Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America: 1950-1985.

A CENTRAL inconvenience confronting all "Catholic conservatives" is that while the proper task of the secular state is essentially a conservative one, the Church is the greatest engine for revolution that history has ever witnessed, established by a Man Who came to set sons against their fathers and to light a fire that He could only wish were already raging. Such being the case, it seems no more than common sense that the agenda of Church and state should only rarely--if indeed ever--be yoked, and then from the most prudential considerations. To the degree that Catholic intellectuals grasp this idea, their politics and their theology are of service both to the world and to the Church, reflective of the realities of each; to the extent that they elucidate it competently, they are the voice of truth in their time. While Patrick Allitt calls "the central issue of this book... the transformation of Catholicism and conservatism" in America since the 1950s, its meaning clearly transcends its subject, as is the case with all good books.

Lucidly and engagingly, Catholic Intellectuals traces the history of American Catholicism as it developed from an intellectually cloistered, politically cohesive, and socially patriotic existence in the Fifties to a boisterously experimental and experiential intellectuality during the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, when its cohesiveness as a political and intellectual force dissolved. Although many factors contributed to the process, the chief element was Vatican II (1962-65) whose liberalizing reforms gave the laity greater freedom to think and act independently of the hierarchy. But Vatican II, in addition to being a response to the times, was a sign of them, so that ecclesiastical aggiornamento ought not to be considered outside the context of the cultural revolution occurring simultaneously not just in the United States but throughout the Western world. While the Council may be credited with having smoked out modernist heretics in the tumultuous years that followed its deliberations, it may also be said to have tempted intellectually and spiritually frail Catholics to heresy and error. As Christ's Body on earth, the Church moves forward through a temporality of its own that is partially, but not entirely, connected with secular temporality--a fact that apologists for "progress" have too often forgotten.

The 1950s were the last years (despite a recent surge in anti-Catholicism in this country) in which American Catholics were regarded by non-Catholic Americans as politically dangerous people, as well as socially inferior ones. As late as 1960, they had a special incentive to adhere to political and social opinions that advertised their fundamentally American character and their loyalty to American institutions and to the American state. After the election of John F. Kennedy to the Presidency, Catholic Americans felt less pressure to conform politically and parrot the patriotic wisdom of their Protestant brethren who were also their fellow citizens; after Vatican II, they considered themselves less compelled to take their cues on political and social issues from their parish priest and from the hierarchy. Quite soon it seemed that there was no longer a "Catholic" position on any subject pertinent to the temporal sphere of human activity.

Professor Allitt follows the development of what might be called alternative Catholic positions on a variety of issues including the Cold War, capitalism, civil rights, the sexual revolution, abortion, contraception, just war, the use of nuclear weapons, colonialism, poverty, the role of the West in the contemporary world, school prayer, Vatican II, and ecumenism. The most fundamental controversy, though not always the most visible one, lurking behind what might be described almost as subissues concerned the relationship between the Church, the state, and secular society, with particular attention being paid to the extent to which the Church shared an agendum with the surrounding liberal democratic society and the degree to which it should make itself an ally of the American government. The modern Church, in confrontation with the modern state, found itself confronting as well one of the oldest theoretical dilemmas in its existence.

The problem was compounded by the deliberate conflation by Catholic conservatives of Christendom with the West, a confusion that entirely ignored the fact that godless Communism was a direct product of the West. In the relatively unified and uncomplicated Fifties, the American Catholic minority agreed overwhelmingly with the Protestant majority that the Cold War represented a stand-off between good and evil, Christ and Anti-Christ; that the American government and the Universal Church together faced a common enemy against which they were morally and prudentially required to make common cause. Brent Bozell, a rounding editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, held the fervent belief that the United States was being directed by God in an apocalyptic undertaking. In the 1960s, disillusioned by what he felt to be the lukewarmness of his fellow editors, he moved on to found a magazine of his own, optimistically called Triumph.

At that time the evolving crisis in Vietnam led many Catholics in the U.S. to urge their government to commit troops to the aid of South Vietnam and its Catholic elite; once American forces were in the field, they justified the war by the claim that it was being fought "for civilization." For Catholic liberals, on the other hand, if the equation of civilization with the West was offensive, making the West synonymous with Christendom was blasphemy. Only one institution, they insisted, could properly call itself God's instrument on earth, and that was the Church. Denying in effect that the American people were chosen by God to do His work, the liberals further opposed the conservatives' claim that America was justified in choosing the nuclear annihilation of the world over abject surrender to Communism. Thus two primary issues were at stake in the debate: the moral superiority of America and of the West, and the authority of the magistrates of the City of Man to conscript its citizens to do battle on behalf of the City of God. It cannot be said that the conservatives always argued these points with intelligence, let alone distinction.

On the question of moral superiority, the editors of Triumph were the first to see the light. By the late Sixties, Mr. Bozell and his colleagues were prepared to withdraw their support of the Vietnam War, arguing that while it was one thing to wage a war of Christian sacrifice, it was another to ask Americans to die "merely to help install a South East Asian branch of HEW." America, having outlawed prayer in the schools and abandoned itself to sexual profligacy, pornography, racial violence, welfarism, and consumerism, scarcely appealed to them as any longer a Christian nation at all, let alone the terrible swift sword of the Almighty; after Roe v. Wade, the magazine concluded simply, "law and order can no longer be a slogan for Catholics [in the United States]." While it was this stance that appears, more than any other, to have led eventually to Triumph's demise, its depressing correctness was dramatized during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in 1989 when conservatives, Catholic and otherwise, treated these events not just as a "victory" for the West but as a kind of divine reward for a nation for which abortion and sodomy had become a kind of sacrament and mall-trotting the most popular Sunday activity. It is one thing to argue that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by his arms build-up; another to argue that Southern California culture did.

Concerning the more weighty matter of secular versus spiritual responsibility, it is tempting to conclude from Patrick Allitt's book that Catholic political debate in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties would have proceeded with more insight and intelligence had the participants heeded more closely the writings of an eminent Protestant minister. When Garry Wills, once a staff writer at NR but by this time an apostate in the eyes of his former colleagues--though not in his own--from conservative principle, argued in respect of Vietnam that the state has no business sending its citizens to die for its ideals, he might have been extrapolating from Reinhold Niebuhr's well-developed argument that a state especially a democratic state--has moral responsibilities different from those of its individual citizens, Christian individuals in particular. Elsewhere Mr. Wills, for whom Mr. Allitt displays undue admiration, showed himself capable of drawing the due distinctions by supporting Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy and the reforms of Vatican II. The Jesuit professor John Courtney Murray, in We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, published in 1960, had written that the divine mission of the United States, insofar as it had one, was to protect the religious freedom of its citizens; by the end of the decade, unfortunately, conservative Catholic intellectuals had apparently quit reading Murray.

Yet if conservative Catholics in the Sixties and Seventies misconstrued the distinctions between moral man and immoral society, by the Eighties it was the liberals' turn, as the reconstituted, post-conciliar Catholic hierarchy in America swung into action against nuclear arms and the capitalist economy with a series of pastoral letters devoted to these alleged evils. In The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, the bishops in 1983 condemned the use of nuclear weapons as a violation of Christ's injunctions against killing and denied that the state has a clear-cut moral duty to defend its citizens from slaughter. Professor Allitt concludes: "Under the impact of the 1960s Catholic conservative intellectuals . . . divided between those for whom the political issue of mobilizing conservative politicians was the most important and those for whom preservation of the Church and orthodoxy mattered more than the temporizing that practical politics made necessary."

In hindsight, the emergence of American Catholics from their "ghetto" (Patrick Allitt's word, not mine), their growing intellectual independence, boldness, and aplomb look to have been a good thing for their Church and for the Faith itself, but a bad one for American politics--perhaps even a disaster. Yet while the effect is regrettable, the trade-off must be judged to have been worth it.

Mr. Williamson is senior editor for books at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.