Also among his most popular publications were the five books in a series called The Road to Damascus, published between 1949 and 1956, in which seventy-eight prominent converts to Catholicism gave accounts of what had led them to the Church.
The contributors included Evelyn Waugh, Clare Booth Luce, Avery Dulles, Dorothy Day, Raïssa Maritain, Thomas Merton, Ronald Knox and Leonard Cheshire.
[1] An interest in birth control arose among Catholics in America as a result of the challenge to the family economy posed by the Great Depression in the 1930s and the approval of artificial contraception by Jewish and Anglican authorities.
[2] O'Brien's psychological approach was influenced by the thought of the German Catholic ethicist Dietrich von Hildebrand, who argued in his 1928 book In Defence of Purity that, besides its procreative aspect, marital sexuality plays a vital role in enhancing the unique interpersonal union that gives marriage its greater meaning.
[3] O'Brien's views, however, clashed with those of conservatives in the Catholic Church, who promoted total abstinence as exemplified by the encyclical Casti connubii (1930), which restated the objection to artificial conception.