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Notes and Comments: Association News

2022; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.2022.0033

1534-0708

Nelson H. Minnich, John W. O’Malley, Simon Doubleday,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Notes and CommentsAssociation News Nelson H. Minnich, John W. O'Malley S.J., and Simon R. Doubleday Report on the annual ACHA meeting that resumed January 6–8, 2022 in New Orleans Forty-six papers and twenty-one panels were accepted. Among the panels were three joint sessions with the American Historical Association, the most in recent years. The spike in Covid-19, however, had an impact on the conference. Because of some participant withdrawals, sixteen panels needed to be canceled. Though a smaller conference than originally planned, the New Orleans meeting, nonetheless, proved a success. The conference began with a tour of Black Catholic New Orleans that culminated in an opening panel on Black Catholic archives at Xavier University of Louisiana. Likewise, a special Friday night session at the All Ways Lounge engendered enormous excitement for "Highway to Purgatory: Catholic Sounds and Sensibilities in the Age of Cocaine," which will be remembered for opening new pathways into Catholic studies and offers a model for future conversations. Over the course of three days, a host of sessions generated many fruitful conversations about the many dimensions of Catholic history. Finally, the historic Antoine's restaurant hosted the ACHA luncheon and awards ceremony where many members had the opportunity to engage with one another in person after a much too long absence. 2021 Prizes (announced at the 2022 Annual Meeting) (1) The John Gilmary Shea Prize: The American Catholic Historical Association awards the 2021 Shea Prize to Theresa Keeley of the University of Louisville for her book, Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America (Cornell University Press, 2020). This gripping book focuses on a Catholic-driven rightward turn in American foreign policy in the late 1970s and into the 1980s that aided and abetted repressive governments and death squads in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador that killed thousands. Keeley documents the ways conservative and traditionalist U.S. Catholics in the post-Vatican II era had an outsized impact on foreign policy, especially during Reagan's first term (1980–84). These anticommunist Catholics saw an opportunity in foreign policy and human rights discussions to advance a battle being fought within the church between leftists informed by liberation theology and "true Catholicism" rooted in individual liberty and ostensibly apolitical personal spirituality. Aligning with Protestant conservatives in a broad "post war restructuring," these Catholics offered the president a religious rationale for secret [End Page 236] as well as explicit military and financial support of right-wing governments and their violent goons. The haunting image on the book's cover—a memorial chapel built in Santiago Nonualco, El Salvador at the site where the bodies of four murdered American churchwomen were found in 1980—offers a stark reminder of the heavy stakes the book lays out. The book ingeniously zeros in on the Maryknolls, a title for two orders, one for men and one for women, who began the postwar period celebrated by McCarthyites as martyrs for American anticommunism. By the 1980s, most Maryknolls had been transformed by their on-the-ground witness of the damaging effects of American foreign policy on human rights in Central America. For rightleaning Americans, the Maryknolls became a symbol of the slipping away of the Catholic Church (which had been identified with anti-Communism at least since the 1920s), the loss of alignment between American ambition and Catholic moral imaginaries. This is what made foreign policy debates so intense. When images of the four murdered churchwomen being dragged from a shallow grave were broadcast over U.S. television, the Reagan administration responded by suggesting, against all evidence, that the women had been shot while exchanging gunfire and attempting to run a military blockade. This fabrication provides the ingenious title of the book, the Reagan supporters' conjured image of nuns wielding weapons in a misguided fight to install communism around the globe. The book is detailed and profoundly rooted in archival research conducted in dozens of archival collections across multiple countries and continents, as well as scores of English- and Spanish-language news sources, U.S. government and particularly FBI documents, and Congressional records. The coverage extends past the extended...