What They Wished For: American Catholics and American Presidents, 1960-2004

5. Catholics and Jimmy Carter (1977–1981)

{169} Chapter Five Catholics and Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) As a born-again Baptist from a region historically inhospitable to Catholics, candidate Jimmy Carter attracted many Catholic skeptics even as he collected most Catholic votes. By proposing nuclear arms control and universal health insurance and by opposing federal funding of abortion, however, President Jimmy Carter endeared himself to much of the Church power structure . But no amount of Catholic lobbying could rescue salt ii, enact health care legislation, or persuade Carter to translate personal repugnance toward abortion into political affinity for a constitutional amendment. In the end, too many American Catholics strayed from their leader in the White House and their leaders in the Church. War and Peace: Nuclear War In May 1977 newly elected President Carter told the graduates at the University of Notre Dame that Americans possessed an “inordinate fear of communism .” Carter would receive much acclaim for this signature speech by the first president of the post-Vietnam era.1 Carter did more than talk. He worked assiduously to achieve a second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev, who had signed the first one with Richard Nixon in 1972. Before Carter could send the treaty to the Senate for ratification, however, Brezhnev had ordered the invasion of neighboring Afghanistan to prop up a friendly government. With startling suddenness, détente died, the Cold War resumed, and Carter admitted that he had been wrong about communism. The American Catholic hierarchy was with the Southern Baptist president almost every step of the way. The bishops lauded his insistence on human rights and shared his devotion to arms control. Their preferred foreign policy was markedly similar to his: long on negotiation, short on bluster, with more conciliation than confrontation. But many of the Catholic congregants, dubi- {170} chapter five ous about Carter from the start, found his diplomacy naïve and his moralism grating. Theirs was the hard line of an earlier era, when Vietnam was a mission before it was a morass, and communism was godless before it was guiltless . Just as Carter underestimated the Soviets, so the bishops underappreciated their flock. But unlike Carter, the bishops would not admit their mistake. Catholics, Carter, and SALT Carter’s focus on nuclear arms control was quite consistent with the recent teaching of the Church on nuclear war, especially Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1963), Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967), and the International Synod of Bishops’ Justicia in Mundo (1971). So the Catholic drumbeat for salt ii was sounding even before Carter came to Washington.2 Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 1976, Archbishop Peter Gerety of Newark, New Jersey, quoted the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes (“Of Hope and Joy,” 1965). This document established three principles governing the deployment of nuclear weapons: 1) Use of the weapons against cities and populated areas is prohibited in a special way because of their destructive capacity. 2) While use is prohibited, the possession of these weapons for deterrence may possibly be legitimated as the lesser of two evils. 3) Even deterrence is questionable unless it is conceived as an interim expedient accompanied by extraordinary efforts to negotiate their limitation and reduction.3 As soon as Carter entered the White House, the American Catholic bishops began to sing his praises. A United States Catholic Conference internal document reviewing the first six months of the new administration applauded the president’s commitment to “the early resumption of salt talks,” as well as his willingness to negotiate “an exchange of limitations of cruise missiles for Soviet limitations on the Backfire bomber and their heavy icbm’s [intercontinental ballistic missiles]; and a ban on new systems such as the mobile icbm’s on both sides.”4 In September 1977 the United States Catholic Conference president, Archbishop Joseph Bernardin of Cincinnati, and its general secretary, Bishop Thomas Kelly, received a briefing from President Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale on the administration’s staunch advocacy of human rights in foreign policy. Pope Paul VI ushered in the new year with a message proclaiming “No to Violence, Yes to Peace.” The uscc administrative board followed with a February 1978 pastoral, “The Gospel of Peace and the Danger of War,” which declared the “primary moral imperative . . . that the arms race must be stopped and the reduction of armaments must be achieved.” In April Edward catholics and...