The Cushwa Center’s spring 2026 programming traced several fault lines in modern American Catholic history: the making of Catholic conservatism in national politics, debates over war and the sanctity of life, and the transformation of parishes and Catholic life in the postwar suburbs. Visiting scholars examined how Catholics have navigated political commitments, moral conflicts, and changing social landscapes from the mid-20th century to the present. The semester culminated in early June in Rome, where historians and theologians gathered for a multiday, interdisciplinary symposium on the development of Catholic social teaching, and two Vatican journalists discussed their recent book on the election of Pope Leo XIV.
A Catholic conservative
Sam Tanenhaus—author, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, educator, and Distinguished Fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto—has long chronicled the development of modern American conservatism. His biography of Whittaker Chambers won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer; his book The Death of Conservatism was a New York Times bestseller.1 With his “monumental and instructive” Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, Tanenhaus tells at length the story of one of the 20th century’s most significant political icons.2
Tanenhaus delivered the lecture “William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Conscience of a Catholic Conservative” on February 10, narrating the life of the prolific writer and founder of National Review. More broadly, Buckley dominated a generation of mainstream conservative politics that characterized the Republican Party well into the 21st century. Tanenhaus focused both on the role of Catholicism in Buckley’s personal life as well as how Buckley viewed religion in society, beginning with the close-knit Catholic community in Buckley’s hometown of Sharon, Connecticut—a bastion of the New England WASP elite. It was here that Buckley first gained familiarity with the blue-collar Americans he would later rally to the conservative cause; in Sharon’s St. Bernard Church, “the Buckleys worshiped in pews alongside the descendants of Sharon’s working class.”3 Little surprise, then, when Buckley—insider by wealth and outsider by religion—turned his considerable energy on what Tanenhaus called the “unacknowledged orthodoxy” at Yale University at midcentury. Buckley’s 1951 book God and Man at Yale presented what the then-recent graduate saw as hypocrisy at the core of the university: “Yale pretended to espouse its own version of faith and freedom through its embrace of the marketplace of ideas. Freethinking and bold theory were educative and also uplifting. The trouble with this, Buckley pointed out, was that all the freethinking seemed to go in the same direction.”4
The book launched Buckley’s public career; it also thrust him into the type of conflict he relished in the ensuing decades. Tanenhaus noted that Yale itself turned its dudgeon on the upstart alum. Rushing to the university’s defense came no less a fellow Bonesman than McGeorge Bundy, who would go on to become one of President Kennedy’s “best and brightest,” and who lambasted Buckley and his book in a lengthy response published in The Atlantic. Bundy was incensed that, among numerous other sins, Buckley had included not “one word of the fact that he himself is an ardent Roman Catholic” (leaving out that no one who knew Buckley had any doubt as to his religious commitments).5
As Tanenhaus reminded the gathering, early on Buckley did not limit his provocations to non-Catholic institutions. After Pope John XXIII promulgated the encyclical Mater et magistra in May 1961, Buckley took to the pages of his own magazine, National Review, to describe the papal document as “a venture in triviality coming at this particular time in history.”6 Buckley feared communist success and “the dehumanization, under technology-cum-statism, of the individual’s role in life,” feeling the pontiff had said far too little about these evils. Buckley much preferred the stance of the Administrative Board of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, which spoke in 1960 on “the history and achievements of America.” (The bishops managed to use the phrase “personal responsibility” 16 times across nearly every paragraph of their 2,600-word statement.)7
Tanenhaus also narrated Buckley’s evolution on race, shifting from outright conviction on the “necessity” of white rule in the South toward acceptance of the aims of the Civil Rights Movement; he mentioned Buckley’s observation in 1970 that “this country could use a Black president.” On matters abroad, Buckley’s intense anti-communism was a throughline of his public life, culminating in his intellectual and media contributions to Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory in 1980. Buckley’s overwhelming concerns about communism had thoroughly permeated his commencement address at Notre Dame two years earlier, which, Tanenhaus noted, was not especially well received at the time: Buckley spent most of the address deriding the previous year’s speaker—President Jimmy Carter. Rather than encouraging the graduating class on their celebratory day, Buckley offered violent and graphic descriptions of the genocide in Cambodia and depressing observations on the state of the world. (This included the typically prolix lines “ours is a fugitive solicitude, whose expression is damped by the prevailing rhetoric, which is one part evangelistic, one part pharisaic, one part anaesthetic. Our foreign policy is bad enough. The rhetoric of our foreign policy, if not the efficient cause of, is surely then sufficient for, the three-martini lunch.”)8
The question-and-answer period after the lecture featured further conversation on the role of Catholicism in Buckley’s life. When questioned about Buckley’s general reaction to the Second Vatican Council, Tanenhaus noted that Buckley was neither a booster for nor a serious critic of the Council, although he did seek out the preconciliar Mass of his youth. Tanenhaus clarified that after Buckley’s quips against Mater et magistra—which had themselves ignited a small war involving Buckley, Garry Wills, and Paul Blanshard—he launched no more assaults on the institutional Church and, despite his vocal leadership of conservative causes, his faith trumped all other commitments for the remainder of his life. Tom Kselman (Professor Emeritus of History, Notre Dame) asked what Buckley had thought of one of his contemporaries, the equally visible Dorothy Day. Tanenhaus noted that Buckley could have treated her with greater esteem in public, once calling her a “wonderful woman with a disordered mind”; yet Buckley maintained great personal respect for Day herself despite their opposing politics.
Whatever Buckley’s opinions on the theology of his co-religionists, Tanenhaus’s biography and lecture highlighted the centrality of a man whom historian Jennifer Burns describes as “an unabashed activist who intuitively grasped the centrality of the media and the power of attention, and wielded both on behalf of his cause. American politics has never been the same since.”9
On Vietnam
In 1968, Msgr. John J. O’Connor published A Chaplain Looks at Vietnam out of his experience serving United States Marines in that conflict. The book was “essentially a full-throated justification for US intervention.”10 Seventeen years later, O’Connor—by then archbishop of New York and soon to be named cardinal by Pope John Paul II—would tell journalist Tracy Early that “I do not think my book was a good book . . . I regret having published it.”11
Between these two snapshots, another Catholic bishop vented frustration over his episcopal brethren speaking clearly on abortion and less so on the Vietnam War. When bishops introduced a resolution on state-level abortion laws at the spring 1972 meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Detroit auxiliary Thomas Gumbleton said “If we care about human life, and if we want people to really believe that we care about human life, we must show a much greater consistency.”12
A shift from support for the war to opposition to American involvement and methods, and debates over other threats to human life—Steven Brady, associate professor of history at George Washington University, addressed these complexities and more in his lecture “American Catholics Debate the Vietnam War: Rights, Obligations, and Morality” on February 25. Brady, a 2008 graduate of the doctoral program in history at Notre Dame, is the author of Less Than Victory: American Catholics and the Vietnam War (Cambridge, 2025). He has published widely on war, peace, and foreign relations, with previous books Eisenhower and Adenauer: Alliance Maintenance Under Pressure (Lexington, 2009); Chained to History: Slavery and US Foreign Relations to 1865 (Cornell, 2022); and a forthcoming work currently titled Adlai Stevenson: The Life and Legacy of a Liberal Icon.
As Brady indicated, investigating American Catholic responses to the Vietnam War—and the specifics of those responses—reveals concerns about the morality of the war emerging long before the general upheaval against American involvement that manifested in the later 1960s and early 1970s. In his book, Brady cites an April 1965 poll conducted by The Monitor, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, which reported 70 percent of respondents did not think “a just and fair government can be established in Vietnam by negotiation.”13 Yet “there was the very weighty matter of morality. Even if one did support the overall goal of the American war effort, it did not follow that one had to accept the means by which that war was being fought.”14 By 1968, not only had many American Catholics turned against the means of war—despite Catholics long having been among the most reliably and vocally anti-communist of Americans—but some clergy were urging yet more of the laity to opposition. Brady cited the Jesuit priest-theologian Robert Springer who, while insisting that in a post-Vatican II Church “neither bishops nor moralists should tell us what to think about the war in Vietnam,” there was only one position at which the properly formed Christian conscience could arrive: “one had a ‘duty to resist’ the type of warfare being pursued by the United States.”15
The debate raging over abortion in the United States complicated opposition to the methods of war abroad. Emblematic of the complication was Richard Nixon, whom Brady suggested could be viewed as “hypocrite in chief” and not the clear-cut candidate for Catholics in 1972: Nixon’s opposition to abortion may have curried favor with American Catholics, but his apparent lack of concern for human life in Vietnam made voting for him less than straightforward.
On the other hand, Nixon’s opponent in that election also presented a challenge to those seeking what Joseph Bernardin later popularized as a “consistent ethic of life.” The above-mentioned concern about consistency at the bishops’ meeting reappeared in an essay by Gumbleton: “Anyone who mourns the senseless burning of a napalmed child should also evidence profound regard for a living fetus in the womb. A pro-life stance is right and possible in both situations.”16 (Gumbleton nonetheless endorsed George McGovern.)
Brady also referenced comments by theologian Father Richard McBrien—later chair of Notre Dame’s Department of Theology—addressing the intellectual and moral tangle, and the resulting partisan split among Catholics, head-on. McBrien wrote in the lead-up to the 1972 election that whatever one’s stance on Vietnam or abortion, discussion of one required addressing the other: “an obligation, for the sake of the Gospel’s credibility, to speak on both questions without equivocation.”17
Brady ended his lecture by calling attention to the moment when debates over the Vietnam War and abortion intersected (almost literally so) on the calendar: early 1973, with the decision of Roe v. Wade on January 22 and the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27. Brady noted that for Catholics supportive of a consistent life ethic, the week was a moral wash. The overt phase of fighting in Vietnam ended but the Supreme Court ushered in a new era of legalized abortion. Within the Church, the immediate aim of anti-war sentiment had been obtained, yet it did not herald the creation of a unified front on abortion, debate over which only became more intense. But as the narrative thread of Professor Brady’s lecture concluded, by 1973 “disharmony was nothing new.”
Tom Schwartz (Vanderbilt) asked Brady whether after Vietnam—like after other wars—Catholics seemed “more American” due to their vigorous participation in public debate. Brady largely agreed and argued that once American bombing of Cambodia came to light, broad ecumenical opposition to the war offered Catholics a place in this religious coalition.
Jonathan Nashel (Indiana University South Bend) asked about the role of the Holy See in the war and in U.S. Catholic opinion-making. Brady pointed to Pope Paul VI’s public image as the “Pope of Peace,” whose own opposition to the war gave anti-war Catholics a hierarchical weapon against their American co-religionists supportive of American intervention. (In a visit covered in the Catholic press and elsewhere, U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey met with Pope Paul on April 1, 1967. Humphrey reported privately that Paul “spoke at some length about the moral position of the United States and the all importance of that moral position being maintained without blemish”; while the pope expressed general agreement that the United States should support South Vietnam, he feared that Americans “might bow to the pressure of using naked strength rather than being tolerant, patient, and ever searching for peace.”)18 Another attendee asked about the influence of contemporary Catholic personalities like Cardinal Francis Spellman and Archbishop Fulton Sheen; Brady noted that Spellman long supported American intervention, and Sheen was known for his strong anti-communism. Yet as Brady notes in his book, Sheen himself would eventually “tell us a great deal about the flux and changes in Catholic opinion,” as by the summer of 1967 even that episcopal Cold Warrior called for an immediate and full American withdrawal.19
At the end of Less Than Victory, Brady casts Catholic debate over the Vietnam War as emblematic of the state of the contemporary Church in the United States:
The lack of a clear victory for any one side should not obscure the significance of the war for the American Catholic community. It had been a catalyst for changes that Vatican II had introduced. The increased role and voice of the laity, the trend toward ecumenism, the meaning of modern war for just war teaching: all were significantly affected by the American experience in Indochina. And the developments that occurred after the war would continue to shape American Catholic thinking and action well after the communist victory in South Vietnam.20
Much about American Catholicism has changed since the end of the Vietnam War, but the prewar consensus shattered by American intervention in Southeast Asia certainly has failed to reassert itself. As such—and as readers learn from Stephen Koeth’s Crabgrass Catholicism (below)—it is clear that the present state of the Church can hardly be traced solely to the event and aftermath of the Second Vatican Council.
To the suburbs
The Spring 2026 Dolan Seminar in American Religion (March 20–21) featured Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C. (University of Notre Dame). Focusing especially on Long Island and the Diocese of Rockville Centre, Koeth examines how the rapid movement of Catholics from city neighborhoods to new suburbs reshaped parish life, religious practice, communal identity, and political engagement. In remarks delivered during the seminar weekend’s opening dinner on Friday evening, Philip Bess (Professor Emeritus of Architecture, Notre Dame) noted that “Not only is Crabgrass Catholicism an impressive historical account of its subject, it is also a de facto invitation to think about the current states of American Catholic culture, American culture generally, and indeed the entire culture of modernity.”
Commenting on the book for this semester’s seminar were Sean Dempsey, S.J. (Loyola Marymount University), Paige Glotzer (University of Florida), and Michelle Nickerson (Loyola University Chicago). Dempsey praised the book as a contribution to understanding the effects of suburbanization on American religion broadly, not only on Catholicism. He noted that the suburb as a distinct place was a kind of frontier: a new place for Catholics to encounter the Church and for the Church to encounter the world.21 Dempsey also called attention to the book’s focus on suburban politics—not confined to the suburbs themselves, but rather the national political ramifications of skyrocketing rates of homeownership in the wake of World War II. Finally, he asked Koeth whether the story of suburban Catholics elsewhere in the country might differ from that of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, the major subject of Crabgrass Catholicism and which was created specifically in response to massive Catholic shifts to the Long Island suburbs.22 Koeth suggested that such differences are likely, especially when suburban Catholics became a large proportion of a historically urban diocese in which they remained.
Paige Glotzer commented that Crabgrass Catholicism felt “urgent” and that the book “reconstructs a world that feels lived in.” (The book begins to describe the exact circumstances that shaped today’s Church in the United States over several decades. Koeth notes in the epilogue that “over time, the rates at which [suburban Catholics] have attended Mass, had their marriages blessed and their children baptized, and sent their children to parochial schools have all declined . . . many of the most plausible explanations for the declines are deeply connected to changes in American Catholicism wrought by postwar suburbanization and its attendant social transformations.”)23 Glotzer also noted the remarkably sensate nature of the shift from the city to the suburbs, highlighting a vignette from the book contrasting crowded urban sanctuaries with Masses held at Fifth Avenue Drive-In in Brentwood, New York. Such Masses were intended to accommodate families with busy Sunday schedules and increasingly accustomed to driving everywhere. But for some, the highest ritual expression of Catholicism taking place in what was essentially a parking lot with a large screen was “the most alienating of our suburban Catholic experiments.”24 That same alienated Catholic had gotten lost at the age of nine in the “sea of station wagons” returning from communion one Sunday: “the absurdity and profound sense of loss in this experience was palpable.”25 Glotzer also commented on the increasing political power of suburban Catholics, not least because of new coalitions with real estate developers and politicians representing suburban districts. She ended her comments by noting the difficulties of conducting archival research on specifically suburban topics, with relevant archival materials disparately located, inaccessible, or in some cases simply no longer extant in the absence of trained archivists’ interest and attention to them.
Michelle Nickerson complimented the book’s deft narration of the “golden age” of American Catholicism from both a bird’s-eye view as well as the more “granular,” everyday experience of actual people. Calling attention to method, she described the book as a type of bureaucratic history, with its focus on the administrative processes of mapping, planning, and building. Furthermore, suburban Catholicism highlights a kind of similarity between elected officeholders and the Church’s own hierarchical bureaucrats and officials. She also suggested that Crabgrass Catholicism expands a subfield of American religious history inhabited by phenomena like storefront churches and other movements availing themselves of contemporary demographic shifts. Finally, Nickerson asked whether suburbanization encouraged or otherwise made more possible the sexual abuse committed, from a statistical perspective, “during the very years at the heart of [Crabgrass Catholicism].”26 Her question arose from how Koeth closes the book, with a meditation on the squandered opportunity of the postwar era:
Whatever [scholars] uncover about the contours and causes of the [abuse] crisis, it is already clear that the Church’s postwar boom years also contained horrors whose full effects would only be appreciated in later decades. This is an especially tragic and extreme example of one of the key ironies of this book: that even as the postwar move to the suburbs was marked by the optimism and excitement of proliferating parishes and schools and of classrooms, seminaries, and convents bursting at the seams, suburbanization was undermining the structures that had sustained the vibrant Catholic world of the “immigrant Church.”27
In his response to the panel’s comments, Koeth expressed appreciation for the personal resonance with the book that many readers have experienced—even on the panel, Dempsey had noted he was a native of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, and Nickerson described herself as a “daughter of suburbia.” In response to Glotzer’s comments on the difficulties of archival research and the value of oral history, Koeth said he had been somewhat apprehensive about the book’s reception within the very community it discusses, but that feedback from those readers had been positive. He also described the book’s “lineage,” in the vein of Kenneth Jackson’s landmark Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford, 1985) and responding to Thomas Sugrue’s call in 2012 for greater historiographical attention to suburban Catholics.28 Koeth said he hopes this book helps launch a new generation of Catholic suburban studies, especially because in the United States the era of the “immigrant Church” was followed most closely by the era of the “suburban Church”—before and certainly not only linked to the era of Vatican II.
The Dolan Seminar included a particularly lively question-and-answer session this semester. Ben Wetzel (Taylor University) picked up on Koeth’s mention of the Second Vatican Council and asked whether more commentary might be appropriate. Koeth noted that the book is an effort to decenter Vatican II from American historians’ understanding of the American Church at midcentury and to focus on contemporary conditions driving ecclesial change, well in advance of the Council. Brad Gundlach (Trinity International University), referring to criticism of suburbia both by lay urbanists and clerical scholars like Andrew Greeley, asked whether it’s possible to concede some benefit to suburbanization. Koeth said that despite the many issues described in the book, by many indicators the Church’s growth into the suburbs represented positive developments. He also recalled, in response to a question from Tom Kselman about the negative connotation of the word “crabgrass,” that a mentor historian once told him “It’s OK for this to be a good story.” Finally, Angela Xia (Cushwa Center) asked Koeth about the role of Andrew Greeley in forming this book’s questions and approach. Koeth noted that among the ways Greeley’s voluminous body of work helped Crabgrass Catholicism was his description of suburbs as not only a new spatial arrangement but also a new way of life, with the parish church no longer at the physical and social center of communities. Beyond accommodating thousands of cars in a parking lot on Sunday morning or building big enough schools to educate the hundreds of children baptized in new churches each year, the Church of the early suburbs necessarily dealt with a nascent lifestyle that did not guarantee—and often militated against—the centrality of the parish.
Architecture critic Martin Filler observed in 2016 that “the great unanswered question about the suburbanization of mid-20th-century America is this: Could it have been done better?”29 The answer is almost certainly “yes,” for both American society in general and for American Catholicism. Koeth’s book has begun a conversation around this question, and his own words suggest one answer: despite the many challenges and shortcomings narrated in Crabgrass Catholicism, “It’s hard to see the Church’s success and call it a bad thing.”
Michael Skaggs (Notre Dame ’13 and ’17) is an independent historian and co-founder of Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, where he serves as director of programs.
1 Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997); The Death of Conservatism (New York: Random House, 2009).
2 “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America,” Kirkus Reviews 93, no. 5 (2025): 72.
3 Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America (New York: Random House, 2025), 20.
5 McGeorge Bundy, “The Attack on Yale,” The Atlantic, November 1951, 50.
6 “Mater et magistra: Social Encyclical of Pope John XXIII on Christianity and Social Progress,” May 15, 1961, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_15051961_mater.html; “The Week,” National Review, July 29, 1961, 38.
7 “Text of the Catholic Bishops’ Statement,” New York Times, November 20, 1960, 74.
8 “Commencement Address,” Notre Dame Report, vol. 7, no. 18 (June 2, 1978), 420f.
9 Jennifer Burns, “Political Theater,” New York Times Book Review, June 15, 2025, 12.
10 Steven Brady, Less Than Victory: American Catholics and the Vietnam War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2025), 196.
11 Tracy Early, “Cardinal-Designate Cites Lessons of Vietnam, Regrets Book’s Support,” National Catholic News Service (Domestic), April 26, 1985, 14–15, cited in ibid., 196.
12 Marjorie Hyer, “Spectre of Vietnam War Present at Bishops’ Meeting,” National Catholic News Service (Domestic), April 14, 1972, cited in ibid., 254.
13 Brady, Less Than Victory, 80.
14 Ibid., 81. Emphasis original.
15 Robert H. Springer, SJ, “The Moral Issues Involved in Vietnam,” U.S. Catholic, October 1968, 9 and 12, cited in ibid., 2.
16 Thomas Gumbleton, “Vote McGovern,” National Catholic Register, October 27, 1972, 17, cited in ibid., 269.
17 Richard P. McBrien, “Abortion and War Issues,” The Catholic Transcript, October 6, 1972, 5, cited in ibid., 271.
18 “Telegram From the Consulate General in Florence, Italy to the Department of State,” April 2, 1967, doc. 308 in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. XII, Western Europe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v12/d308.
19 Brady, Less Than Victory, 141. Brady does not rule out the possibility that Sheen delivered the anti-war statement to embarrass his nemesis, Cardinal Francis Spellman, but also notes that the call to withdraw was consistent with Sheen’s lifelong regard for “peace and justice.” Ibid.
21 All of American society, to be sure, and not just American Catholics confronted this new “frontier.” Martin Filler, among others, has noted that “by 1950 more Americans lived in suburbs than in cities—[representing] a thoroughgoing reformulation of our domestic landscape and a colossal demographic upheaval.” “Living Happily Ever After,” New York Review of Books, April 21, 2016, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/houses-living-happily-ever-after/.
22 Koeth, Crabgrass Catholicism, 37–39.
24 Maureen Fitzgerald, quoted in ibid., 82.
26 Koeth, Crabgrass Catholicism, 222.
28 Thomas J. Sugrue, “The Catholic Encounter with the 1960s,” in R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings, eds., Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 61–80, also cited in Koeth, Crabgrass Catholicism, 4.