In this presentation, Visualising Peace student Thomas Frost discusses some of the scholarship he has been reading on pacifism within American Catholicism. Below the video, you can find a summary of the publications he discusses. These are also available in our Visualising Peace Library.
Covis, Leonardo. “The Radical Next Door: The Los Angeles Catholic Worker during the Cold War.” Southern California Quarterly 91, no. 1 (2009): 69–111. https://doi.org/10.2307/41172457.
The article concerns the activities of a Catholic pacifist organisation, the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, during the Cold War. Specifically, Covis attempts to account for the fact that the Los Angeles Catholic Worker managed to avoid the decline in activity and membership which most anti-war and anti-nuclear organisations in the USA experienced over the course of the 1970s. To this end, he argues for a methodology which prioritises the experiences and motivations of individual volunteers over aggregate data regarding the organisation’s membership, on the grounds that the latter line of inquiry can yield only generalisations which fail to account for the very particular factors which actually cause any individual to take the radical decision to join such an organisation. He considers, for example, the case of Jeff Dietrich, a member of the group who in 1978 was arrested for blocking roads leading to a military weapons convention being held in Anaheim. Covis details Dietrich’s fears about whether he would be able to cope with imprisonment, and the effect which the experience of prison had upon his principles and subsequent activism, emphasising the importance of this sort of personal experience to the nature and success of anti-war activism generally.
Covis emphasises the group’s foundations in the broader Catholic Worker movement which had been founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the 1930s, characterised by principles which were Catholic, anarchist, and pacifist, and devoted both to political activism and to what it usually refers to as “works of mercy”, involving practical work against poverty, with its members living in community and in voluntary poverty. Catholic Worker communities were autonomous, albeit sharing these principles, and varied in the extent to which they focussed on poverty or peace work. Covis emphasises the unique ideological foundations of the group as a reason for its persistence during the 1970s: the fact that it was not dedicated solely to anti-war activism, and the fact that its anti-war work was a consequence of broader religious principles and not its sole reason for existing, allowed it to continue to attract members even during a period when anti-war positions in themselves had become relatively unattractive. In the terms of the Visualising Peace project, we can say that the particular vision of peace that the Los Angeles Catholic Worker held was crucial to its effectiveness as an agent of anti-war activism.
McNeal, Patricia. “Catholic Conscientious Objection during World War II.” Catholic Historical Review 61, no. 2 (Apr 01, 1975): 222. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/catholic-conscientious-objection-during-world-war/docview/1290071224/se-2.
This article examines the phenomenon of conscientious objection during the Second World War on the part of American Roman Catholics. It considers the relationship of this phenomenon to both the historical tradition of the Catholic Church and to its recent history within the USA, and the relation between the Catholic conscientious objectors and the hierarchy of the institutional Catholic Church.
McNeal begins by drawing attention to the radical change in the attitudes of American Catholics toward issues of war and peace over the course of the 20th century. Whereas at the start of the century there was virtually no existing tradition of Catholic pacifism in the USA – there were only four Catholics recorded as conscientious objectors in the USA during the First World War – by the time of the Vietnam War, Catholics constituted an unusually large proportion of conscientious objectors. Therefore, although during the Second World War pacifism remained a fringe position among American Catholics, it represented the first time that organised Catholic activity against conscription existed, and saw the birth of PAX, an offshoot of the Catholic Worker movement, which would take a significant role in Catholic anti-war activity during the Vietnam War decades later.
McNeal notes that the Catholic clergy overwhelmingly opposed attempts to introduce conscription in the years leading up to the Second World War, due to the traditional Catholic respect for individual conscience; however, after the bombing of Pearl Harbour and the American entry into the war, the American bishops firmly supported it. Many members even of the pacifist Catholic Worker movement would fight in the war themselves even while supporting the right of others to conscientiously object. McNeal describes the practical difficulties of setting up infrastructure for objecting Catholics who were not part of the historic peace churches, such as the Quakers and Mennonites, which were able to fund labour camps for alternative service. Furthermore, those Catholics who did oppose the war were obliged to work out a model of Catholic pacifism which had not hitherto existed. Some made use of the Thomist theory of Just War, which had long been endorsed by the Church, to argue either that its requirements could never be met in modern warfare or, in a more limited way, to argue that the American military was not conducting itself in a manner such as would make the war just. Others, especially within the Catholic Worker movement, took a more absolutist position which denied the possibility of just war in principle, often basing their argument on a reinterpretation of the Sermon on the Mount as it is recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. Either way, these visions of peace tended to be closely integrated into the existing tradition of the Catholic religion; the article depicts an important example of how visualisations of peace can change within a highly systematised and institutionalised tradition.
Moon, Penelope Adams. “‘Peace on Earth – Peace in Vietnam’: The Catholic Peace Fellowship and Antiwar Witness, 1964-1976.” Journal of Social History 36, no. 4 (Summer, 2003): 1033-1051. doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2003.0108.
This article examines the history of the Catholic Peace Fellowship during the Vietnam War, which was founded by members of the pacifist Catholic Worker movement in 1964 as an organisation dedicated to opposing American involvement in the war, and supporting Catholic conscientious objectors. It has two distinct focusses, considering the significance of the CPF to both the broader anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and to the American Catholic Church. Its significance to this library is in its consideration of how competing visualisations of peace can exist within the same institution and social group, and how these may be affected by external social and political factors.
During the 1960s, America’s Catholic bishops were overwhelmingly supportive of its engagement in the war, as a result partly of the Church’s longstanding opposition to Communism, and partly of the desire of the Catholic Church, which had historically been marginalised in American social and political life, to appear fully integrated into American society. For the bishops as for many Catholic laypeople, supporting the Vietnam War was a means of demonstrating their patriotism as many Catholics moved, for the first time, into the American middle class. Even those Catholic clergymen who opposed the war were therefore usually prevented from speaking publicly against it, leaving the responsibility to lay organisations such as the CPF. The CPF therefore spent much of its effort in the early years of its existence in educating Catholics about the Church’s teaching on just war and the right of the individual to refuse to bear arms in the context of an unjust war. By the late 1960s, however, the group had become frustrated by the apparent failure of its educational work to have a significant impact on the opinions of American Catholics or on the course of the war, a frustration shared by much of the anti-war movement at this time. This motivated the CPF to take part in more direct activism which went beyond legal civil disobedience, being one of the first organisations to adopt the tactics of the public burning of draft cards and raiding of draft offices which would be extensively imitated by the wider movement. Moon notes the particular significance of the draft card burnings within a Catholic context – being simultaneously a direct action against the physical machinery of conscription, and a public statement of faith-based witness against the war’s immorality, the protests were integrated into a tradition of public prophetic witness going back to the Old Testament. She describes how this conception of the opposition to the war as specifically moral affected the broader anti-war movement’s conception of its own work.
Moon argues, however, that the CPF had more effect on the Catholic Church itself than on the anti-war movement of which it only ever formed a very small part. The CPF was founded during the Second Vatican Council, which was the most significant re-evaluation of the Church’s teaching and practice in centuries. The CPF managed to exert significant influence on the council itself, and was instrumental in convincing the Council to produce a statement condemning the nuclear arms race and legitimising Catholic conscientious objection in principle. At the same time, Moon considers the CPF’s ability to exist through the war years to be in large part a consequence of the changes which the Council brought to the Catholic Church, particularly in its promotion of the Catholic laity’s role in speaking for the Church on the public stage. The CPF’s confidence in leading Catholic opposition to the Vietnam War as a lay organisation – even taking the step, exceptionally for a lay movement at the time, of petitioning the Pope directly – is a reflection of the confidence that the Council gave to laypeople more generally. Furthermore, when in the 1970s the American bishops turned against the war and began to give official support to the promotion of nonviolence, the CPF’s leadership during the 1960s put it, and the laity in general, in a strong position to lead Catholic social and political action more generally.