Volume 30, Number 20 · December 22, 1983
Nuclear Catholicism
By J.M. Cameron
Confession of a Catholic
by Michael Novak
Harper and Row, 221 pp., $12.95
Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age
by Michael Novak, foreword by Billy Graham, introduction by William F. Buckley, Jr.
Thomas Nelson, 144 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Michael Novak proclaims himself a Democrat and is no doubt registered as one; but the policies he defends and advocates, in social and political matters, are largely those of the Reagan administration. One comes across his pieces in such doctrinaire conservative periodicals as Commentary and the National Review. His position is full of interest for those who want to understand the historic shift in the foundations of support for the two American parties; and what he writes as a Catholic may tell us something of what lies behind the recent explosion of anticlericalism among those Catholics the French call les bien pensants—the right-thinking, respectable people who were formerly supporters of the influence of the clergy in public life but have in recent years become increasingly anticlerical. Some things have brought these bien pensants to a pitch of frenzy and the latest of these is the intervention of the American bishops in the debate over the morality of nuclear warfare.
Review, 5052 words
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