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

Conclusion

{377} Conclusion Most of the one in four American Catholics who regularly attend Sunday Mass listen intently to the priest’s homily, which draws a lesson from that day’s gospel reading. The preacher intends that his parable follow the parishioners out of church and accompany them during the week ahead, at least until the next Sunday, when the process begins anew.1 While many of the people in the pews endeavor in good faith to heed their pastor’s insights, others leave his scriptural wisdom at the church door. They find it too abstruse , too utopian, or too remote from their everyday lives. They have bills to pay, mouths to feed, and deadlines to meet. Their hour of scriptural diversion is over, and it is time to reconnect with the rugged reality with which God has saddled them. So it was with the relationship between American Catholics and the power structure of the Church from 1960 to 2004. In the years between electing and rejecting one of their own as the leader of their government, American Catholics alternately followed and forsook the dictates of the leaders of their church. On elements of war and peace, social justice, and life and death, American Catholics evinced the political prowess befitting one-quarter of the country’s population. But they also displayed a diversity of opinion reflecting their dissonance along lines of race, class, gender, and political affiliation. While their numbers always demanded the attention of U.S. presidents, their differences often lightened their imprint on U.S. presidencies. Yet because of those numbers and despite those differences, American Catholics exhibited a substantial impact on a secular government in a Protestant culture. In the realm of war and peace, American Catholics and their presidents would no doubt concur that from 1960 to 2004 there was too much of the former and too little of the latter. Whether confronting communism, genocide, or terrorism, every president of the age exerted the awesome authority of commander in chief. And hovering balefully over the entire epoch was the specter of a nuclear apocalypse, at risk of being ignited by the superpowers’ escalation of the arms race or the terrorists’ infiltration of the arms trade. For a peace-loving Catholic Church, which sanctions war only when it is just, this era created abundant angst. As early as 1965, Pope Paul VI was re- {378} Conclusion nouncing war, and as early as 1968 the U.S. Catholic bishops were raising questions about the Vietnam conflict. Yet Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford extended the strife in Southeast Asia for seven more years. Twice within a dozen years U.S. presidents named Bush fought wars against Iraq that, Pope John Paul II and the American bishops implied in 1991 and amplified in 2003, were unjust. In the Balkans from 1993 to 1995 and again from 1998 to 1999, President Clinton acted less swiftly and less decisively to arrest the humanitarian horror than the Catholic hierarchy often appeared to be demanding. Pope John XXIII’s efforts to stave off nuclear war over Cuba did not preclude Kennedy and Khrushchev from taking the world to the brink in 1962. The bishops’ campaigns for salt ii and a virtual nuclear freeze could not deter Carter from withholding the treaty when Brezhnev chose to invade Afghanistan in 1979, nor could they deter Reagan from intensifying the arms race when Soviet leader Yuri Andropov chose to build in kind in 1983. “I don’t think you can claim that specific recommendations that the bishops made have been followed in any way,” the United States Catholic Conference’s Rev. Bryan Hehir admitted four years after “The Challenge of Peace.” In the early years of Reagan’s presidency, Notre Dame’s Rev. Theodore Hesburgh would remember, the president remained committed to mutual assured destruction.2 American Catholics nonetheless achieved measurable success in helping to move American presidents and the American people in their direction on matters of war and peace. The United States waded into Vietnam largely because of Catholics: the communist oppression of the Church there galvanized Senator John Kennedy’s interest in the region, which would result in thousands of American military advisors and millions of American dollars going to Southeast Asia at President John Kennedy’s request. And the United States wobbled out of Vietnam largely because of Catholics: the Catholic Left helped to push the bishops to break with Nixon over the war in 1971, and the bishops helped to press Ford to...