A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., and the Politics of American Anticommunism

Epilogue

Epilogue Walsh’s strokes removed him from the public arena just as Catholic anticommunism was reaching its high-water mark. By 1954, Mark Massa writes, ‘‘a deep fissure’’ had emerged among Catholics over Joseph McCarthy, his aims, and his tactics.1 Although many Catholics supported the senator, Catholic endorsement was never unanimous.2 Division appeared in the Catholic press: Our Sunday Visitor and the Brooklyn Tablet supported McCarthy, whereas Commonweal and America condemned him as irresponsible and reckless. In the Senate, Dennis Chavez of New Mexico, a Catholic, led the opposition to his Wisconsin colleague. In April 1954, within days of one another, Cardinal Francis Spellman publicly endorsed McCarthy, and Chicago Auxiliary Bishop Bernard J. Sheil denounced him.3 In the wake of his censure by the Senate in December 1954, McCarthy descended into obscurity as rapidly as he had ascended to fame. His excesses, and those of his followers, had thoroughly discredited any legitimate contentions anticommunists may have had. As a result of the Army-McCarthy hearings, Richard Gid Powers notes, liberal anticommunists began to move away from the anticommunist consensus that had characterized the early Cold War. By the time Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, anticommunism had come to be associated with right-wing extremism, a stereotype that Goldwater himself found hard to shake. Furthermore, the extreme hysteria of right-wing organizations such as the John Birch Society helped contribute to anticommunism’s increasingly disreputable public image.4 The 1960s marked the beginning of what Powers calls American Catholicism’s ‘‘long goodbye to anticommunism.’’ John F. Kennedy’s election to the presidency, which overturned many long-held assumptions regarding what it meant to be an American Catholic, was an important factor in this decline. Even more influential was the pontificate of John XXIII, which redefined the Church’s relationship with the modern world. In his 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra, 170 A CATHOLIC COLD WAR John wrote that colonialism was a bigger problem than communism, prompting the rising conservative Catholic spokesman William F. Buckley to remark: ‘‘Mater si, Magistra no!’’ By then, anticommunism had ceased to be a unifying element for the American Catholic community .5 With the Second Vatican Council and the social upheaval of the 1960s, anticommunism became less of a priority for American Catholics . Other issues came to the forefront, chief among them poverty, race, war, and renewal of the Church. Although fewer Catholics embraced anticommunism with the fervent enthusiasm of earlier years, Catholics continued to compose a high percentage of anticommunists .6 Patrick Allitt notes that Catholic laypersons such as William F. Buckley and Michael Novak played a fundamental role in shaping the conservative intellectual movement from the 1950s through the 1980s, although theirs was but one of many Catholic voices. ‘‘In 1950,’’ writes Allitt, ‘‘the U.S. Catholic Church spoke with one voice and regarded itself as a homogeneous body. By 1970 even the appearance of unanimity had vanished.’’7 By the late 1960s, the American hierarchy assumed an increasingly prophetic voice on issues of war and peace. In ‘‘Human Life in Our Day’’ (1968), the bishops began to question the morality of American military involvement in Southeast Asia. In 1971, their ‘‘Resolution on Southeast Asia’’ denounced the Vietnam War.8 The 1983 letter of the American Bishops, ‘‘The Challenge of Peace,’’ argued that anticommunism was not a fit reason for the use of nuclear weapons: ‘‘In simple terms, we are saying that good ends (defending one’s country, protecting freedom, etc.) cannot justify immoral means (the use of weapons that kill indiscriminately and threaten whole societies).’’ By then American Catholic anticommunism had ceased to have any kind of institutional basis.9 Although it is impossible to predict how Walsh would have reacted to these changes, it is fair to say that his brand of anticommunism would have made little sense to a subsequent generation. This may help explain why he was forgotten so quickly. Thus to argue that American democracy and Catholicism were mutually reinforcing would not have elicited the same response in 1970 that it did in 1950. Indeed, in 1983, the American bishops directly refuted the arguments that underscored Walsh’s endorsement of nuclear warfare, saying that anticommunism was no longer a sufficient rationale. His EPILOGUE 171 depiction of the Christian-communist conflict in black and white terms would not have held the same urgency at a time when John XXIII...