A Matter of Conscience: The Selective Conscientious Objector, Catholic College Students, and the Vietnam War

A Matter of Conscience: The Selective Conscientious Objector, Catholic College Students, and the Vietnam War Helen M. Ciernick C ollege students played a significant, if not central, role in the anti-Vietnam war movement. With the deployment of the first combat troops in 1965, more college students, predominantly white, began focusing their attention on the government’s evolving policy in Vietnam. Two primary reasons for their growing interest were, first, white college students’ diminishing role in the civil rights movement due to the emergence of black power, and second, male college students’ increasing possibility of being drafted due to the government’s rising draft calls. Catholic college students, in contrast to their restrained response to the civil rights movement, joined the anti-Vietnam war movement early and remained active until the end of the war in 1973. Like their non-Catholic counterparts, Catholic student activists fostered debate on the war by sponsoring teach-ins on United States foreign policy, encouraging intercollegiate participation in mass demonstrations, and demanding on-campus draft-counseling services. By outward appearances, Catholic college students appeared to be motivated by the same forces as college students nationally. They, too, believed that it was an imperialistic war sponsored by the military -industrial complex, and/or that the draft was not intended primarily to supply troops for the war, but to channel youth into professions deemed to be in the national interest. However, despite these shared beliefs about the war and the draft, many Catholic students’ involvement in the anti-war movement was also motivated and shaped by their strong Catholic faith. Historian Patricia McNeal, in her history of the American Catholic peace movement, observed when examining students’ response to the war at the University of Notre Dame (UND): In one sense the Catholic college campus looked very much like other college campuses in America during the student unrest period of the 1960s. On the other hand the added religious dimension provided by Masses for Peace that were an integral part of protest demon33 strations and the constant structuring of the terms of debate and discussion in moral and ethical language distinguished the Catholic campus from its secular counterparts.1 While not all Catholic colleges began the practice of a Peace Mass in 1965 like UND, nor did all administrators question the moral validity of the war as early as did UND president Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C, the religious dimension of the anti-war movement could be found on many Catholic college campuses. Evidence of the movement could be found among students joining Catholic Peace Fellowships, in the writing of editorials questioning the war, demands for on-campus draft counseling, and battles with draft boards. Thus while Catholic college students’protest of the Vietnam war took the same forms as that of their non-Catholic counterparts, for a segment of the Catholic college student population these students’ motivation was rooted in their Catholic faith. The case of James McFadden, a University of San Francisco (USF) student, and his battle with the Selective Service System (SSS) to be legally recognized as a Selective Conscientious Objector (SCO) illustrates the central role faith played for many Catholic activists in their protest against the war and offers insights into how the theological developments of the period shaped Catholic college students’ responses to the war and the draft. Like his secular counterparts, McFadden decided that the United States government had chosen to wage an unjust war in Vietnam; 34 U.S. Catholic Historian 1. Patricia McNeal, Harder than War: Catholic Peacemaking in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 152-153. James McFadden at time of college graduation. Courtesy of the USF Archives unlike his secular counterparts, he had come to that decision by way of the Catholic Just War ethic. Since McFadden was not a pacifist opposed to all wars, he knew he could not qualify for the traditional Conscientious Objector (CO) status. However, as he was influenced by Thomistic thinking and could perceive valid grounds to resist the draft, he knew that he could use the Catholic social justice tradition, as well, as Catholic theology to fight the government for the broadening of CO to include selective...