The Rev. Martin Collins of Winston-Salem sat down to write a letter in March 1948. The words he wrote would stand as one of the few religious protests against the sterilizations pushed by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina.

"Sterilization is immoral in itself and contrary to God's law, be it either voluntary or imposed," Collins wrote in the letter, which ran in the Winston-Salem Journal. "The state has no more right to mutilate individuals when they have done no wrong than individuals have to mutilate themselves."

The letter from Collins, the priest at tiny St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church, had little effect. The eugenics board would approve thousands of sterilization petitions during the next 25 years. And only now, as the details of its work emerge, are many others sharing Collins' outrage.

"I'm not surprised, but I'm appalled," said Irma Gadson, a member of St. Benedict's since the time Collins served there. "But I wouldn't be surprised at anything they did, because I'm an African-American or whatever you want to call me."

It's hard to believe in these times of loud and public debates about abortion, but Collins was virtually alone in his public outrage. The priest was one of a handful of Christians to speak out against a statewide program that moved quietly and efficiently. The early proponents of the program anticipated this lack of opposition from the pulpits and saw it as a plus.

"North Carolina also presents advantages for genetic study and the application of eugenic programs in that there is practically no public opposition in this area to such programs," wrote Dr. C. Nash Herndon, a professor in the Department of Medical Genetics at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine, in the 1940s. "No church opposition has yet been encountered to proposals of family limitation or sterilization, and in fact collective support has been obtained from ministers of various denominations."

In the years ahead, proponents of the program carefully took note of opposition from people of faith. As they considered Lumbee Indians, they noted that some of the "Holiness" followers among that group of American Indians were against sterilizations. As they studied groups of blacks and whites around the state, they noted opposition from "fundamentalists."

"Indeed, what might be called 'the-Lord's-will-point-of-view,' with an associated fatalism and clear-cut notions of 'right' and 'wrong' is common to a large part of the rural population and is especially marked among Negroes, for whom religion assumes an intensely personal and emotional character," Moya Woodside wrote in Sterilization in North Carolina, published in 1950.

"The Bible was prominently displayed in many white and Negro homes which were visited, and women who had been sterilized often reported prolonged heart-searchings before they agreed to the operation," she wrote.

Jews knew all too well of the sterilizations in Hitler's Germany, but they were only a tiny minority in North Carolina. Even so, Woodside described reports that some Jewish physicians "would never sign a sterilization petition, however commendable the case."

Conservative Protestants, including those whose wives and daughters were targeted for sterilization, occasionally spoke out, but there were no Jerry Falwells or Ralph Reeds to organize them. Black Protestants would soon band together in the civil-rights movement, but reproductive rights were not on their list of issues.

And some Protestant leaders, starting with William Louis Poteat of Wake Forest College, pushed eugenics. "We have seen the peril of feeble-mindedness and insanity multiplying under the cloak of silence... Probably 8 percent of us are a burden on the back of the rest of us," he told a group of Baptist educators in 1921, according to Randal Hall's biography of Poteat, a legendary Wake president.

Most of the opposition to the eugenics movement came from Catholics. As the eugenics movement was cranking up in Germany and across this country in the 1930s, the Catholic Church was already taking a firm stand against sterilization - just as firm a stand as it now takes against abortion.

In the late 1940s, there were only about 10,000 Catholics in North Carolina, a state that had millions of Protestants. And only a few in the Catholic minority were speaking out in a time when they faced prejudice for their faith alone.

"However, it was clear that from a practical point of view, organized Roman Catholic opposition, the greatest hindrance to sterilization in many other states, was negligible," Woodside wrote. "Whatever Catholics individually may believe, in North Carolina their numbers are too small for them to have serious influence on the Legislature, nor can they impede the sterilization program except by individual refusals to cooperate - as for instance in the case of surgeons or certifying physicians - or by denying hospital facilities to sterilization cases."

They could also write letters.

Which is what a few Catholics, including Collins, did. He was a Franciscan priest who served here from 1943 to 1952. He was a white priest at a poor black parish, a common arrangement in the Catholic Church but yet unheard of for most Protestants.

It is unclear whether he acted from his faith alone, or whether one of his parishioners had been targeted for sterilization or sterilized.

What is known are his words:

"Behind this idea of sterilization is the implied supposition that only those of social standing, economic complacency and with a certain amount of formal education should be allowed to propagate.... One thing is certain and that is that the birth controllers will be punished, either in this life or the next. Perhaps one form of that punishment will be for them to see the poor and the 'feeble-minded' inherit the earth."

• John Railey can be reached at 727-7288 or at jrailey@wsjournal.com