Harder than War

McNeal begins with the first official Catholic peace organization in the United States, the Catholic Association for International Peace, founded in 1927. An elitist lay organization supported by the church hierarchy, the CAIP based their opposition to war on the "just war" doctrine. With the emergence of pacifism among American Catholics in 1930s, Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Peace movement, added to the Catholic theological agenda the concepts of pacifism, conscientious objection, and nuclear pacifism. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement became the midwife in the formation of other Catholic peace organizations such as PAX, the Catholic Peace Fellowship, and PAX Christi-USA during the Vietnam War. Members of these groups cooperated with the broader peace movement in the United States. Their main focus became opposition to nuclear warfare and nuclear weapons.

During the Viet Nam War, Catholic Workers burned their draft cards and turned from nonviolence to resistance by practicing civil disobedience. Daniel and Philip Berrigan escalated that resistance when they destroyed draft files, and symbolically poured blood over and hammered nuclear weapons to awaken the national conscience to the life-ending effects of nuclear warfare.

McNeal concludes that Catholic peacemakers had the greatest impact not on the government but on the institutional church. In 1971 the American hierarchy judged that the Vietnam War was not a "just war." For the first time in the United States, and possibly in history, a national hierarchy announced as unjust a war being waged by its own nation.

Patricia McNeal is an Associate Professor of History at Indiana University at South Bend.

"McNeal demonstrates a broad understanding of contemporary Roman Catholicism and of the historical context of its development.... This is an impressive book."

"More than a history of a movement, this book tells the stories of some of those men and women in the Catholic community who have helped bring the U.S. church into a highly visible role of peacemaking."

"McNeal narrates the tortuous search for a Catholic approach to peace.... This is an original and comprehensive history... [it] belongs in every library on peace movement history and Catholic social thought."

"A valuable and highly significant work. It is the definitive account of the growth of pacifism... among American Catholics and of the impact of the peace movement on the Roman Catholic church in the United States in the twentieth century."