Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950-1970 by James F. Findlay, Jr. (review)

Abstract

It's all there from Triumph to Ramparts, the apocalyptic anticommunist and convinced monarchist, Frederick Wilhelmsen, and the American version of the red-bereted Spanish Carlists, to the balanced John T. Noonan, Jr., commenting on the difficulties of the natural-law tradition and writing his penetrating historical analyses of the great moral problems of the day. There are, unfortunately, a number of instances where the author indicates his unsure hold on the history ofAmerican Catholicism which is his context. They range from garbled identifications (CardinalJoseph Mundelein, Cardinal Maclntyre, "George Wiegel [sic], S.J.," in a seeming conflation of two rather different people) to misreading of events, as in the case of the Land o' Lakes meeting (1967) or the supposed "exile" of Daniel Berrigan to Mexico, which was actually orchestrated by his editor and patron, Patrick Cotter. Another is described as "a former Roman Catholic who had adopted eastern-rite Catholicism," and the great breakthrough which involved Protestant and Orthodox leaders in the Second Vatican Council is reduced to the pope permitting "Protestant observers to witness some sessions."