Gordon Zahn in an undated photo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

While “Magnifica Humanitas” will probably always be known as the “A.I. encyclical,” Catholic nerds everywhere were also intrigued by two other somewhat unexpected revelations in the document. First, Pope Leo used the encyclical to apologize for the Catholic Church’s role historically in condoning and in some cases promoting the slave trade. Second, writing about the realities of modern warfare, he wrote that “it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.”

That second point would likely have found a very interested audience in Gordon Zahn, the famous American pacifist, defender of the marginalized and an intellectual gadfly who was forever stinging figures of authority during the United States’ most militaristic era (unless that era is, well, now). While Zahn was no fan of just war theory, he did make a habit of pointing out that every conflict the United States joined tended to violate the theory’s requirements anyway. 

Zahn’s influence on Catholic views toward state-sponsored violence reached far beyond American shores, however: One could argue that statements at the Second Vatican Council defending conscientious objection and making clear denunciations of war would never have happened without Zahn’s dedicated work on those topics. It is also likely that figures like Blessed Franz Jägerstätter would not have received the attention (including Jägerstätter’s open cause for sainthood) they did without Zahn’s scholarship on their acts of resistance against unlawful authority. 

Being a pacifist in the United States has never been an easy thing; being one in the church has not traditionally been a walk in the park either. When it comes to arguments over war, for every Bishop Gumbleton there have been a dozen Cardinal Spellmans. “When Gordon Zahn began his own journey to pacifism, he was convinced of two things,” wrote Thomas A. Shannon in an appreciation for America after Zahn’s death in 2007. “[F]irst, that had he been educated in the traditional Catholic schools of his time, he would never have heard of pacifism; second—and he was given rather strong encouragement to think this way—that he was on the lunatic fringe of the church.” But Zahn was also convinced that the early church had it right, that pacifism was the normative Christian position. So for many years, he “followed the lonely road of preaching pacifism in the company of others on the edges of mainstream Christianity.”

Born in 1918 (as Gordon Roach; he later took his stepfather’s last name), Gordon C. Zahn was raised in Milwaukee, Wis., and attended St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., and St. Thomas University in St. Paul. Already a pacifist by the time the United States entered World War II, he registered as a conscientious objector. He didn’t have a lot of company: Less than half of 1 percent of the 34 million Americans who served in that war sought a similar status (one fellow traveler? The author J. F. Powers, who would later review one of Zahn’s books for Commentary). Zahn worked for the Civilian Public Service at a camp sponsored by the Catholic Worker and later at a school for developmentally disabled people, publishing his observations on this time in the Catholic Worker newspaper. 

After the war, Zahn earned his doctorate in sociology from the Catholic University of America in 1952 and became a professor at Loyola University Chicago. In 1962, he published German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control. Because it was critical of the actions (or lack of same) of the Catholic bishops in Nazi Germany, but also because it stood as a clear criticism of Catholic just war teaching in the context of modern war, the book caused no small stir in Catholic circles. According to Michael W. Hovey, who later worked with Zahn at the Pax Christi USA Center on Conscience and War in Cambridge, Mass., “Jesuit and Vatican officials alike tried to suppress publication of the book, but failed.” Zahn would leave Loyola Chicago in 1967 for the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where he taught until 1980.

While doing research for German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars, Zahn became interested in the story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer who refused to serve in the German army and was executed by the Nazis in 1943. He published Jägerstätter’s story as In Solitary Witness in 1964; the book remains influential in the Catholic nonviolence movement as well as with anti-war and anti-draft protestors still today. Thomas A. Shannon later wrote that “[o]ne of Gordon’s proudest moments came when he was at yet another antiwar rally and heard someone say that he was burning his draft card in memory of Franz Jägerstätter. One flame had led to another.”

Zahn’s research on In Solitary Witness brought him in contact with Archbishop Thomas Roberts, S.J., of Bombay, who cited Jägerstätter’s example in a speech to his fellow bishops at Vatican II. The council eventually included a rejection of the morality of nuclear weapons and a recognition of the right to conscientious objection in “Gaudium et Spes”—moves for which Zahn (along with fellow pacifists like Eileen Egan, James Douglass and Dorothy Day) was rightly given some credit. 

In 1972, Zahn and Egan founded Pax Christi USA with the support of Bishop Gumbleton and others. After he retired from UMass-Boston in 1982, he became the national director of the Pax Christi USA Center on Conscience and War. He was also a consultant to the U.S. bishop’s committee in the 1980s that drafted their famous 1983 pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace,” which strongly criticized Cold War politics and confirmed that pacifism and nonviolent resistance were legitimate Christian responses to war: Zahn’s influence was all over the letter. 

In addition to his numerous books, Zahn also wrote frequently for America and Commonweal both for many years, and some of his pieces on Franz Jägerstätter in America in the 1950s are clear precursors of his later books. Other America articles covered everything from conscientious objection to abortion to the Catholic Worker to military chaplaincy to reflections on a papal visit to the United States in 1996—more than four decades after his first contribution to the magazine. Both America and Commonweal paid tribute to Zahn upon his death from Alzheimer’s in 2007.

“Gordon was not a flashy person,” wrote Thomas A. Shannon in America, “and was rather modest in his personal way of living, but day in and day out he bore constant and often solitary witness to the cause of peace to which he dedicated his life.”

In his tribute to Zahn in Commonweal, Michael W. Hovey noted that Zahn’s life of activism had truly begun when he wrote to his local archbishop in Milwaukee seeking support for his application to be a conscientious objector in World War II—a letter that was never answered. “That experience helped shape Zahn’s life mission,” Hovey wrote, “which was to draw attention to the church’s failure to ‘speak truth to power’ and to constructively engage leaders and the faithful in rediscovering the pacifist roots of early Christianity.”

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Sagrada Familia: The Chains,” by Rachel Lott. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

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Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.