Beyond Neo-Malthusianism: Ludwik Dembiński and the Cold War Biopolitics of Humanae Vitae

Abstract: In response to the global Catholic aggiornamento that followed the death of Pope Pius XII, extensive cultural and intellectual transfers blossomed between budding milieus of Catholic intellectuals in the Global North and Global South, as well as across the Iron Curtain. This paper takes as a case study the Polish Catholic intellectual Ludwik Dembiński, a law professor from Lublin and co-founder of the Polish Catholic Intelligentsia Club (KIK) movement who in 1967 joined the leadership of the Swiss-based Catholic NGO Pax Romana. In his capacity as secretary general for Pax Romana’s “adult” movement (i.e. for university graduates, as opposed to its youth movement), Dembiński in 1968 found himself moderating and overseeing heated debates about the encyclical Humanae Vitae that threatened to tear apart the fragile global Catholic intellectual community built over the past decade. Developmentalist discourse became inextricably embedded in debates over natality and reproduction, with Catholics from behind the Iron Curtain joining activists from across the Global South to embrace Humanae Vitae and to accuse its Western opponents of neo-Malthusianism and neo-imperialism.

Bio: Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Recipient of a PhD from Princeton, he has published widely on the history of the Catholic Church, on the intellectual entanglements of Poland and France and on the Cold War, including Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891-1956 (Yale, 2018) and, as editor, Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism (2019, with M. Gehler and H. Wohnout), Christian Democracy across the Iron Curtain (2018, with S. Łukasiewicz), The Long 1989 (2019, with K. Kunakhovich), and Vatican II behind the Iron Curtain (2016). His essays have appeared in Commonweal, The TLS and the Washington Post.