'Peace on Earth--Peace in Vietnam': The Catholic Peace Fellowship and Antiwar Witness, 1964-1976

Abstract

Founded in 1964, the Catholic Peace Fellowship (CPF) was central to American Catholic peacemaking during the Vietnam war and offers students of the era deeper insight into the complexity of the antiwar movement. CPF protest reflected growing disdain for American Activities in Vietnam among American Catholics, as well as growing interest in Catholic peacemaking following the reforms of the second Vatican Council. CPF members provided American Catholics with a forum in which they could protest the war in a religious context, even as they worked to maintain a religious voice in the larger secular antiwar movement. Unlike much secular protest activity, CPF protest sprang from religious roots and CPF members consciously constructed arguments against the war and developed protest tactics that reflected the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the Church's hidden history of nonviolence. Moreover, the primarily lay character of CPF challenged traditional relationships in the American Catholic Church. Rather than defer to clerical leadership, lay catholics in the CPF took the lead protesting the Vietnam War, a fact that prepared them to participate more fully in the mission of the church and in constructing the American Catholic Church's Post-Vatican II agenda.