Catholic Worker Research Articles

Legal Constraints or Aggregate Individual Characteristics? Examining Factors of State R&D Intensity and Spending in the United States

ABSTRACTThis study empirically examines the impacts of legal constraints and aggregate individual characteristics on the funding and expenditure related to states' research and development (R&D). A system generalized method of moments (GMM) analysis is performed over a 20‐year period (2000–2019). The budgetary institutions, including rainy‐day funds, TELs, and debt limitations, significantly affect states' overall innovative capacity and R&D spending. They can hinder improvements in states' innovative capacity and R&D expenditure. On the other hand, states can circumvent these institutions and increase their R&D intensity and spending. States' development and human capacity foster their innovative capacity and R&D spending. Catholic work ethic is also crucial for enhancing state governments' innovative capacity and R&D expenditure. Legislative term limits reduce states' R&D intensity and expenditure. Meanwhile, economic downturns may motivate additional spending on R&D activities to promote states' innovative capacity and R&D spending. Fiscal burdens can prevent states from investing in R&D.

The Christian Trade Union Movement in the Weimar Republic according to Apostolic Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli’s Assessments

This article focuses on the opinions of Eugenio Pacelli, the Apostolic Nuncio in Germany, regarding the German Christian labor movement in the 1920s. During the Weimar Republic, there were two types of organizations for Catholic workers: the interconfessional Christian Trade Unions and the Catholic Workers’ Associations. In his reports to Rome, Pacelli mainly emphasized the Church’s loss of contact with workers, as well as the spread of «misconceptions» regarding economic theory among them. In comparison to the Catholic Workers’ Associations, the Christian unions seemed more «moderate and reasonable» to the Nuncio, as he believed that the latter were more susceptible to radicalization.

Inhabiting the Kingdom: Theologies of Nonviolence in the Catholic Worker Movement

This article considers understandings of nonviolence within the Catholic Worker movement and their embodiment. The aim is to make the Worker's position theologically understandable, demonstrating how this drives their methods for action. The article argues that a particular ethic of nonviolence can be found within the movement, grounded within the aims of its founders and the current practices of the movement today, drawing on the example of the Jubilee Ploughshares 2000 from which the London Catholic Worker was founded to illustrate this. By exploring the movement's theological foundations for the practice of grassroots, active nonviolence, it will seek to present an important example of Catholic nonviolent practice questioning how this may challenge contemporary Catholic thinking on war and peace.

RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS IN THE CONCEPT OF THE FUTURE SOCIETY IN THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AT THE END OF THE 19THAND BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURIES

Based on the analysis of the works of the classics of Marxism, the works of theorists and historians of German social democracy, articles by priests of the Catholic Church and representatives of Christian socialism in Germany at the end of the 19th century, theorists of anarcho-syndicalism, Russian and foreign researchers of German social democracy and the labor question, an attempt is shown to a departure from the orthodox Marxist policy of the German Social Democracy of the late 19th-early 20th century regarding religion, the church, religious organizations and believers towards a more pragmatic party policy aimed at attracting faithful Catholic workers into their ranks. In German Social Democracy, after the repeal of the law against the Socialists, which fell as a result of joint political actions against the policy of the government of Otto von Bismarck, a coalition of opposition bourgeois and clerical parties, the restoration of existing voting rights, in the interests of growing party ranks and strengthening the influence of the Social Democrats in local Landtag and the Reichstag, created the opportunity to propagate socialist ideas among the workers, who were under the strong influence of the church. The question arose: what kind of party policy should be pursued in the future with regard to believers so that this does not contradict the program of the party and does not reduce the quality of its party ranks. These questions served as the subject of discussion in the party and led to the subsequent adjustment of its party program, the exclusion from it of the provision on the reactionary nature of all other classes of society, except for the proletariat. The problem was to develop such a policy of the party towards the church and believers that it would not contradict the basic Marxist postulates on this issue and at the same time would not interfere with the attraction of believers to the party, especially from rural areas that were under the strong influence of the clergy.

“Our Colored and Indian Charges Furnish So Much Amusement for Us”: Catholicism, Assimilation, and the Racial Hierarchy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1883–1918

ABSTRACT While the history of White reformers’ attempts at assimilation has been studied in the American West and South, their role in the American Northeast still remains largely unexplored. This article examines the role of Catholic missionaries in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. These White missionaries worked with students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School as well as African Americans at St. Katharine’s Select School. By comparing and contrasting Catholic work with these two ethnic groups, this article examines the racial hierarchy within the assimilation process at the turn of the twentieth century.

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria W. Wolcott

Reviewed by: Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria W. Wolcott Alison Collis Greene Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement. By Victoria W. Wolcott. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. x, 262. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-226-81725-5.) Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement links several cohorts of twentieth-century utopian radicals who worked to build a world they envisioned in the midst of one they lamented. Among the broader range of liberal and radical freedom movements, Victoria W. Wolcott focuses on utopians tied by an emphasis on racial and economic justice and a commitment to cooperative economics, interracialism, and nonviolent direct action. This “matrix of intentional communities” included key members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and, later, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) (p. 10). Wolcott argues that these utopians—all well-documented individually—together “situated utopian interracialism and radical nonviolence at the center of the civil rights movement” (p. 10). Wolcott’s first chapter opens with “The Workers” at Brookwood Labor College in New York, founded in 1921 by the pacifist Christian labor organizer A. J. Muste, and Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, established by Myles Horton in 1932. The workers’ education movement “went beyond trade unionism to advocate for a new and more just world that would embrace racial and gender equality” (p. 18). Brookwood and Highlander provided a practical democratic education to many women and created “a new generation of Black activists,” including Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, and Rosa Parks (p. 18). This chapter establishes an argument central to the socialist utopianism of the 1920s and 1930s that Wolcott traces directly into the civil rights movement: that “the working classes could only rise on the basis of full racial equality,” and that Black workers in particular faced myriad forms of individual and systemic injustice based specifically on race and not reducible to class (p. 17). To live into a future of racial and economic justice in the midst of the profoundly segregated North was difficult and often dangerous; to do so in the Jim Crow South could be deadly. Chapter 2, “The Cooperators,” explores the Christian socialist dreams that shaped Delta and Providence farms, two agricultural cooperatives constructed to house displaced Black and white sharecroppers in Depression-era Mississippi. As historian Robert Hunt Ferguson has recently argued in his book Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (Athens, Ga., 2018), the farmers’ own dreams carried them through two remarkable decades of work before they fell to racism from within and without. “The Divinites” of chapter 3 proved “the most successful utopian community in the twentieth century”; theirs is not coincidentally also the first Black-led movement that Wolcott discusses (p. 88). Following the lead of scholars Judith Weisenfeld and Father Divine biographer Jill Watts, Wolcott analyzes both the religious and the political work of the Peace Mission movement to demonstrate the real-world value of a utopian vision in which class, racial, and gender hierarchies (and even gendered difference) did not exist and where self-sufficiency came from shared resources and vision. Chapters 4 and 5, “The Fellowshippers” and “The Pacifists,” follow the utopian dreams of the pre–World War II era into Cold War antiradicalism and [End Page 391] the freedom movements led by FOR, CORE, and the inheritors of the prewar socialist Left. Here, Wolcott focuses on a number of outward-facing communes, from cooperative farms to the Catholic Worker movement to the Harlem Ashram. Wolcott contrasts—and defends—these activists’ radical, provocative, and nonviolent interracialism with the ameliorative liberal interracialism of more conventional white-led organizations. Wolcott demonstrates a coherence of vision across civil rights efforts where historians have more often seen fracture and rupture. This is not a consensus history, but it is a history of coherent, deeply rooted, and ideologically cohesive dissent—and a plea for its continuation. Alison Collis Greene Emory University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Updating the Catholic Workers’ Theory of Revolution

Updating the Catholic Workers’ Theory of Revolution

The Catholic Worker at Large

ABSTRACT The LCW creates the physical and intellectual spaces in which to practiseradical hospitality and explore Christian anarchism. As these spaces can be transitory,easily destroyed or abandoned, the Catholic Worker must draw on its personalist and anarchist roots to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

Catholic Worker Anarchism at a Crossroads: The Difficulty of Addressing Anti-Blackness

Catholic Worker Anarchism at a Crossroads: The Difficulty of Addressing Anti-Blackness

“Wherein Justice Dwelleth:” The Catholic Worker Movement and Political Theology Today

ABSTRACT This introduction to this roundtable on the Catholic Worker Movement and political theology discusses the theological and political background of its movement founders–Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. These visions are intertwined through their idea of the “Mystical Body of Christ,” which connects humans together in relationships of responsibility to each other as well as to the earth.

Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left by William Marling

Reviewed by: Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left by William Marling Benjamin Peters Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left. By William Marling. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 319pp. $45.00. In The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day recalled the divisions that emerged within the Old Left in the 1920s and 1930s. There were those who were sympathetic to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and those who opposed it, favoring instead the Industrial Workers of the World or “Wobblies.” The Wobblies, with their call for “One Big Union,” regarded the skilled workers of the AFL as “the aristocrats of labor.” Impatient with the dialectic of “the orthodox Marxists,” they believed in direct action—even through violence. But Day also identified small anarchist groups. While anarchism in the United States was associated with secular figures such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Day pointed to Ammon Hennacy as a “Christian anarchist” in the mold of Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount. Borrowing this characterization, William Marling’s Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left offers the first critical biography of Hennacy, an important figure on the Left (Catholic or otherwise) and, in particular, for the Catholic Worker. Hennacy had been involved with the Wobblies, but rejected violent class-warfare and became a pacifist who was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War I, where he met Berkman. Marling paints a vivid portrait of Hennacy starting with his childhood in Ohio raised by Quaker parents, his education at Hiram College, and his various attempts to live out his anarchist commitments, which Marling describes as “individualistic, anti-authoritarian, Christian pacifism.” Hennacy simply called it his “one-man revolution” (or as he supposedly once declared: “An anarchist is someone who doesn’t need a [End Page 81] cop to make him behave.”) The picture that clearly emerges is of a very disciplined and dedicated form of life and focus on personal responsibility. It was this pacifist anarchism that Hennacy brought to the Catholic Worker in the 1950s, though not without controversy. Indeed, Michael Baxter has even suggested that there are two poles within the Catholic Worker: the Father John Hugo-traditionalist pole and the Hennacy-anarchist pole, with most Workers falling somewhere in between. Marling also provides insights into Hennacy’s friendship with Scott Nearing, whose Living the Good Life became a classic in the back to the land movement in the 1960s, and the influence of the Hopi people, who Hennacy saw as providing a template for a more social form of pacifist anarchism. Marling does not limit his scope to an intellectual study of Hennacy’s life and thought. He spends considerable time on Hennacy’s personal life, recounting Hennacy’s first marriage to Selma Melms with whom he had two daughters. Melms eventually left Hennacy and took their daughters to join a religious cult in California. Marling gives a heartbreaking account of Hennacy’s often futile attempts to be part of his daughters’ lives. Marling also ventures into Hennacy’s relationship with Day, who influenced Hennacy’s decision to enter the Catholic Church in 1952. Marling strongly implies that this relationship was more than (as William Miller described it) “sophomoric.” Marling holds up correspondence that suggests they shared a real romantic intensity—which Day certainly exhibited when Hennacy began to pursue other (often younger) women in the Catholic Worker. If nothing else, this confirms the suspicion that Dorothy Day—in contrast to the more saintly manner she is often portrayed today—was attractive to many men and she did not always brush such attention away. Christian Anarchist is well-written and much needed—though more interviews with folks who knew Hennacy such as Karl Meyer or the late Tom Cornell could have given it a little more familiarity. That said, Marling has provided a great service to scholars or anyone else interested in the U.S. Left, Catholic radicalism, or the Catholic Worker. Accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students, Christian Anarchist will certainly become the definitive biography of Ammon Hennacy for years to come. And as the current political and economic climate (eerily mirroring that of...

From Criticism to Activism: Sociologists Influenced by the Catholic Worker Movement

From Criticism to Activism: Sociologists Influenced by the Catholic Worker Movement

Lincoln Rice, ed., The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin: Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker

A review of Lincoln Rice, ed., The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin: Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker.

Pope Francis and the Catholic Worker on the Ascesis of Attention

Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli tutti elevates some key themes of his papacy. Using the parable of the Good Samaritan as a framing narrative, Francis outlines an active, nonviolent style of politics and social engagement based on practices of attention and hospitality toward one’s neighbors. Francis refers to this mode of engagement as “social friendship.” Francis’s pastoral letters and homilies draw from the content and methodologies common to Latin American liberation theology, but many of his insights are mirrored in an Anglo-American context through the witness of the Catholic Worker movement. This paper looks to the Catholic Worker for a mode by which the Gospel of social friendship can be lived out through asceses of attention and hospitality to the unhoused. Social friendship leads one to responsible action, and universal membership in the Body of Christ calls into question the structures that oppress the vulnerable.

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic Socialist Feminist by Donna Haverty-Stacke

Reviewed by: The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic Socialist Feminist by Donna Haverty-Stacke Janine Giordano Drake The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic Socialist Feminist. By Donna Haverty-Stacke. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 312 pp. $50.00. In the Cold War-era narratives of U.S. history that predominated the twentieth century, radical socialism and Christianity were inherently opposed to one another. In this framework, Dorothy Day's [End Page 79] Catholic Worker Movement appeared as an exception to the rule. And yet, Donna Haverty-Stacke's well-written biography of Grace Holmes Carlson, the Catholic Trotsykist, psychology professor, political candidate, outlaw, and Catholic university reformer, reminds us that Dorothy Day is no exception. Carlson, too, had a foot in both the political left and the churches as she sought to change both Christian definitions of social justice and patriotic definitions of American democracy. Grace was raised in Catholic schools under the leadership of Archbishop John Ireland, a fierce Progressive-Era advocate for labor justice. She excelled academically and went on to pursue a doctorate in Psychology at the University of Minnesota, where she also met her husband, Gilbert. For her, it felt like a seamless transition from supporting union struggles during the Depression to carrying on this work within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the 1940s. Within the SWP orbit, Grace and her sister Dorothy found their voices as political leaders. Grace ran for public office and, after she was forced to resign her teaching position due to her socialist leanings, she worked for the party. This decision took a strain on both her marriage and her faith, and for a period she stopped calling herself a Catholic and had a relationship with another man. Yet, less than a decade later and after a brief detention in prison for her political beliefs, Grace decided to leave the party and return to both her husband and what she described as the Catholic Church. In Grace's telling of the story, her return to Catholicism was not a rejection of socialism but an affirmation of a part of her that had always been there. She made a "personal" decision stemming from the death of her father to return to her more spiritual roots. Contrary to some of our presumptions about patriarchy and anti-socialism pervading Catholicism in 1950s, Roman Catholic sisters in Minneapolis gave the former felon sanctuary and respected her expertise and sense of "mission." At St. Mary's Junior College, Grace took on leadership roles in campus ministry. She was also invited to help design a general education curriculum that prepared students for the challenge of committing oneself to social justice, ethics, and truth [End Page 80] while also following a secular vocation. As Haverty-Stacke tells the story, Grace's mature support for a "modern, engaged Catholic activism" was more of a fulfillment of her lifetime of political experiences than a rejection of the Trotyskyist politics of her young adulthood. Moreover, her invitation to Catholic leadership was also a fulfillment of Roman Catholic social and political goals. Grace also traveled and spoke broadly on the value of a Catholic liberal arts education which nurtured Catholics' sense of justice and respect for human beings, and which integrated this with their vocational mission of redeeming and transforming society. One wonders to what extent her ideas inspired Catholic vocational work in other institutions. When, in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson officially pardoned Grace's felony and restored her voting rights, one wonders who really proved victorious in the culture war between Leftists and American Catholics. In many respects, the interests of the Left and the Roman Catholic Left had become indivisible by 1965. Indeed, perhaps the most significant scholarly contribution of the book is its spotlight on the intimate relationship between Roman Catholicism and left-wing labor politics in the twentieth century. The book leads us to wonder how many Americans who ended up supporting the Socialist Workers' Party were similarly steeped in Catholic labor support throughout the 1910s–1930s, and how many of them also quietly declared victory through the significant shifts in the meaning of "Catholicism" in the 1960s. If Grace...

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism by Brenna Moore

Reviewed by: Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism by Brenna Moore Stephen Schloesser S.J Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism. By Brenna Moore. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2021. Pp. 322. $32.50. ISBN 9780226787015.) In Kindred Spirits, Brenna Moore boldly theorizes and accomplishes a genuinely global Catholic intellectual history for the 2020s. Moore examines an international network of writers, theologians, artists, and activists between 1920 and 1960. The sprawling diversity of identities, crossing and hybridizing religious, ethnic, racial, gender and sexual borders, is unified by Catholicism’s global reach and inexhaustible capacity for accommodating local contexts. Although the figures were dispersed in places as distant as Chile, Egypt, France, Jamaica, and Russia— as well as Chicago and New York—they all shared the city of Paris at some time in their lives. Moore comes to this story with authority stemming from her 2012 monograph Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905–1944). In that work, Moore’s unpacking of Maritain’s richly textured life led her to explore the roles played by salons organized by women. Salons—and their cultivation of friendships—served as sites of refuge and belonging for ex-patriots, émigrés, and exiles (like Maritain herself). Nearly a decade later, Moore has built on this foundation as she pushes Catholic intellectual history beyond these earlier borders. Moore argues for the category of “friendship” playing a vital role in analyzing this global community and, more particularly, “spiritual friendship” as the binding force. On one level, this actively chosen spiritual kinship—hence, Kindred Spirits— gave participants a shared identity and belonging that transcended passive forms of [End Page 786] blood inheritance in both families and nations. Not surprisingly, medievalist imagery pervaded their discourse as Christian monastic life was explicitly contrasted to the nuclear family’s rise in modernity. Transnational kinship not only permitted difference between friends—it cultivated and celebrated that difference. This “resistance” to homogeneity manifests itself especially in often complicated relationships defying predictable categorizations. Although the prominent French Islamic scholar Louis Massignon was known for his same-sexual orientation, his most profound friendship in this book is with Mary Kahil, a Syrian-born, Egyptian feminist activist in Cairo. Meanwhile, he confessed that “being with his wife and three children felt like he was undergoing Chinese torture, his face getting eaten by a rat”—complicated kinships. (p. 21) On another level, this heterogenous community both stood apart from as well as interacted with the more homogenous institutions that form the largely clerical loci of traditional Catholic intellectual history: religious orders (e.g., Dominican and Jesuit), seminaries, schools, parishes, and other ecclesiastical settings. The centers for these kindred spirits were “off-center”: women-led salons, clandestine resistance movements, the Dar-el-Salem in Cairo, Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality in the USA, and Latin American base communities. However, as Moore’s Sacred Dread already demonstrated, these two spheres—clerical and lay— did not form a simple binary opposition. Far from being hermetically sealed, they interacted, overlapped, and mutually nourished. When, for example, the Jesuit (later Cardinal) Jean Daniélou was a guest at Marie-Magdeleine Davy’s salon outside of Paris, he encountered a much wider range of intellectuals than he might have found in circles closer to home. As a corollary to friendship, women play leading roles in Moore’s account as the founders, patrons, organizers, and sustaining forces of these “off-center” centers. (Her method evokes Dena Goodman’s groundbreaking study in The Republic of Letters [1994], a revisionist history of the French Enlightenment in which women’s salons blurred boundaries between public and private spheres.) For example, Moore’s genealogical excavation of rarely recognized figures uncovers the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. Mistral surprisingly alters received narratives of Jacques Maritain’s influence since she was largely responsible for the dissemination of his Christian democratic thought in Latin America. Moore observes: “we have histories on mothers who passed on their faith to their children, nuns who staffed orphanages, grandmothers who filled the pews, but very little on modern religious women who were intellectuals, the critical thinkers of their...

Solidarity, Praxis, and Discernment: Formation at the Catholic Worker

Although the encyclicals and episcopal documents of Catholic social teaching remain fairly theoretical and address concrete social issues on a general level, the implications of these texts must be lived out to be fully understood. Students of Catholic social teaching require spaces and communities in which they can ‘test out’ concepts such as the common good and the preferential option for the poor for the sake of their own formation and in service to the Church and the world. The Catholic Worker, an anarchist lay movement primarily based in urban centers of the United States, has historically provided a setting for young people and students to reflect on and practice living out the ideals of Catholic social teaching; Worker communities are in this way informal schools of the Catholic social tradition. The following article engages the concept of solidarity as envisioned by Pope John Paul II in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis and by Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium and addresses how participation in the work of hospitality and peacemaking in the Catholic Worker movement can deepen students’ understanding of CST and build upon the magisterial tradition.

Źródła duchowości służebnicy Bożej Dorothy Day

The article presents the spirituality of Dorothy Day. It is a result of an analysis of her publications, that is books and articles in different magazines, above all “The Catholic Worker”. Dorothy Day is a Servant of God, whose Canonization Process gives hope that one day she can be presented to the entire Church as an example of lay spirituality. The author investigates and presents an analysis of the sources of spiritual concepts in the shape of people and publications which had the most influence on the candidate for the honor of sainthood. These sources, in a spiritual aspect, form the foundation of manifold schools of spirituality which Dorothy dealt with.

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

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...