Lecture by Steven J. Brady | “American Catholics Debate the Vietnam War: Rights, Obligations, and Morality”

It is well known that the Vietnam War divided Americans against each other. American Catholics were no exception.

Despite common perceptions to the contrary, there was no single American Catholic response to the war. Many Catholics initially supported U.S. military intervention in Indochina as a means of stopping the spread of communism, but American Catholics were not unanimous even on this point. The debate was no simple binary; it quickly became a three-cornered dispute in which each side claimed that the Church’s moral teaching supported—indeed, mandated—their position. The question of morality was raised particularly poignantly when the contentious issue of abortion became unexpectedly enmeshed in the debate over the war.

Steven J. Brady, associate professor of history at the George Washington University and author of Less Than Victory: American Catholics and the Vietnam War (Cambridge University Press, 2025), will discuss the impact the Vietnam War had on American Catholics and the influence of the nation’s largest religious group on its most controversial war.

Free and open to all, this lecture is presented by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and cosponsored by the Department of American Studies.

Originally published at cushwa.nd.edu.