An earlier version of this article was originally presented to the conference on “The Challenge of Peace: The Catholic Church in Public Debate,” Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., 27–28 October 1989. I am grateful for the comments of Patout Burns, Michael Martinez, and Kim Lanegran, all of whom read it in draft form, and the subsequent reactions of Bill Marty, Raymond Cohen, Allen Hertzke, David Leege, and the editors of this journal. James Davidson generously supplied me with a prepublication copy of chapter 9 from American Catholic Laity in a Changing Church. The data for Tables 2 and 3 were supplied to me by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Neither the Consortium nor the original source of the data, the National Opinion Research Center, is responsible for the analysis or interpretation presented here.

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31. Ibid., pp. 299, 301, 303.

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64. Unfortunately for our purposes, the GSS in 1984 introduced an experiment in question wording that further complicates time series analysis of attitudes to the arms race. Approximately one-third of the 1984 sample was asked the military spending question in its 1983 form (identified by the variable name NATARMS in the data set) while another third were asked about spending for “national defense” (NATARMSY) and the remaining sample members were asked to respond to “strengthening national defense” (NATARMSZ). Greeley's conclusion about the 20% increase in opposition to weapons spending utilizes only the respondents asked the pre-1984 question. After determining that the distribution of responses to version Y were identical to the original wording but that Version Z generated a different attitude split, I combined responses to NATARMS and NATARMSY but dropped respondents asked NATARMSZ. This accounts for the minor difference in percentages between Greeley's presentation of the data and Figure 2.Utilizing a complex multivariate design, Kenski and Lockwood found significant Protestant-Catholic differences only on the NATARMS question (see Kenski, Henry C. and Lockwood, William, “Re-Imagining American Catholicism: The American Bishops and the Seamless Garment,” in The Incarnate Imagination: Essays in Theology, the Arts and Social Sciences In Honor of Andrew Greeley, ed. Shafer, Ingrid H. [Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988, p. 102].Google Scholar They concluded that the lack of religious group differences on NATARMSY and NATARMSZ was a true reflection of a relatively undifferentiated public opinion about defense spending. Rather than treat Catholic-Protestant differences on NATARMS as an artefact of question wording, as Kenski and Lockwood do, I would argue that the original question is superior to the alternatives because of its precision and specificity.

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79. For those who need persuading of this assessment, consider a recent finding that six times as many Americans identified the judge on television's People's Court as correctly named the chief justice of the Supreme Court (Morin, Richard, “The Case for TV in the Highest Court,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 06 26–07 2, 1989, p. 37).Google Scholar That may lessen the surprise on discovering that less than a third of Catholics even volunteered familiarity with The Challenge of Peace a scant four years after its release.

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86. According to one official (Adlesic, , “Implementing the Pastoral,” p. 388Google Scholar), the NCCB acted merely as a clearing-house for the dissemination of information and provided no programs or guidelines to encourage discussion of the pastoral. Most striking is the almost complete lack of coordination between the parish clergy and the bishops. A survey of the Richmond diocese revealed that only 10% of parishioners learned of the pastoral from the pulpit (cited in Berryman, Phillip, Our Unfinished Business [New York: Pantheon, 1989], pp. 146–47).Google Scholar A 1989 survey found that only 28% of self-identified Catholics had heard their local pastor speak out on the general question of nuclear disarmament — the lowest percentage registered among six political issues and a percentage virtually indistinguishable from Protestants. By contrast, more than 70% of Catholics reported receiving political guidance from the clergy on the issues of abortion, homelessness, and sexual behavior. See Welch, Michael R., Kellstedt, Lyman A., Leege, David C. and Wald, Kenneth D., “Are the Sheep Hearing the Shepherds? Cue Perception, Congregational Responses, and Political Communication Processes” (Paper delivered to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA, 1990).Google Scholar