| The American Catholic Church and the United States government fought together for common cause for nearly the duration of America's longest war. Throughout my dissertation I explore the connection between religion and foreign policy in this country during the Vietnam conflict, examining how Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson defined their foreign policies in terms of religious principles and how, in turn, the American Catholic Church---the largest single denomination in the United States---conceptualized and responded to the government's initiatives overseas.;After consulting a wide range of primary source materials including documentation from the presidential libraries and the official records of the American Catholic bishops in the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), I conclude that for better or worse religion served as a weapon of war during the Vietnam era. Each president believed that the war was Christian and moral in his own way, and each man sought to unite the diverse American populace behind the struggle against Vietnamese communism-with varying degrees of success. The hierarchy of the American Catholic Church responded in kind, enjoining both clergy and laity to pray for their Catholic brethren in Vietnam, imperiled by the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the cadres of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF).;Yet by the late 1960s, more and more Americans began to view the war as fundamentally immoral, demonstrating against the leadership of President Johnson and his successor Richard Nixon. Confronted by an increasingly outspoken Pope Paul VI from above and the rising Catholic pacifist movement from below, the hierarchy of the American Catholic Church finally embraced the cause of peace in 1971. The damage was already done, however, for just as the Vietnam War fostered widespread distrust for the government among the American people, so too did the bishop's rabid anti-communism undermine the moral credibility of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, credibility that remains in jeopardy to this day. |
