The Rights of Conscience: the Rise of Tradition in America's Age of Fracture, 1940-1990
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The Rights of Conscience: The Rise of Tradition in America's Age of Fracture, 1940-1990 Author: Peter S. Cajka Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107310 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2017 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. The Rights of Conscience: The Rise of Tradition in America’s Age of Fracture, 1940-1990 Peter S. Cajka A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Boston College Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Graduate School December 2016 © Copyright 2016 Peter S. Cajka The Rights of Conscience: The Rise of Tradition in America’s Age of Fracture, 1940- 1990 Peter Cajka Advisor: James O’Toole, Ph.D. In the 1960s and 1970s American Catholics invoked conscience inordinately. They claimed to possess “sacred rights of conscience.” Catholics produced a thick psychological literature on the formation of conscience. They also made clear that conscience could never behanded over to an authority figure, whether in the church or state. The term conscience became a keyword in the rights discourses of the late twentieth century. This dissertation seeks to explain why Catholics invoked conscience so frequently. It also hopes to show how conscience became important to the rights vernacular of the era. Catholics invoked conscience frequently in an effort to remain in and expand tradition. Catholics had theology of conscience with roots in the 13th century work of Thomas Aquinas and appearing in mainstream texts throughout the 1940s and 1950s. This study also shows how the human rights advocates of Amnesty International and a community of mainline Protestants appropriated the Catholic theology of conscience and used it for their own purposes. The 1960s and 1970s, rather than witnessing the end of tradition, facilitated its growth. TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... iv Preface ...................................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 1.0 Chapter 1 ...................................................................................................................... 222 1.1 First section .......................................................................................................................... 322 1.2 Second section ....................................................................................................................... 45 2.0 Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................ 69 2.1 First section ........................................................................................................................... 73 2.2 Second section ....................................................................................................................... 87 2.3 Third section .......................................................................................................................... 87 2.4 Fourth section ........................................................................................................................ 96 3.0 Chapter 3 ...................................................................................................................... 120 3.1 First section .......................................................................................................................... 124 3.2 Second section ..................................................................................................................... 127 3.3 Third section ........................................................................................................................ 139 3.4 Second section ..................................................................................................................... 148 4.0 Chapter 4 ...................................................................................................................... 182 4.1 First section .......................................................................................................................... 185 4.2 Second section ..................................................................................................................... 197 4.3 Third section ........................................................................................................................ 212 4.4 Fourth section ...................................................................................................................... 225 5.0 Chapter 5 ................................................................................................................... 2244 5.1 First section ....................................................................................................................... 2247 5.2 Second section ..................................................................................................................... 264 5.3 Third section ........................................................................................................................ 271 6.0 Chapter 6 ...................................................................................................................... 293 6.1 First section ....................................................................................................................... 2297 6.2 Second section ..................................................................................................................... 328 Epilogue .................................................................................................................................. 364 iv v vi PREFACE The author wishes to acknowledge grant support from the Louisville Institute. This work was supported with a Dissertation Fellowship from the Louisville Institute over the course of the 2016-2017 academic year. I also wish to thank my family, especially my wife Gráinne, who read every page of this dissertation. Finally, I wish to thank the staff at O’Neill Library who handled the many document requests made through Interlibrary Loan. vii INTRODUCTION In the midst of the political and social crises that shook American society in the 1960s and 1970s – the Civil Rights Movement, sexual liberation, the Vietnam War, and the loss of respect for authority typified by Watergate – a specific Catholic tradition carried, expanded, and ultimately flourished even among non-Catholics. This dissertation is an attempt to understand why a vocabulary of conscience swept across the United States in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. During this period, Catholics deployed a theologically informed vocabulary of conscience in response to artificial birth control, mass conscription, and disillusionment with authority figures. The theology of conscience, advanced by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, was a traditional moral framework. It held that, as laws lost authority or became unjust, individuals could follow conscience. Increasingly, as Catholics and other Americans called the authority of law into question, they made the shift to conscience. Conscience talk – a moral vocabulary spread by American Catholics and subsequently adopted by Liberal Protestants and human rights activists – ultimately brought countless Americans into a traditional moral imagination as revolutionary changes appeared to diminish the capacity of laws to organize moral life. Exploring why a vocabulary of conscience spread throughout the United States in the second half of the twentieth century will help historians understand how American 1 Catholics, members of the largest religious denomination in the nation, responded to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s and how they influenced American society’s broader reaction to an era of immense change. American Catholics, far from serving merely as the foil for Protestant America or “the modern,” exerted significant influence on American life in the second half of the twentieth century. Catholics were uniquely influential in American society in the 1950s as a result of the Cold War. Celebrations of suffering and sacrifice made Catholics ideal citizen-warriors in the global struggle against communism.1 Catholics also built an immense institutional apparatus over the course of the twentieth century, beginning with the parish and extending to a robust university system, second in institutional capacity only to the state and federal governments.2 Conscience talk pervaded the Catholic responses to the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, and the general loss of confidence in authority in America. Conscience talk then surged in the cases Liberal Protestants and Catholics made for amnesty just after the Vietnam War, in the embrace of developmental psychology among Protestants and Catholics in the 1970s, and in the human rights work of Amnesty International, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning group with Liberal Protestants and Roman Catholics working at both its executive and local levels. Upon investigation, from historical analysis reaching back to the 1940s and 1950s, the vocabulary