Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties by Peter Cajka

Abstract

Reviewed by: Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties by Peter Cajka Matthew Levering Peter Cajka, Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 232 pages. Peter Cajka’s book is a complex work that can be engaged at many levels. Historically it is superb. Cajka offers lively accounts of now often forgotten but widely influential twentieth-century figures such as James Martin Gillis, C.S.P., Francis Connell, C.Ss.R., and John C. Ford, S.J., along with less influential but still notable figures such as John K. Ryan and George B. O’Toole. Gillis in particular stands out for his combination of profound social and political conservatism with a doctrine of conscience that allowed for radical conclusions, such as his strong support of the claims of the pacifist Canadian Baptist Douglas Clyde Macintosh. Cajka’s presentation of the popular Catholic thinker Daniel A. Lord, S.J., exemplifies the striking combination of conservatism and radical thought: “In the Protestant and secular imagination, Lord qualified as a Catholic reactionary; but like other Catholic thinkers trained in the Thomistic mode, he was a fierce defender of conscience rights”—notably in defending the rights of conscientious objectors to military service, on the grounds that Catholics are bound by divine law, as recognized in conscience, “not to fight in an unjust war” (53–54). For the period of World War II, Cajka pays particular attention to the Catholic Worker movement, which affirmed Christian pacifism. But he also attends to the ways in which Catholics responded (for example) to the military’s requiring quartermasters to hand out contraception and to the military’s building of “officially designated prostitution zones” in which the prostitutes had all passed medical exams for venereal disease (57). He also notes important Catholic responses, led by John Ford, S.J., to such events as the blanket bombing of Hamburg in 1943 that resulted—somewhat inadvertently—in the deaths of more than forty thousand civilians. Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, archbishop of Washington, D.C., insisted after the war (in the early years of the Cold War) that “Catholics could join an American army fighting against godless communism, but no unjust law would force them to violate conscience to bomb innocents” (61). Cajka devotes a chapter to the Vietnam era that is filled with details that were largely new to me and that demonstrate how “the principle of selective conscientious objection, the just-war framework, and the rights of conscience were overlapping logics in a particularly Catholic approach to resisting [End Page 96] the draft” (68). Here he focuses on the Catholic Peace Fellowship, which emerged from the Protestant Fellowship of Reconciliation in conjunction with the Catholic Worker movement. The Catholic Peace Fellowship was founded by the Catholic Worker leaders James Forest and Tom Cornell in 1964, encouraged by Daniel Berrigan, S.J., and others. In 1965, Forest published a booklet with ecclesiastical approval (from the Apostolic Vicar for the United States Armed Forces) titled Catholics and Conscientious Objection. Cajka also draws valuable connections in this chapter to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which powerfully appealed to God’s law and conscience (including societal conscience) and argued that an unjust law is no law at all. Cajka turns from his chapter on Vietnam-era conscientious objection to a chapter on the rejection of the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae on conscience grounds. He focuses on the clash between Cardinal O’Boyle and a group of priests of the Washington, D.C. archdiocese, beginning with Cardinal O’Boyle’s removal of Joseph O’Donoghue from active ministry due to his questioning of the truth of Humanae Vitae. Shortly after Vatican II, a group of Washington priests had come together, and, in 1966, they named their group the Association of Washington Priests, led by O’Donoghue, John Corrigan, Shane MacCarthy, and others—later supported by the establishment of the Center for Christian Renewal. As Cajka frames the issue, “O’Boyle spoke for the clarity of the law. O’Donoghue, Corrigan, and their fellow priests pulled for conscience, a concept that they thought heralded...