Gordon C. Zahn

Gordon C. Zahn was born in Wisconsin in 1918. He attended public schools and a Catholic parish and worked briefly before World War II got underway and he confronted the military draft. He registered as a conscientious objector based on his deeply held Catholic faith and his personal judgment that pacifism, not “just war,” was the basic message of Jesus. His archbishop never responded to his request for support, but remarkably his petition was granted and he spent the war doing alternative service. This work brought him into contact with a few other Catholic peace advocates, mainly from Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. He told of that wartime experience many years later in Another Part of the War: The Camp Simon Story (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980).

Following the war, Zahn studied briefly at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, but protests of veterans unwilling to attend school with a pacifist led to his transfer to University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. He worked for Senator Eugene McCarthy in Washington while working toward a PhD in sociology at The Catholic University of America. As he began teaching at Loyola University in Chicago he completed his first book, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control (Sheed and Ward, 1962). Documenting the prudential adjustment of church leaders to the Nazi regime and their strong support for the national cause during the war, the book sparked controversy; some church officials even tried to prevent its publication. No wonder, when he argued on the basis of the bishops’ own statements: “In World War II the leading spokesmen of the Catholic Church in Germany did become channels of Nazi control over their followers, whether by their general exhortations to loyal obedience to legitimate authority or by their even more direct efforts to rally those followers to the defense of [the German fatherland] as a Christian duty.” From then on, Zahn was often asked to comment on scholarly works on Catholicism during the Nazi period; he did so with carefully documented arguments and his characteristic blend of personal modesty, scholarly honesty, and moral clarity.

While researching his book, Zahn discovered the story of Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter, executed in 1943 for refusing military service. Like Zahn, Jägerstätter arrived at his serious and costly moral judgment independently, receiving no support from his family, his village, or his pastors. Indeed, Zahn found on a visit that the villagers continued to believe that Jägerstätter had acted irresponsibly. For Zahn, the pressing question was how this sturdy villager had arrived at the moral judgment that Hitler’s was an unjust war when the church’s pastoral and intellectual leaders acted upon judgments that, after the war, were universally judged to be wrong. His book, In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter (Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1964), provided in the 1960s a powerful resource for Christians dealing with the moral problems posed by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the Vietnam War, which became an all-out American war in 1965.

Cover of a book by Gordon Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control, 1962.

Courtesy of University of Notre Dame Archives

By then, Catholics were actively revising long-standing assumptions about the morality of war. Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris of 1963 raised hard questions about the morality of nuclear arms, while the Vatican Council in 1965 affirmed the validity of Christian pacifism and supported the right to conscientious objection, which had previously been ruled out for Catholics. Zahn joined other American Catholic peace activists in working for that judgment at the Council. He accepted an invitation to address the British bishops and one cited Jägerstätter’s witness in a speech at the Council. Thus as the Council ended, Catholics in the United States, including those eligible for the draft, were now told they would have to arrive at their own conscientious decisions about the morality of the Vietnam War. A...