What They Wished for: American Catholics and American Presidents, 1960–2004 by Lawrence J. McAndrews (review)

Historian Lawrence McAndrews provides a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship that incorporates the Catholic experience more fully within U.S. history. McAndrews’s experience—as the author of several books and articles on Catholic schools and education policy in the United States—provides gravitas to this work, which effectively navigates Catholicism’s complexity. Scholars of post-1960 U.S. religion and politics will find this book a critical starting point for research.

One of the central questions confronted by McAndrews is: Who speaks for the Catholic Church in the United States? What They Wished for attempts to explain the varying degrees of weight represented by the international voices of popes and Vatican officials; the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; and individual priests, nuns, and Catholic laypersons of varying education level and political status. In seeking to identify the causal relationship between Catholic appeals and presidential decisions, McAndrews also demonstrates mastery of the chronology of recent U.S. history.

What They Wished for analyzes the impact of Catholic opinion on presidential policy in three areas—defined by McAndrews as war and peace, social justice, and life and death. Chapters are organized around presidential administrations beginning with John F. Kennedy and concluding with the first term of George W. Bush. The elections of 1960 and 2004 serve as useful bookends, because the former resulted in the election of the nation’s first Catholic president, and the latter ended with the voters’ rejection of John F. Kerry—another Catholic senator from Massachusetts with the initials JFK. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, McAndrews believes, Catholic viewpoints received much more consideration in presidential politics than at any other time in U.S. history.

Regarding war and peace, McAndrews’s argument appears most persuasive. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, for example, U.S. Catholic bishops developed a powerful moral critique of the administration’s plans to modernize and expand the U.S. military. Rather than ignore the clerics, Reagan officials actively engaged in correspondence and discussions with U.S. bishops. McAndrews attributes the dovish turn in Reagan’s second term to Catholic lobbying. This idea seems generally convincing, although the Catholic bishops were not alone in calling for nuclear disarmament.

In life-and-death issues such as abortion, McAndrews concedes the limits of his theory that presidents adhered to Catholic appeals. Despite more than forty years of organized opposition to Roe v. Wade, Democratic presidents rebuffed direct, personal pleas—even from Mother Theresa—for protection of the unborn. Republican presidents—who professed to agree with the Catholic Church’s official stance that abortion is morally wrong—refused to prioritize pro-life policies. Most glaringly, George W. Bush failed to pass any substantial anti-abortion legislation, despite working with a Republican Congress during his first term.

Social-justice issues prove the most difficult for McAndrews to measure the impact of Catholic lobbying. His definition of social justice includes the push for racial equality and national health insurance. Although the Catholic hierarchy demonstrated exceptional unity and consistency in opposing abortion and nuclear weapons, Catholic bishops and laypersons differed significantly in their ideas about the pace of racial integration.

Although graduate students and other researchers may find this book especially useful, undergraduates would likely struggle with the book’s structure. The narrative flow is disrupted by a tendency to explain causal relationships through long lists of factors. Nonetheless, McAndrews’s broad use of archival and oral-history resources has provided historians with an excellent foundation for future study. Whereas pundits and scholars of this period have recently focused primarily on secularization and the Religious Right, What They Wished for offers useful insights into Catholicism’s multifaceted role in this conversation.