decrease our carbon footprint" by not having children is a scary reminder that this may be on the horizon.  

The True Tolkien Story

Are the stories of the Hobbits just imaginative tales based in Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology? Or is there more to Middle Earth and the events that fascinate modern readers? The life of the author, Tolkien, gives us a hint of the source of his literary achievements.

Tolkien’s Early Life
JRR (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1892. His mother and father, Arnold and Mabel Tolkien, were English but had moved to South Africa where Arnold worked as a banker. The Tolkien family’s home in England had been in Warwickshire but the name ‘Tolkien’ originated in the Saxon Duchies of what later became the German Republic. Mabel Tolkien (nee Suffield), who came from a religious Anglican family, had been a missionary with her sister in Africa before her marriage. The Tolkien family attended Church of England services. Arnold and Mabel had a second son Hilary, born when Ronald, as JRR was called, was only two.
As children, both boys were sickly and the parents decided that Mabel would take the boys back to England in hopes that their health would improve there. Arnold was to follow them when he could resign his post and find similar employment in England. Mabel left when JRR was only two and Hilary just a baby and they settled in Sarehole, a small, quiet village outside Birmingham. Shortly after their arrival in England they received news that Arthur had died of acute peritonitis after influenza.
This was a great tragedy for the family and Mabel was left to raise the two boys by herself. She was qualified to teach and took the education of her sons upon herself teaching them Latin, Greek, literature and mathematics. Even at the age of nine Tolkien began inventing languages but this was thought by his mother to be a waste of time and was discouraged. Mabel did encourage her sons to appreciate fairy stories that were popular in Victorian times, particularly the writings of George MacDonald, Spencer and the Grimm Brothers. She also shared her enthusiasm of nature, classical mythology, pageants and parades with the boys.
Around 1900, Mabel Tolkien converted to Catholicism. It is not known what led her to do this, although there was a surge of interest in Roman Catholicism in Birmingham at that time because of John Cardinal Newman’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism in 1845. Newman had been accepted into the Congregation of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri and established the Oratory in Birmingham in 1851. He was made a Cardinal in 1879 and died in 1890. Birmingham had traditionally been an anti-Catholic city but through the Oratorian Fathers many converted to the Catholic faith.
Mabel Tolkien had depended on her relatives for moral and financial help but her family did not approve of her conversion and a strain was now placed on the relationship. During this time, Mabel came to rely on Father Francis Xavier Morgan, a priest at the Oratory, for advice, especially on the raising of the boys. He was said to have “... a firm but gentle manner, a keen intellect and an unusual sensitivity toward children.” (Grotta-Kurska, p. 33). Father Morgan was influential in the boys’ upbringing and Tolkien said later that he had been like a father to him.

Tolkien and Studies
In 1904, Mabel Tolkien died leaving 12 year old Ronald and Hilary orphans but she had made arrangements for the boys before her death. As she wanted them to continue in the Catholic faith rather than leave them with their Protestant grandparents, Mabel had appointed Father Morgan as their legal guardian and he placed them in a boarding house where other orphans attending the Oratory school lived. Tolkien missed the quiet village of Sarole and although he hated the poverty and squalor of Birmingham he came to enjoy the museums, libraries and parks. Father Morgan took them on trips to the English countryside, to Wales and once even to the Alps for mountain climbing.
Tolkien eventually outgrew the physical weaknesses he had as a child and by age 16 he was an enthusiastic athlete. It was also when he was 16 that he met Edith Bratt, who lived at the same boarding house. She was his first and only love. Edith was also an orphan and from a similar background to Tolkien’s. Because of their youth and because they were expected to concentrate on their education, they were kept apart. In fact, they were even forbidden to write to each other until Tolkien was at Oxford and Edith reached the age of majority!
Tolkien studied at King Edward VI School and chose to focus on Anglo-Saxon studies rather than the usual Classics. In 1911 he was able to begin studies at Exner College at Oxford as an ‘exhibitioner’ which was similar to a scholarship that provided his tuition.

Tolkien and The War
The world was drastically changed in 1914 when the Great War began but Tolkien was determined to finish his degree before joining the army. When he did join as an Oxford graduate he was automatically given a commission. Before being sent to the front in France in 1916, he went on a short leave to Birmingham where he and Edith were married. In France he took part in the terrible Battle of the Somme where many were killed.
After 1917, after suffering trench fever, Tolkien did not see active service again and later that year he and Edith had their first child, John Francis Ruel, the ‘Francis’ after Father Morgan. This first son later became a priest following in the footsteps of Father Francis. The war ended in 1918 and Tolkien worked for a time at the Ministry of Labour. He was able to join the faculty of the University of Leeds in 1921 and returned to Oxford to teach in 1925.

Tolkien at Oxford
One of Tolkien’s closest friends was C.S. Lewis, the author of Tales of Narnia, whom he met while teaching at Oxford. Lewis wrote in his autobiography, “At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.” (Lewis, p. 216) Tolkien was, of course, a major influence in the conversion of Lewis from atheism to Christianity. Tolkien told a friend, “I got him as far as the Church of England from atheism”. Lewis, who was from Belfast, never became a Catholic although his thinking fits well with Catholicism and his books are loved by Catholics. The two were part of an informal literary group, known as The Inklings, who met at the pub, The Eagle and Child, in Oxford.

Tolkien The Author
Tolkien doesn’t mention Catholicism or Christianity in his books and many of his readers are not aware of the influence that his faith had in his writings. Tolkien once wrote to a friend, “The Lord of the Rings is fundamentally a religious and a Catholic work.” (quoted by Pierce in “Tolkien, Man and Myth: A Literary Life”)
Middle Earth is created, monotheistic and fallen; the primary sin is that of pride. Evil is bound to failure and ‘God’ will bring good out of evil. The enemy, Morgoth, is like Satan. The ring (the symbol of original sin) is destroyed on March 25 which coincides to the Feast of the Annunciation, that is, the date when God became man. In medieval times people believed that this was also the date of the resurrection. Frodo is the one who ‘takes up his cross’ and follows Christ. In our world the cross is the symbol of sin, in Frodo’s world, the ring is the symbol of sin. ‘Elves bred’ is bread to help them on their way. Tolkien once said, “The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect.” The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter to his son.
Unfortunately, fans of Tolkien’s works know the background of Norse mythology and Anglo-Saxon tales but often fail to see the important connection between his Catholic faith and his literary works. The books remain popular and the movies (The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and now The Hobbit) have fans of all ages but how many of those fans know the real meaning of the characters and plot?

Sources
Grotta-Kurska, Daniel. J.R.R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth. New York: Warner Books. 1976
Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1984
Pierce, Joseph. Tolkien: A Catholic Worldview. EWTN television, December 15

Thai priest on the way to being a Saint: Blessed Nicolas Kitbamrung

Most Thai people (or others, for that matter) are not aware that there are 5 Thai martyrs and a priest who were proclaimed Blessed (the step before sainthood) by the Catholic Church.  Here is the story of the priest, Blessed Nicolas Kitbamrung.

Bunkerd Kitbamrung was born to a Catholic family in Nakon Pathom province January 11, 1895.

His childhood was unremarkable but at sometime he felt called to be a priest. After training at the seminary in Penang, Malaysia he was ordained on January 24, 1926 at the age of 31 at Assumption Cathedral, Bangkok.  His Catholic name was 'Nicolas'.

He served in several parishes in North and Northeast Thailand, including Chiangmai.  In 1927, he assisted the Salesian Order missionaries helping to teach them Thai and also training Thai seminarians.   

At that time, Catholics were considered 'unpatriotic' as 'to be a Thai is to be a Buddhist'.  As well, disputes with France over borders with Laos caused Thai authorities to look with suspicion on those associated with the French, which in many cases were Catholic priests.

On the morning of January 12, 1941, Father Nicholas rang the church bell to summon parishioners to Mass. For this simple act he was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment at Bang Khwang. While in prison he contracted tuberculosis and died on January 12, 1944 at the age of 49. It was said he was denied care because he was a Catholic but this has not been verified.

While in prison he had heard confessions and administered the sacrament of baptism to his fellow prisoners. Approximately 68 persons were baptized by him while in prison. During his life Father Nicolas had a great concern for pastoral work and compassion for the poor. 

After a thorough examination of his life, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Fr. Nicolas Bunkerd Kitbamrung a Blessed on January 27, 2000 and the ceremony of beatification was held on March 5, 2000 at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Thai Catholics, from all parts of the Kingdom of Thailand, joyfully celebrated the beatification in Father Nicolas' home town of Sam Phran, Nakhon Pratom on that day.

Oscar Romero: The Unfinished Mass

A few days before he was assassinated, Romero told a reporter, “You can tell the people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish.”

Oscar Romero was born in 1917 in Cuidad Barrios, a small town in the mountains of El Salvador.  He left school at the age of twelve and became an apprentice carpenter.  He wished to become a priest but his family wanted him to continue studying carpentry. 
Romero somehow managed to convince his parents that he wanted to study for the priesthood.  He was ordained a priest in Rome in 1942 and continued to study there for his doctoral degree in theology. After  he worked as a parish priest in El Salvador for several years.  
 In 1975 he became the bishop of Santiago de Maria and in 1977 he was appointed the Archbishop of San Salvador.
During the 1970’s, El Salvador was wracked by Civil War stemming from a poor economy and a repressive dictatorship.  This war between right-wing government and the leftist antigovernment units led to around 30,000 people being killed.  The US backed the military dictatorship in spite of its human rights violations.  At that time there was a movement of priests who followed Marxist teachings as a solution to El Salvador’s problems and they sided with the poor against the rich landowners and elite of the country.
Romero's fellow bishops and priests considered him to be predictable, conservative and not concerned with political views. This was no doubt the reason he was appointed an Archbishop.  It was expected that he would carry on as others had before him and would not cause any political ‘waves’.
However, Romero let it be known that, although he did not support Liberation Theology, he was on the side of the poor. Shortly after being elected as bishop, a Jesuit priest, Father Rutillo Grande and two of his parishioners were killed.  One was a seven year old child.  When this happened Bishop Romero truly understood what the farmers were facing and promised to be their shepherd.
Romero asked for international intervention but it fell on deaf ears.  With one exception, the Bishops of El Salvador turned their back on him and it is said that they sent a letter to Rome accusing him of using politics to seek popularity.  In 1980, Romero wrote to the President of the United States asking them to stop sending military aid because he said it was being used to repress the people.  They did not stop.
On March 23, 1980 he ended a broadcasted homily with, “Brother, you are from the same people ... No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God.  In the name of God, in the name of the suffering people, I ask you .... in the name of God to stop the repression.”
The day after that speech as Romero was celebrating Mass in a hospital chapel, as he raised the chalice, he was shot by an assassin.  His blood spilled over the altar mixing with the wine from the chalice.
During his funeral Mass on March 30 a bomb exploded and shots rang out. From 30 to 50 people were killed that day.  From this, the people recognized the horror of all the killing and violence in El Salvador finally subsided.
In 2012, the United Nations declared the International Day of the Right to the Truth recognizing the contribution of Archbishop Romero. 
In March 2015, Pope Francis beatified Oscar Romero bringing him one step closer to sainthood. And on October 14, 2018, Oscar Romero was recognized as a Saint of the Catholic Church.

Book Review: Glastonbury by Donna Fletcher Crowe

Glastonbury: The Novel of Christian England by Donna Fletcher Crow

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I enjoyed reading this book and learning more about the history of England, especially how Christianity came to England and the struggles over the years. It took me a long time to read but then it does cover the time of Joseph of Arimathea coming to England to the destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII. I found it interesting how the author cleverly wove what are considered legends into the story in a way that made them entirely believable. Donna Crow did a tremendous amount of research and I found it interesting how she presented both sides of the Catholic/Protestant controversy in a non-biased way. I could not tell which side of the fence she is on.

Are You Really Pro-Life?

To be pro-life means you want to end:

the killing of babies still in the womb

the killing of children in their schools (or anywhere)

suicides of children

the legal killing of those who are depressed because they are old or in pain (so-called'euthanasia')

Eugenics and Sterilization: Forgotten Chapters of History

                                                    Charles Darwin

When we think of eugenics we usually think of Hitler, perhaps the most hated man in history. We are reminded of his plan to get rid of Jews, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and others he considered sub-normal human beings.  We may also think of Joseph Mengele, known as the ‘angel of death', who conducted eugenic experiments at Auschwitz on twins, many of whom were children.

But apparently the idea of eugenics and how to improve the human race by eliminating certain people was an idea that had been around for some time before it erupted in Nazi Germany. Darwin wrote about  natural selection, a process in which the best and strongest survive. If this is the case, then the human race should improve naturally. The weak bodied, the weak-minded, those with inherited disabilitating diseases, even homosexuals, it was thought, should naturally disappear in time. But for some in the early 20th-century, natural selection wasn’t doing the job fast enough. What if science accelerated the process of improving human beings so that there would no longer be drug and alcohol addicts, the insane, and the mentally retarded? Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, coined the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883, from its Latin roots meaning ‘good in birth’ or ‘noble heredity’ and it was promoted as a science.

Some well known Americans and British jumped on the bandwagon to improve the human race by eugenics and  backed the idea with their money and their writing. As is usual, the ideas filtered across the border into Canada as we will see. Here are a few  of those in 20th century America who aided the birth of the so-called ‘science of eugenics’.

Charles Benedict Davenport -(1866-1944)  was a Harvard zoologist who said, “Prevent the feeble-minded, drunkards, paupers, sex offenders and the criminalistic from having children or marrying their like, or cousins or any person belonging  to a neuropathic strain.”

Harry Hamilton Laughlin (1880-1943), who with Davenport founded the Eugenic Record Office on Long Island, New York with their staff, compiled detailed records on 534,625 Americans whom they considered defective.  Sixty thousand of them would face sterilization, the males by forced castration. Their aim was to sterilize fourteen million people in the United States and more worldwide to replace them with ‘pure Nordic stock’. Sound familiar?

Davenport had plenty of funds to accomplish this, but soon the Rockefeller Foundation poured in thousands more. In 1914, John Kellogg, brother of the Cereal King, founded the Race Betterment Foundation in Michigan.

 Lucien Howe, was the ophthalmologist who discovered that bathing the eyes of newborns with diluted silver nitrate would save the sight of thousands.  But he was an avowed eugenicist and proposed that blind people should be sterilized and forbidden to marry. The state of New York voted against this so it did not become law there.

In some states, prohibitions of marriage between certain races were prohibited: black/white marriages in several states, white/Asian marriages in Montana, white/Native Americans in other states.  Delaware criminalized marriages of people on welfare!

Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote the decision that was voted on by the United States Supreme Court to uphold legalized sterilization. In 1917 there were only 1,422 sterilized people in institutions in the US, but by 1941 there were 38,087. Not surprisingly, public support for sterilization was not strong and the movement against it was aided by the Hearst newspaper which published horror stories of sterilzaitons

In 1908, Nova Scotia was home of the first ‘eugenics movement’ in Canada when the League for the Care and Protection of Feebleminded Persons was established in the province. In Quebec, Ontario, and elsewhere, academics and physicians worked to enlist others to publicly support eugenics.

The most damaging sterilization program in Canadian history was afforded via the passing of the Alberta Sterilization Act of 1928. Youths, minorities, and women were sterilized in disproportionately high numbers. Indigenous people and Métis, regardless of age, were also targeted making up 25% of the sterilizations performed even though they represented only 2.3% of the general population in Alberta.  If the persons were deemed 'mentally defective' no consent was required.

British Columbia’s Sexual Sterilization Act, legislated in 1933 and repealed in 1973, closely resembled Alberta’s legislation. In BC however, t he Act created a Board of Eugenics, consisting of a judge, psychiatrist, and social worker and less people were sterilized there. Many were inmates of Riverview or Essendale Mental Institution.

When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, they patterned their program of eugenics on American legislation. As well, they received financial assistance from those in the American movement. As we know, it turned into something horrific and 10,000 Jews alone were murdered.  Many more who were deemed ‘undesirable’ by the Nazi regime were also killed. When the truth became known at the end of the war, the world recoiled at the very idea of forced sterilization and getting rid of so called ‘inferior’ human beings. Instead it turned to ‘more civilized’ methods of contraception and abortion which was supposed to rescue women from being slaves to their fertility and protect the world from over-population. Those who were deemed the undesirable segments of humanity were targeted. ‘A Woman’s Choice’ was the cry of the day and Margaret Sanger headed a new onslaught on who should be allowed to have babies. 
What will the future bring?  More coupes are opting to not have children.  Although abortion has decreased in some years, it has not disappeared by any means.  Artificial contraception is now common and although it was historcally forbidden by all Christian denominations, the Anglican Church was the first to say it could be used "in some situations".  Now Christians from all Protestant denominations practice artificial contraception and only in the Catholic Church is it still not allowed (even though many Catholics ignore the Church's  teaching). China brought in the "one-child policy" which has resulted in not enough women for the men to marry. Will countries bring in forced laws to abort children or limit the number of children a couple can have?  Pope Paul VI made some predictions in his encyclical "Humanae Vitae" and that was one of them.  The suggestion that we can "decrease our carbon footprint" by not having children is a scary reminder that this may be on the horizon.