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Steven J. Brady, "Less Than Victory: American Catholics and the Vietnam War" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to welcome back onto the podcast Dr. Steve Brady to tell us about his latest book, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025, titled Less Than American Catholics and the Vietnam War, which is a really interesting exploration of how these two, like, individually interesting things, right? American Catholics and what they're doing and what this means politically and socially. And of course, the Vietnam War, which has a massive impact across the United States, kind of, I think every possible group you can imagine was impacted by it. And this book puts them together and goes, well, hang on a second. What is happening with Catholics and their reactions to the Vietnam War? Some of which we might think we know already. But as this book shows, there's quite a lot of this interaction that perhaps is lesser known even amongst such a well known subject as the Vietnam War. So we clearly have a lot to discuss. Steve, thank you so much for coming back onto the New Books Network.
- [02:07]
C
Oh, Miranda, thanks so much for having me. This is a pleasure.
- [02:12]
B
Well, I'm very pleased to have you back as well. But for listeners who may not have heard your previous interview with me, could you do a little bit of an introduction of yourself and then tell us about this latest project and how it started.
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C
Sure. So I'm Steve Brady, as Miranda said. I'm a history professor at the George Washington University here in Washington, D.C. i specialize in the history of foreign relations, military, war and society, and more recently, peace history as well. And my specific interest, or one of my specific interests in all three of these areas is religion. So the connection of religion with these various areas, the roots of the book, the roots were very much like the last one it came out of. Actually teaching an undergrad class. I teach a course on US Peace movements, the history of US Peace movements. And I have three themes that follow through the entire class. And one of those is religion. It's a light motif of the class from its origins in colonial times, the colonial thinking about peace with the historic peace churches, to the Society of Friends and so forth. So we do a lot with religion now. One semester we're having a great discussion here at gw and a couple students said, we do a lot with the history of Protestants and peace thought. And we were discussing a book on the Vietnam War. And one of them said, is there anything that you can tell me about or assign to me, recommend to me on Catholics and the Vietnam War? And I suggested a couple chapters and books, and I talked a bit about some things that we might get into later. The Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day, the Berrigan brothers. But when I looked into it, you could really see that there wasn't anything that took the whole perspective. Some people looked at the peace activism, but that's about it. And you could probably see a light bulb going over my head, going on over my head in the office. I came home and I told my wife, I've got my idea for the next book. This is what I was finishing off the last one and got really excited about it. There's a lot to know that I didn't know before.
- [04:45]
B
I mean, that's always a fun thing to come across as a researcher of like, oh, okay, let's see what happens if I start exploring this. So that's always an interesting origin story for a project. What then on the other side of it, having done all sorts of investigation and figured things out and written it all up, what do you most hope readers take away from this now?
- [05:05]
C
Yeah, that's actually the big question. Right. A professor of mine in grad school always called that the so what question. Right. It's the question that I always ask students when they come up with theses and ideas and so forth. What do you get if you read this? What do you take away from it. That's new, that's important. One thing that I think is really significant here and will come up for anybody who reads the book is, is the complexity of it. A friend of mine read the book and called me and said some things about it. One of them was he used the word messiness. There's a real messiness to this. It's not a clear cut story. So when people talk about Catholics in the Vietnam War, the tendency has frequently been a standard narrative. A narrative of American Catholics overwhelmingly supporting the war until it starts going very badly and then turning against the war just like everybody else did. What I found while researching this is it's actually very complicated. It's a very complicated story and it gets connected significantly with Vatican ii. So the Second Vatican Council, the updating of the Church is taking place and it finishes off just months after Johnson decides to. President Lyndon Johnson decides to send very large numbers of troops to take over the fighting in Vietnam. So the confluence of these events complicates it. Another thing is that I found this wasn't a binary at all. You know, there's a tendency to say, okay, you've got these two sides, supporters of American intervention versus opponents of American intervention. Well, why is that surprising that you'd find that in Catholics too? One of the things that I found quite significant was that this is really a three cornered debate on the Vietnam War among Catholics. There are people who say whether we're justified in being there or not, what are the means we're using? Are the means moral? And they will focus on means that they think we should not be engaging in, whether they believe the war is right or wrong. And some of them will say, I'm not going to say just how I come down in the war, but there are things we're doing in Vietnam that are morally unacceptable. That really, I would say, connects with a big theme, which is morality. The debates on morality play a huge role here, a huge factor in how Catholics think, discuss and argue about the war. This is introduced from the very first, from the very beginning, as opposed to just a prudential argument. Does it make sense for us to be there in Vietnam? Are we gaining anything? Is it in national interest? Catholics raised the moral question from the very beginning and did so, as I like to emphasize, with different presumptions and different ways of thinking about morality than others. I think one final thing I'd say is that the story is still relevant. So the US pulls its final ground forces out of Vietnam in early 1973. Saigon falls to the north in April of 75. This is not the end of the story. This is not the end of the story. What happens during the war influences how people afterwards, including now, act on and think about peace and war since then. So it really helped to change the way Catholics and non Catholics, but especially Catholics, thought about war in general and peace action in general.
- [09:00]
B
Well, let's get into then, some of that thinking starting, I suppose, with the beginning, like when and why did American Catholics even start to care about the conflict in Vietnam? Was this sort of when everyone else started to care, or was there something specific about this group and its interest in Vietnam that's maybe different from other.
- [09:19]
C
Actors in the U.S. yeah, so I'd say that in some ways early on, US Catholic thinking on the war really tracks with other groups. So in the early 1950s, so the first three years of the 1950s, there was not a lot of attention paid. Few Americans are paying attention to the. The war that's going on then in Vietnam, which just very brief background. The French are fighting a war in Indochina. It's called the first or French Indochina War. And during this war, America begins supporting the French to a significant extent. And so that war that's going on at the time, you don't see a lot of news coverage, whether in the secular press or the Catholic press, which I surveyed quite significantly in my research. But in 1954, 1955, you see a real change. And that change is especially strong in the Catholic community. So early on in the story, the Vietnam went from the back pages or no coverage to being a very big story in 1954. In May of 54, France decides, for reasons that I won't get in to here now, to get out of this long stalemated war. And so in May through July of 54, there's what's called the Geneva Conference. It's a multinational conference that's supposed to deal with East Asian issues, but comes to really focus on Indochina very briefly, and it's a lot more complicated than that, the Geneva agreements. But very briefly, one of the things that's quite relevant is that Vietnam was to be temporarily divided along the Bien Hai river, so at the 17th parallel. And that sets things up for what happens next. Article 8 of the 2nd of the Paris. I'm sorry, the Geneva Accords, I'm getting ahead of myself, said that those living in the north and those living in the south should have the choice of where they want to live. So if you live in the south and you want to live in the north for a couple years, you can do so. If you live in the north and you want to live in the south, the political units in the north or the south are not able to stop you. Right? They're actually supposed to help you. Well, no one was prepared for what actually happened. And this becomes a big story. Hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese left for the south for a number of reasons. One was certainly fear of communism, the perception that communism was an oppressive system that would particularly oppress Catholics, the desire not to live under a communist regime. But we're talking massive numbers. We don't know the exact number, but give or take, we're talking about 800,000 refugees. And a very significant majority of these refugees are Catholics. Probably 2/3, 2/4, 3/4, something like that, are Catholic Vietnamese. This gets reported extensively in the Catholic press, especially as the idea of an exodus, right? People leaving one place to go into another to avoid religious oppression, to be able to practice their faith in freedom. And Catholics especially responded to this. These were overwhelmingly their co religionists. And so it made them deeply committed to the story. They felt connected to it. So that's the early part. And then after A while, South Vietnam 56, 57 starts looking stable. I mentioned this very briefly in the book that it largely disappears from Catholic press headlines. Again, we get an uptick in the early 1960s. In the early 1960s, under first John Kennedy, there's a deepening of American involvement. American troop numbers, while not massive as they would be, are increasing. They're doing more in Vietnam. And the Catholic angle on this end more generally is religious oppression in North Vietnam. Catholics in the United States are urged to pray for their oppressed brethren in North Vietnam, the people who had not come, or now they've been able to make it to the South. There's a reason for this. Certainly persecution of Catholics had increased significantly in 1963 in North Vietnam for reasons that the Hanoi government, for reasons the Hanoi government had, had come to, had decided. And so increasingly this early on, there's a perception, especially among American Catholics, that South Vietnam, this part of Vietnam south of the 17th parallel, had to survive if Catholicism itself was to survive in mainland East Asia. So from what I can tell, and we don't have a lot of surveys and so forth, but Catholics really appear to have been more deeply invested in keeping the anti communist government in Saigon alive at that point than the average American. And I think that's one of the reasons that this really tracks with the late curve on Catholic opposition to the war. Catholics were strong. The people Spoke of the Catholic anti communist consensus at this point in the Cold War. And I think this perception that Catholicism was in danger in Vietnam helped to contribute to that.
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B
Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense. Laid out like that. Thinking then about kind of this concept, though, of consensus and arguments for and against. Right. There were so many groups in the US that were interested in US involvement in the Vietnam War. But interested didn't always mean in favor of. Right. So when we're talking about this fear amongst the Catholic community in the US about their brethren in Vietnam, does that mean it was kind of like a full on. All Catholics were saying, yes, the US should get involved in whatever way is needed or like, what did that kind of aspect of acting on this fear look like?
- [16:01]
C
I think that's, that's a great question. It starts off slowly and begins building. So you do have some people early on who are saying, and this is, I mean, still during the French Indochina War, but also in the period during the exodus from the north that are saying that you shouldn't, we shouldn't be involved in this. The United States is supporting colonialism and that's the central problem in Vietnam, not communism. And I point that out because one of the key advocates of that idea was Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement. For people who don't know, very briefly, the Catholic Worker movement is, among other things, a pacifist group. And so early on, the Workers are saying the US Is doing wrong things, morally wrong things in Vietnam and it's immoral to support imperialists. Right. And imperialism in the end, is going to fail. Now, this is not. I think you've got a point about the Catholics, you know, asking the question, were all Catholics in favor? No, not so much. There were Catholics who dissented and Catholics descended from the beginning. Not a lot, but they were there. So overall, there's still strong Catholic support for the Vietnam War in general. But in early 65, we see the beginning of some divisions forming, which I find to be the interesting part. Division begins building. One of the big names that you associate with this is some listeners will certainly have heard of this. The last name Berrigan, Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest and editor of a Jesuit magazine. Comes out early in February of 63, participates in a rally, condemns modern war, as it's called in Catholic teaching. Everything from nuclear weapons on the one extreme to irregular guerrilla warfare on the other. And it's in a context of opposing what's going on and what the United States is doing in Vietnam. So that's pretty early February of 65, also, we see some of the press, some of the Catholic press growing more skeptical. I think a good example of this is the National Catholic Reporter. It's a national lay edited journal that comes from a liberal perspective. And ncr, for instance, it's just one example, but it's national, so that's why I use that one starts becoming more skeptical. One of the things they say in early 65 is that Lyndon Johnson is choosing martyrdom for others. Now, a Catholic can choose to risk martyrdom, but it's morally acceptable to kill others and make them martyrs. Emerging on the scene soon after that is another Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, who is the brother of Daniel Berrigan, a Josephite priest who begins, I'm sure, I suspect, with some of the questions you'll come up again. He's ubiquitous here, and so he begins to come out publicly against the Vietnam War as well, participate in protests. He gets disciplined for this. So does Daniel Berrigan. So by the summer of 65, we really see Catholics begin to discuss and debate the Vietnam War. And we see them doing so as a fundamentally moral problem. Some people making, some Catholics making the argument for U.S. intervention, that you can't abandon an ally, that intervention is moral. In fact, it's morally obligatory to protect victims of invasion. Catholic teaching on war says you're allowed to use force to defend yourself, your country from invasion or to protect others who are being invaded. And so also this issue of the, the Catholics who came to the south from the north is played up by then. Especially this idea that Catholics who fled from the north to the south will be specific and very serious victims of reprisal for having left the North. But you also see arguments here starting in 1965, especially that the Vietnamese, north and south had a right to be in South Vietnam and that U.S. soldiers didn't. This was an intervention in a, in a civil war, and that was not acceptable in Catholic teaching. You can't, you can defend a country from attack by another, but you can't intervene their own civil war. We start seeing criticisms by this point of the means that the United States and our South Vietnamese allies are using that some people saw as patently immoral. Strategic bombing, torture, and napalm. Napalm becomes a significant bone of contention with a lot of people on the Catholic side saying there's no justification for the use of this weapon. Killing civilians is clearly immoral in Catholic teaching, and you can't do that. And so I would say a key event here is to get to the heart of Your question, really a key event here is In October of 1965, a Catholic worker, young Catholic worker by the name of David Miller, a 22 year old just out of college, burns his draft card publicly in New York City. This makes him this Catholic Worker. This makes him the first person to destroy a draft card since Congress had made it illegal to destroy a draft card. So he does this, he does this in full view of the cameras. And interestingly there's a photo of him in the book. And I just bring this up, I guess for color commentary, but we have this image of these long haired people in ratty jeans opposing the war. Well, this is a clean cut guy in a business suit and tie. And that's how this really begins, with an act, one act of civil disobedience, other acts of civil disobedience that were not so low key as burning a draft card would follow. Now, he might not have agreed with me calling it low key. He gets three years and a sentence of three years in prison for it, which I think a lot of people left, right and center said was just ridiculous. But it begins the discussion of the war in opposition to the war begins early in the Catholic community, in fact, before the United States gets deeply involved. But by 10 years later, you do see some, you're seeing some Catholic civil disobedience and that's just going to grow.
- [23:45]
B
And this is something that is obviously centering in the Catholic community. But as you mentioned, like there are plenty of people who then go on to also protest about draft cards. So do we get to a point where kind of the protests within the Catholic community are sort of the same sorts of anti war activism happening in other communities?
- [24:05]
C
Oh yeah. So initially, initially you're actually getting significantly more participation in anti war activities from liberal Protestants and Jews than from Catholics. I mean, there's initially anti war Protestants and Jews were disappointed by Catholic involvement. The debate is taking place, they're seeing this debate take place, but it doesn't seem to translate into participation at rallies, protests, meetings. People are asking questions like where are the collars, where are the habits, where are the Catholics here? So Catholics are, in that sense, even though they're having this debate, they're pretty far behind from the point of view of the most strongly anti war Protestants and Jews. But I would say this, and I don't quite know if this goes to your question, but I hope so. Catholics were behind the curve, as I said, but in this sense it really depends on what community you're comparing them to. So Southern Baptists were pretty strongly in support of the war for quite some time, for almost its duration. Mainline Protestants generally were earlier in opposition. But what I'd say is, you know, because you're asking for sort of comparison, the leaders in the radical anti war actions, right? So breaking into. Breaking into draft offices and burning or pouring blood on files, destroying, destroying federal draft records and then destroying property of. Breaking in and destroying property of corporations later on that contribute to the war. For instance, Dow Chemical, which manufactured napalm. This is overwhelmingly a Catholic movement. These what are called numbered protests. And maybe people have heard of some of these. The Baltimore 4, the Catonsville 9 was very famous. The Milwaukee 13 was fascinating to me and so forth. The Camden 28, really good book written last year on it. These really were Catholic actions, overwhelmingly Catholic actions with Catholic leadership and Catholic participation. And so they really paved the way for what was called ultra or radical opposition to the war and action against the war. And so while it is absolutely true that Catholics tended over the course of the war to be more supportive of American intervention than were others until they really began later in the war to turn against it as well, I think Daniel Berrigan was right. A disproportionate amount of the most radical activism came from Catholics, not from anybody else. And he points out in this track, statistically, people who went to prison for activism, people who engaged in radical civil disobedience and were sent to prison for it, were largely Catholics. So you have this, as I said, it's a messy story, this perception initially of Catholics not being deeply involved in the peace movement or certainly actively involved in the peace movement with a development where Catholics are. Some of them are really putting themselves on the line for it.
- [27:54]
B
So obviously, by looking at those kinds of statistics and saying disproportionate numbers are on the more radical side are getting punished for it. I want to make sure we don't sort of go, oh, well, that's just a coincidence. Is it like it. Why is it that sort of there are more Catholics further on this sort of side. Like, I can imagine, for instance, you talk about in the book that some of these other groups are looking at the Catholics being like, whoa, what's up with them? Right? Like, what is going on? That explains, again, it's not all Catholics, but when we're talking about the more radical, why is there this disproportionate representation?
- [28:30]
C
Right? So, yes, that's a great question. And to my mind, the answer has to do with Catholic definitions of morality. Right? And these people who engage in this activity are motivated by their view of what's moral in war. So, you know, I think that's the primary explanation that Catholics are opposed to, are supposed to be opposed to certain forms of warfare. And these are people who have one definition of what that means, and they define that in moral terms, not prudential terms. It seems to me that the different views of Catholics on morality are a significant factor in explaining that. Yeah. So you end up with a more radical fringe of Catholics than others, than other groups. And the morality issue is the way they're defining morality. The way they're defining Catholic moral teaching is a very significant contributor to that.
- [29:49]
B
Okay. No, that definitely makes sense, given that how often we think about Catholic morality and religious morality on lots of other political topics that I sort of assumed, you know, would be unrelated to this. I was like, okay, the title is American Catholics Vietnam War. That's what we're going to be discussing. I, to be honest, was pretty surprised then to get to a section of the book and find that we were in fact going to be talking about debates around abortion. I didn't think that those would be related to this, but why were they for some of these Catholics.
- [30:19]
C
Right. So that's an excellent question. Your surprise kind of matched mine. And that's one of the things that for people who have read the book already, they've commented on, have contacted me about. We didn't know this. Right. Catholics saw the Vietnam War and the abortion issues as closely related. And as your surprise indicates, it would seem that these two are unrelated at first glance. Right. But to many Catholics, these were integrally linked. And the connection is Catholic moral teaching on life. There is no justification for the taking of innocent human life, not in wartime, not in peacetime. And so you end up with this really fascinating confluence of events. The war is becoming even more brutal with some of the policies that Richard Nixon is instituting when he. He comes in over the course of his presidency. Well, at exactly this time, a number of states are beginning to liberalize abortion law. This coincidence of events is really fascinating to me, and I admit I hadn't thought about it that way before, but these issues became linked in Catholic debates about morality. To get back to my previous comment with accusations of hypocrisy, at least inconsistency, but, yeah, hypocrisy on all sides of this, that you are advocating for morality here, but Catholic morals here, but not there. And the key is the Catholic moral obligation to protect innocent life. Nixon, just as a little background, Nixon introduces over the course of Time, something known as Vietnamization, which, very briefly, because I'm sure a lot of your readers, your listeners will know what this is. Vietnamization means over the course of steps, pulling American ground troops out of Vietnam and turning the fighting over to our South Vietnamese Allied army, arvn, as it's called, the army of the Republic of Vietnam. So American combat forces are drawing down in Vietnam as we're building up the ARVN to fight the war that we had fought. And so that's Vietnamization in a nutshell. Now, as American ground forces are drawing down, Nixon's not content to say, well, we'll leave the south on their own. He wants to put a lot of pressure on the North. And so bombing of the north increases substantially. Well, bombing of the north is going to result in increased civilian casualties. And Catholic laity and clergy and the press are looking at this, and they're saying, okay, so more innocent human lives are being taken in Vietnam now. But also innocent human lives are being taken in hospitals in the United States, bombers over Hanoi, or hospitals in New York. And so they're drawing this connection on the moral question of protecting innocent life. This gets wrapped up. And this really interested me. In the 1972 election, Nixon announces he's opposed to abortion. And this raises significant hackles and objections in the United States among some people in the Catholic community. He's saying, we need to recognize the right to life. Okay, not just here, but what about in Indochina? You're recognizing the life of the unborn in the United States, but not the unborn in North Vietnam. I mean, you're killing innocent people, pregnant mothers and so forth. And so a number of Catholics said, this is totally inconsistent, in fact, hypocritical. From the other side, you get people who are saying, how do you, as Catholics, protest against the Vietnam War? Because it's killing innocent people. Right. It's wrong that it's doing that. But support, and this is people more on the left side support liberalized access to abortion. You can't do both. And so these accusations of at least inconsistency are flying at this point. This has really brought to a head in the 1972 election because you've got two candidates that a voter, a Catholic voter, might support, a Republican, Richard Nixon, who opposes abortion but is busy taking innocent lives in Indochina. Or you get a Democrat, Senator George McGovern, who promises to end the war within 90 days if he takes over, but won't defend life at home. So there's a difficulty in the 72 election that's raised by a number of Catholic commentators. In the end, Catholics are going to majority vote for Nixon in that, but so did everybody else. But there's also, what I'd like to emphasize, again with the messiness, is there's consistency in thinking as well. One of the great examples of this, I went through his papers for my research is Archbishop, excuse me, Auxiliary Bishop. I promoted him. Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbaldon of Detroit, the Berrigan brothers, Dorothy Day. You know, people think, okay, there are people on the left. They probably support access to abortion. These folks didn't. The, I guess, final point, because when I enthused about these things, like I am about this debate, I use insight, I get a little enthused. But as you can tell, but the final confluence was really fascinating to me. And again, I'd never thought of it this way. January 23, 1973, it's announced. Ceasefire has been signed in Paris. The United States will stop fighting in Vietnam and pulled the last of our forces out. So this is, and dates are important here. January 23, 1973. We're going to end the war. Great news. We're going to end our participation in the war. Great news to the people who oppose the war, except that the day before this happens, January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issues its decision in Roe v. Wade. And Roe v. Wade is, of course, the, the Supreme Court decision that makes abortion a right under the federal constitution here. And so you get this response in the United States among a lot of Catholics who say, wait, which direction are we going? In Catholic papers? I found this fascinating as I was going through Catholic newspapers carried both stories on the front page. I mean, some you'd have both, both stories as front page headline news. These are considered related stories by Catholics. And you know, one newspaper said, look, we, we were overjoyed with the news of the Paris Accord ending American participation in the war. And then our hopes were crushed when the news comes out about what the, what the Supreme Court has decided in Roe. So they seem on first glance to be very separate issues taking place on opposite sides of the globe. In fact, from the perspective of Catholic moral teaching, it's not surprising that a lot of people made that close connection.
- [38:25]
B
Accidents of timing like that are absolutely fascinating. So thank you for helping us understand the connection. Both kind of theologically, I suppose, but also in terms of like they really are happening at the same time. So that's an interesting aspect, too. Once we get to those headlines, though, the declaration of the US Is going to stop getting involved with this. That's Obviously, just because kind of it's been declared on the front pages of newspapers doesn't mean that sort of all debates about what happens next with US Involvement in Vietnam, with kind of how the war should end, that doesn't magically get solved on that day of the headlines. So what were some of the different opinions within the American Catholic community about kind of what next?
- [39:08]
C
Yeah, right. I think that's a really important question, too, and I appreciate your making that point. We tend to have this idea that the Vietnam War ends with the Paris Accord in January of 73. The Vietnam War ends in April of 75 with the conquest of Saigon by North Vietnamese forces. Right. So there is this period where it's a very important point. The United States is still discussing how to support or whether to support our ally in the South. So some people are saying the war should be over. From our perspective, we need to withdraw all support from the South Vietnamese regime. Right. So diplomatic, political, economic aid and also military end all of that. End all of that. There are other, there are other Catholics who are saying we can't do this. We've got a moral obligation to support a regime. These are people who have no place else to go. This is their country. If to us it's become a burden to them, it's become their country. And if the Communists take over, they've got no place to go. We've got to give them at least a fighting chance. This is the, this, this I find fascinating too. So the Nixon Kissinger phrase for what kind of peace we wanted was not just a peace, not just an end of the war, but peace with honor. Peace with honor. They'd talk about that. And, you know, we can debate how committed they actually were to that. I've got my own opinions, but. But a lot of Catholics were saying during this period, this interstitial period between American withdrawal and the final victory of the north in the Vietnam War, that the United States has to come up with an honorable peace. And so that's a phrase that's getting used, too. The other one that's getting used is a just peace. A just peace. Right. So you can't have a peace that will last if it's unjust. And just letting an ally get defeated by aggressive power, as they saw it, was not justice. So they, and folks on this side felt that they had the Pope on their side. Pope Paul Virginia, whom I haven't mentioned yet, always spoke of finding a just settlement to the Vietnam War. He was a pope very committed to peace, very committed to ending The Vietnam War. And he spoke of a just settlement. I was thinking about this just yesterday. There are bumper stickers on some cars here in the United States that say, if you want peace, work for justice. And that's a quote from Pope Paul vi. And so the idea is, you're not gonna have peace without a just settlement. Others are saying, again, completely withdraw all aid. And this again comes down to a question of morality. Where are our moral commitments?
- [42:28]
B
Yeah, I mean, those are very complicated questions of what to be done next. So it makes sense that there'd be a number of perspectives.
- [42:33]
C
Yeah, that's exactly it. And there's no consensus on that. There's no consensus in the Calvary community.
- [42:40]
B
Yeah, no, that's important to highlight as well. Obviously, moving on then, from those kind of immediate moments, the Vietnam War did end. I'm sure there's so much that could be talked about there. But if we think in the kind of longer term, moving on from those immediate months and years, what have been some of the legacies of this Catholic activism against the war?
- [43:04]
C
Yeah, that's one of the big questions that I asked during my writing of the book. And there are some significant follow ons, if I can call it that, legacies, as you put it, of Catholic activism during the war. Really significant here, and I emphasize this a bit in my epilogue, is that the after effects of the war on the Catholic community are substantial. There's an intellectual and organizational base now for further peace action within the Catholic community. And this persisted. So some people may be familiar with this, but there was significant opposition too, and protest against American policy in Latin America, especially in the 80s, and against nuclear weapons. In the 80s, Catholics brought leadership to this. They brought energy and experience that came out of the directly out of their actions and thinking during the Vietnam War. So actions and to emphasize one, actions and techniques that were employed in Vietnam with the anti war movement soon are transferred over to the anti nuclear movement, including things like, you know, pouring of blood. And so Catholics are really going to lay the the groundwork in a major way for the anti nuclear movement and for the more well known interreligious organization Plowshares, which has a inter religious component. Now this is really interesting because there's historiography that says the peace movement in the United States in general, and I don't like the phrase peace movement, it was always, as someone has said, a movement of movements. The peace movement among Catholics or others was never united, it was never one movement. But the peace movement in general very generally went into the doldrums in the 1970s, not much is happening. These are what some call the lost years. I think this can be significantly overplayed and a scholar recently has made that point. But it's true to say that the Catholic peace movement stayed vigorous during the 70s. And so in the 80s, when these issues like Latin America and nuclear buildup began to become issues Catholics play this early and leading role in, for instance, the anti nuclear movement. Catholics were viewed as, as I pointed out, behind the curve when it came to Vietnam, although ahead of it when it came to the radical action against the war. But when you get to the nuclear freeze movement, religion, and I emphasize Catholic thinking is going to be a significant influence. So that's my putting on my peace historian Hat there another thing that's quite significant and I'll try to be a little more concise with this one. Bishops are increasingly speaking out on issues of peace. I get into this that for quite some time during the Vietnam War, frustratingly long time for a lot of people, the bishops did not issue a statement or at least an acceptable statement when they did issue one on the Vietnam War. Was it moral? What do the bishops teach us about this? Because Catholics, according to Catholic theology, need to obey their conscience. They cannot violate their conscience, but it has to be a correctly formed conscience. How do you correctly form a conscience if you don't get leadership? And these were people who were saying, the bishops were saying, we don't know enough. We don't know enough about the Vietnam War. That changes. And that changes to a large extent as a result of their experience in the Vietnam War. Famously, at the time, In May of 1983, the Catholic bishops issued a statement called the Challenge of Peace. And it was on nuclear weapons, which you'd think was also a technical matter that they didn't have expertise on. But what they said was, we're not speaking as technical experts, we're speaking as moral teachers. They condemn nuclear warfare. It's totally unacceptable to fight nuclear warfare from a moral perspective. Also, what they say is that deterrence is the purpose, can be the only purpose of nuclear weapons that can be moral. You have them to keep someone else from using them against you. Deterrence can be acceptable, but only in the context of continuing efforts at arms reduction. So there's no justification for nuclear weapons except in deterrence. And deterrence is only acceptable as long as you're working to reduce the number of nuclear weapons out there. Other follow ons I'd say would be just take off a couple or three. Briefly, the increasing confidence and role of Catholic laity. And this is one of those things that really comes out of both Vatican II where the laity are given, are given a focus and impetus to take on new roles. And the Vietnam War, which leads to a questioning of authority. And this is a hierarchical church. And what we have is the questioning and challenging of the official church, as they say, so of clergy, but especially of the bishops. So the laity are feeling more confidence, and that includes confidence in criticizing the leaders of the church itself. Quick example of that that I find fascinating. One generally would think of that as coming from the Catholic left like this, challenging authority. But you really see that on the Catholic right after the Challenge of Peace is issued in 1983, lay people on the right saying the bishops don't know enough, they don't know what they're talking about and we shouldn't have to follow their teaching on this. They're wrong. This is fascinating to me because it's conservatives, generally speaking, in this case, who say we can challenge the authority of the official church. And finally, ecumenism and interreligious participation. Ecumenism, you know, working of Christian groups together and interreligious participation working with other groups as well, non Christian groups. This was encouraged in Vatican ii. But you really see this with the Catholic peace movement working together with other religious groups, especially as you get towards the end of the war, where there's a very impressive amount of ecumenical work in the anti war movement where Catholics are participating or disproportionately participating. And so I think this in microcosm, this issue really does stress. One of the things that I want to emphasize in the book, which is the Vietnam War serves as a catalyst for changes that Vatican II had introduced or continued. Some of the changes were already taking place, but Vatican II is. The documents of Vatican II are issued. And this war helps cattle as a, you know, catalyze those changes.
- [51:07]
B
Another really interesting sort of interaction that I certainly wasn't expecting to read about in the book. So really intriguing there, the things that you've been able to figure out and put together. And it sounds like a lot of things were surprising to you too. So I can only ask with curiosity, kind of, what are you exploring next? What might be on your desk now that this book is out in the world?
- [51:29]
C
Yeah, the question that we always ask each other and probably shouldn't, you know, what's your next project? Right. So I'm deeply into writing the next book now and that's going to. I could go on about it forever. I'll try not to. That's a biography of a fellow by the name of Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson was Maybe people aren't familiar with him the way they used to be. He was a two time Democratic presidential candidate who lost both times to Dwight Eisenhower. He was the American Ambassador to the UN under Kennedy and Johnson. And this means that he was ambassador to the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which some people consider to be his greatest moment. And during the run up to the Vietnam War. He dies in 65. Not to ruin the story, and so dies just before the big commitments are made, but he's involved in foreign relations for the United States at that time and has a lot to say about it, but also, probably totally irrelevantly, he got a start in politics as governor of my native state of Illinois, so I have to point that out as well. That's the project. Yeah.
- [52:53]
B
Well, I'm sure there's plenty for you to investigate there. I mean, even just that brief synopsis definitely suggests that there's a lot to write about. So best of luck with that project. And of course, while you are doing that, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled Less Than American Catholics and the Vietnam War, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Steve, thank you for joining me again on the New Books Network podcast.
- [53:17]
C
Miranda, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate. Foreign.
- [53:33]
B
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- [53:59]
C
Experian.