God Experts

Yesterday was the 150^th anniversary of the penning of the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which you may know better as the song with the rousing chorus “Glory, glory, Hallelujah!”

The tune was a little older that; it began life earlier in the 19^th century as Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us On Canaan’s Happy Shore. When the Civil War broke out in April, 1861, Union soldiers picked up on it, changing the opening words to the irreverent John Brown’s Body Lies A’mouldering in the Grave, which caught on quickly among the ranks. John Brown, you may recall, was the God expert abolitionist who had done as much as anyone to prevent America from ending slavery in the orderly, peaceful fashion of the other American republics and colonies. He was executed after a failed attempt to incite a slave insurrection at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. According to one story, the lyrics were dreamed up by a soldier whose name was also John Brown, responding to the joke he kept hearing from his buddies that “I thought John Brown was dead!” Some soldiers who sang the catchy tune thought they were nobly carrying on the work of “the” John Brown, whose soul marched with them; others no doubt had a less sanguine view, more along the lines of “Brown’s dead already – so what the hell am I doing here, getting ready to fill my own moldy grave?”

In any event, Union bigwigs were uncomfortable hearing their men dwell so incessantly on the “good chance of getting killed” aspect of their service, and thus sought a more uplifting song that would be as invigorating to march to without being quite so morbid. When Julia Ward Howe, the wife of a prominent abolitionist editor, accompanied her husband on a visit to President Lincoln and a review of troops stationed in Arlington, Virginia on November 18, 1861, a minister who accompanied her group suggested that if she found the lyrics unseemly, perhaps she could write some better ones. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we saw how a massive Catholic propaganda campaign induced approximately half of northern Vietnam’s Catholics to flee to the south. What happened to those who stayed behind? Were they exterminated? Tortured? Imprisoned? Forced to worship Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh? Terrorized into abandoning their traditional modes of worship? Forced to pray and take their sacraments in secret?

The correct answer is, none of the above. They were left alone to pray, attend Mass, and receive sacraments in the same manner as any Catholic in Boston or Rome. One problem they did face was a shortage of priests, since so many clergy had obeyed the command from on high by heading south. So the North Vietnamese government reopened seminaries to train priests to satisfy the demand.

Ordinary Catholics didn’t suffer, but the same cannot be said for the Church as an institution. Under French rule, the Catholic Church had been by far the largest landowner in Vietnam. The Viet Minh ended that status pretty quickly, forcing priests to survive on contributions from their flocks. Catholic status had also been the key to bureaucratic advancement under the colonial regime; that pattern ended pretty quickly as well. While memories of the war for independence were fresh, Catholic status was undoubtedly a negative for those seeking positions in the new government – though not an insurmountable one – and the former deference to the views of the Church in carrying out the functions of government virtually disappeared. Thus, it was the prospective loss of money and political status that caused the hierarchy to trigger the exodus to the south. Read the rest of this entry »

Reasonable people have different opinions about the date on which the Vietnam War began, at least from the American standpoint. My pick is October 24, 1961, exactly 50 years ago tomorrow. That’s the day on which President Kennedy wrote to South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem that “the United States is determined to help Vietnam preserve its independence … to prevent a Communist takeover of Vietnam.” There were already a handful of American advisers there, but Kennedy ordered in troops – more than 16,000 of them – including helicopter units to ferry Vietnamese soldiers into battle, thus involving Americans themselves in the fighting.

Nearly 400 Americans died in Vietnam during the Kennedy years – more, for example, than during the first war against Iraq. What isn’t well understood is the central role that religion played in the Vietnam War, a war that ultimately cost 58,000 American lives and ten times that many Vietnamese lives. Read the rest of this entry »