In August 2024, a New Haven–based Catholic Worker named Mark Colville journeyed to the West Bank to join an interfaith coalition of activists protesting the Israeli state’s apartheid regime and genocidal war in Gaza. The carnage wrought by the Israeli government and military in Gaza has its slower, though no less noxious, parallel in the West Bank. “[W]hat stood out so prominently to me,” Colville attested, “is the absolute nastiness of this whole project.” He recounted conversations with Palestinians who’d been terrorized by vigilante Israeli settlers brandishing weapons supplied by their government. He described meeting Palestinians whose homes were demolished for no reason other than to force them off the land, with appeals to Israeli courts that would be categorically resolved in favor of the settlers. Having witnessed firsthand the routine violence to which the Israeli government subjects Palestinians, Colville felt no need to retreat into equivocations. “This is not about religion,” he reflected on the present conditions of Israeli society. “This is evil.”
The moral witness and action of Colville, and the Catholic activists he joined, are modern incarnations of the rich American Catholic antiwar tradition. It’s a tradition that dates back nearly a century, inaugurated, it is generally agreed, by Dorothy Day. Her pacifist resistance during World War II drew the admiration of many, but the ire of more. She spent decades writing on the interwoven evils of war-making and poverty, excoriating an American political consensus that immiserated untold millions across the country and world every day.
By the 1960s, Day had grown into a movement elder and played a critical role in mentoring the next generation of Catholic peacemakers. The new class of activists directed their attention to the Vietnam War, ultimately coalescing around the Catholic Resistance, a loosely connected political formation that carried the American Catholic antiwar tradition to its zenith. What began as a small band of Catholic clergymen and laypeople quickly flourished into a wide network of dozens of localized antiwar communities across the country. These communities mobilized thousands of people, including non-Catholics, to oppose the grisly horrors orchestrated by the American government in Southeast Asia. Catholic Resistance groups carried out a variety of protest actions, but they became best known for their draft-board raids. Activists would burst into a draft-board office and destroy draft files in an effort to materially hinder the administration of the war. They would then use any subsequent trial as an occasion to litigate the Vietnam War itself, exposing as many Americans as possible to the unmediated truth about the bloodshed being carried out in their name.
Michelle M. Nickerson’s recent book, Spiritual Criminals, offers a window into the Catholic Resistance through a lesser-known episode during the movement’s twilight years—the August 1971 raid of a draft-board office in Camden, New Jersey, and the subsequent Camden 28 trial that took place in the spring of 1973. As in most antiwar trials of the time, the defendants openly embraced their actions during oral arguments; but unlike in most antiwar Vietnam-era trials, they won full acquittals on all counts. The story is extraordinary on many fronts—for example, one of the defendants’ saving graces came in the form of the testimony of Bob Hardy, a raider-turned-FBI-informant who seemed to intentionally weaken the prosecution’s case, perhaps as repentance for his betrayal.
Nickerson’s definitive account of this underappreciated episode in antiwar history also complicates the standard historiography of the Catholic antiwar movement. But beyond its scholarly merit, it’s an urgent, timely book, particularly as millions of people across the country are grappling with how to reckon with—and resist—contemporary war-making. The teachings of the Catholic Resistance, we learn, are more relevant than ever.
Spiritual Criminals joins a burgeoning canon of excellent revisionist examinations of mid-century Catholic political and social life, an area that provides seemingly limitless points of entry for scholars. It’s among the most dynamic periods of American history. The world sifted through the wreckage wrought by World War II; the United States ascended to the status of global hegemon; billions of colonized people marched on a path to freedom from foreign rule; and the institutional Church embarked on its most consequential doctrinal reform in centuries, ushering in changes that would affect the daily lives of hundreds of millions of its adherents.
Nickerson’s work sits well alongside other recent books tracing the relationship between Catholicism and postwar politics, including Peter Cajka’s Follow Your Conscience, D. G. Hart’s American Catholic, and a phenomenal new collection of Philip Berrigan’s writings published last spring, edited by Brad Wolf. This uptick in scholarly interest must be in part due to the past decade of domestic political strife. Until recently, the fusionist consensus holding the conservative political coalition together seemed unbreakable. Marrying small-market economics with conservative social commitments, it seemed so steady, in fact, that received political wisdom had begun to espouse an immutable harmony between religiosity and conservative politics.
Of course, no such transcendent harmony between the two ever existed—any serious observer of American politics (or Commonweal reader, for that matter) knows this. And after the rise of Donald Trump nearly a decade ago, the fusionist consensus now feels more precarious than it has in half a century. With its erosion, the relationship between state power, religion, and party politics has begun to change. Here, Nickerson’s work is particularly helpful. It reminds us of the historical and political contingencies at the root of the apparently immutable relationship between faith and politics. In doing so, it shows that the future of that relationship remains up for grabs.
At this point, it’s perhaps worth briefly outlining the mythos of the Catholic Resistance. Tales of the maverick, marauding Catholic draft-board raiders have circulated within progressive Catholic communities for years. The standard chronicle starts with Daniel and Philip Berrigan, the Jesuit and Josephite (respectively) who sat at the spiritual and political centers of the Resistance. To traditionalists, the Berrigan brothers were heretical iconoclasts, clawing for attention; to radicals, they were prophets; to most American Catholics, they were oddities, aligned to an uncomfortable degree with the eccentric mores of the antiwar and countercultural movements. The most prominent trials of the Catholic Resistance are the 1967 trial of the Baltimore Four, following the first draft-board raid led by Philip Berrigan, which effectively birthed the movement; the Catonsville Nine trial of 1968, which involved both Berrigans and rocketed the Resistance to a new degree of national notoriety; and the sensationalistic Harrisburg Seven trial of 1972, where the FBI framed Philip and six other activists for conspiring to kidnap then–National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. In standard accounts of the Catholic Resistance, the Harrisburg trial is deemed the movement’s death knell.
Though they’re known by students and activists of the Catholic Resistance, the Camden 28 have historically been excluded from this larger pantheon. Until the arrival of Spiritual Criminals, the only long-form works devoted to the trial were a 2002 account published by one of the Camden defendants and a 2007 documentary. Partly, this has to do with the timing of the trial, which took place in 1973, the same year that saw the functional end of the draft. Even as a covert, American-led dirty war raged throughout the region unabated, American investment in the war effort appeared to be waning. A sputtering antiwar movement was on its last legs; its disillusioned base confronted the reality that policymakers were immune to public pressure and any surviving antiwar groups were worn down by years of incessant (and often illegal) surveillance and repression. It’s in this context that the Camden trial unfolded—with the Catholic Resistance sapped of its vigor, fractured by internal divisions, and afflicted with defeatism.
Much like Nickerson’s path-breaking Mothers of Conservatism, which uncovered the lasting implications of domesticated, postwar femininity on contemporary conservative politics, Spiritual Criminals deepens our understanding of the gendered dynamics of the Catholic Resistance. Specifically, she describes it as a movement that could not escape its era’s patriarchal realities.
Explicit expressions of masculinity were virtually ubiquitous. Philip Berrigan’s approach, in particular, “molded the movement’s male bravado,” Nickerson writes. To draft-board raiders, he exalted the urgency of action: “If you’re not doing this, you’re not doing anything.” And action itself attained a transcendently masculine quality—Daniel Berrigan considered draft resistance and raids a process to “remove bars to manhood.” In Nickerson’s words, “Male participants talked about draft resistance as formative to their development into manhood.” Older men in the movement also tended to pursue younger women in draft-resistance circles—a reflection of the encounter between the ongoing sexual revolution and traditional Catholic American norms. Even as these sorts of relationships “never rose to the level of abuse,” Nickerson writes, they still “harmed people, and especially women, who grew up in a culture in which virginity, innocence, and reserve represented feminine virtues.”
Past studies of the Catholic Resistance, such as those by Marian Mollin and Charles Meconis, have detailed the ways female activists responded to their marginalization. One common refrain in Spiritual Criminals (echoed by women of the Catholic Resistance more generally) is that movement spaces often mirrored the dynamics of local parishes: men, taken seriously as they led planning and action; women, expected to be quiet and subservient, denied access to any real levers of decision-making.
Nickerson’s recovery of the Catholic Resistance’s gendered history is an invaluable intervention, but it’s far from her only one. She also analyzes the racial dynamics of the movement, an aspect of the Catholic Resistance that remains relatively underexamined by historians. For example, she situates the Camden activists within the area’s broader Catholic community, which consisted of a sizable population of Puerto Ricans, who were militantly organizing against police brutality throughout the city. She reflects on how the Catholic antiwar activists, who were exclusively white, strategically wielded their privilege in order to take risks that would be exponentially more lethal for their nonwhite counterparts. Clergymen and nuns would be sure to strategically cloak themselves in their respective cloth as they burned draft files, drawing on the authority and respect society accorded them as they transgressed the law.
“To see reality in our time is to see the world as crucifixion.” These words open James W. Douglass’s The Non-Violent Cross, a 1968 book that became something of a movement bible to the Catholic Resistance. “Our age,” he continues, “is defined by the kind of events, from Auschwitz to Vietnam, whose depth of evil imposes night on the eyes of countless victims at the same time that the executioners, removed yet responsible, comfort themselves with blindness or the self-righteousness of an ideology.”
Douglass’s account, which has been described by one historian as “the first [book-length] statement on Christian nonviolence to issue from an American Catholic,” may encapsulate the spirit of the Catholic antiwar tradition better than any other single work. Like Douglass, the Berrigans, and Day before them, the Camden defendants forced Americans to confront and reckon with the evil engineered by their government. In so doing, they embodied the prophetic commitment of witness.
Any person of conscience reading Douglass’s words today will think of Gaza, a land bathed in the blood of countless Palestinians, tens of thousands of children among them. Mainstream media and political institutions attempt to blind Americans with a welter of ideological distortions justifying the carnage and absolving the executioners. But anyone who looks past these distortions will immediately identify the unmistakable horrors at hand.
They’ll see Gaza, an area hardly twenty-five miles long but packed with millions of people, many of whom are forced to roam between makeshift tent shantytowns as they dodge American-made bombs and missiles. They’ll read reports of the near-daily airstrikes that have pounded the region for over a year—the cumulative total bombings surpassing the explosive force of multiple nuclear-weapons attacks. They’ll watch videos of Israeli soldiers grinning as they push a button to detonate entire building blocks. They’ll see pictures, every single day, of human beings ground into pulp; of charred, mangled, mutilated corpses dangling under rubble; of wailing fathers carrying their children’s remains in plastic shopping bags. They’ll hear doctors talking about treating sniper-bullet wounds that pierced toddlers’ skulls (“Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many,” one American surgeon remarked). They’ll read about the Israeli military dropping targeted shells onto aid relief vehicles—and wonder whether that has anything to do with the famine and disease outbreaks afflicting millions of Gazans. They’ll note the unanimous chorus of NGOs and humanitarian groups across the world imploring the Israeli and American governments to halt the violence, cries that feel utterly inconsequential as billions of dollars in weapons sales and aid transfers continue to flow unimpeded from the United States to its rogue client state.
During the Camden trial, Joan Reilly, one of the twenty-eight defendants, reserved part of her time on the stand to display photos of the My Lai massacre to the jury—a measure meant to force a confrontation and push back against those who sought to depersonalize and anonymize the violence of American war-making. The constant trickle of livestreamed Levantine My Lais demands that we do the same. History here isn’t merely rhyming; it’s repeating, and Colville, along with the legions of other Catholic Workers and antiwar organizers, knows this well.
Nickerson’s study is a scholarly triumph, and a useful account that breathes life into the robust Catholic antiwar tradition. But to apprehend it merely as an abstracted text—a historical curiosity consisting of nothing more than a compelling narrative, interesting characters, and a bittersweet resolution—would be a tremendous failure. If we take seriously not just the history of these twenty-eight crusaders for justice, but the tradition that preceded, succeeded, and animated them, we must be called to conscience by their story. Works like Spiritual Criminals help recover part of this legacy—but the only way to fully realize its spirit is through action itself.
Spiritual Criminals
How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial
Michelle M. Nickerson
University of Chicago Press
$27.50 | 268 pp.
