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  • "Good Friday in December," World War II in the Editorials of Preservation of the Faith Magazine, 1939-1945
  • William L. Portier

On September 1, 1939, Hitler's tanks crossed the border into Poland. Germany's invasion of Poland marks, by most accounts, the beginning of the Second World War of the twentieth century. Lasting for six years, it left 60 million dead and Europe in shambles. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as dominant powers of the post-war era until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. After subsequent controversial conflicts in Korea, Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Middle East, World War II has come down to those born after it as the "good war," a paradigmatic case for just war theory. "But what about Hitler?," the argumentum ad Hitlerum, is widely taken as the decisive refutation of contemporary Christian pacifists. Those who "came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America" have come to be known, in Tom Brokaw's phrase, as "the greatest generation."1

Though the war in Europe began in September 1939, the United States did not enter the war until after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In the intervening twenty-seven months, still suffering under the Great Depression, those who would become the "greatest generation" found themselves bitterly divided over whether the United States should enter the war on the side of Britain and France who were allied with the Soviet Union, at this point less than a quarter of a century from its beginnings in the 1917 Russian Revolution. The legendary flyer and one of America's first international celebrities, Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), was the major spokesperson for non-interventionists.

After the decisive American intervention on the side of the Allies and the post-war stature of the United States, represented by the lionizing of the "greatest generation," [End Page 25] it is hard to imagine how so many could have been against U.S. entry into the war. One such opponent was Joachim V. Benson, M.S.Ss.T. (1904-1981), editor of a mission magazine turned literary venture, The Preservation of the Faith. Though he had some sympathy for Lindbergh, the primary driver for Benson's opposition was religious. He was a disciple of Thomas A. Judge, C.M. (1868-1933) who founded the congregation to which Benson belonged, the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity. After Judge's death, and as a student at Catholic University, Benson became involved with what, during the 1930s and the Great Depression, Paul Hanly Furfey called the "New Social Catholicism." In 1935, at age 31, Benson was appointed editor of the Missionary Servants' mission magazine, Preservation of the Faith. With the support of his superiors, Benson turned Preservation into a forum for the Catholic intellectual ferment of the second half of the 1930s.

After brief accounts of Benson's background as disciple of Fr. Judge and key participant in the "New Social Catholicism" of the 1930s, and after introducing The Preservation of the Faith and its offspring Preservation of the Faith Press, this article will focus on the treatment of the war in Benson's editorials and editorial policy from 1939 to 1945, with particular attention to the twenty-seven-month period between September 1939 and December 1941.

Disciple of Father Judge

Born in Boston of Irish immigrant parents, Judge preached up and down the east coast on the Vincentian mission band between 1903 and 1915. Disturbed by the "leakage" of immigrant poor from the Church, he enlisted and organized lay women he met on parish missions to work for the "preservation of the faith." Judge's work grew apace with the growing body of papal teaching on the lay apostolate. When he became superior of the Vincentian Alabama mission in 1915, he invited the lay apostles to come south. "This is the layman's hour," he wrote in 1919.2

But by 1919, many of his lay apostles had evolved in the direction of vowed communal life. This pioneer of the lay apostolate found himself at the head of a community of women...

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