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From Sputnik to Spaceship Earth: American Catholics and the Space Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Catherine R. Osborne
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Abstract

This essay considers American Catholics who, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, reflected seriously on the religious significance of technology in general, and space science in particular. American Catholics, while no more immune from the belief that space science would create fundamental changes in human life than their Protestant, Jewish, and secular counterparts, nevertheless sought to understand the Space Age in their own distinctive terms. Catholic discussion of these issues revolved around the contributions of two theologians. From the earliest moments of the Space Age, Thomas Aquinas provided a justification for the work of Catholic scientists and astronauts within a Cold War framework. However, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's cosmic vision helped American Catholics integrate feelings of wonder and hope with darkly realistic fears about the military consequences of the space race. Thomas and Teilhard, fundamentally optimists, helped Catholics elaborate a vision of a way forward through the very real threats Americans confronted in the “long 1960s,” a vision they developed in books, articles, and speeches, but also in art, liturgy, and fiction. Ultimately, however, both extreme hopes about cosmic unification and extreme fears about total annihilation modulated, and like their fellow Americans interested in space flight during the 1960s, American Catholics turned in the early 1970s to a renewed focus on the Earth.

Keywords

astrotheologyTeilhard de ChardincatholicismCold Warspace race
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , Summer 2015 , pp. 218 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2015

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References

Notes

1. The initial research for this article was funded in part by travel grants from Fordham University and from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. I am grateful for their support, as well as for that of many colleagues, who commented on earlier drafts of the manuscript and in several cases provided me with additional source material. In particular, I thank Peter Cajka, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Erika Doss, James T. Fisher, Charles T. Strauss, J. Terry Todd, and Benjamin Wurgaft.

2. Sr.Madeleva, M. to Mr. and Mrs.Luce, Henry R., December 17, 1957, 765/6, Clare Boothe Luce Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Google Scholar

3. Gilbert, James, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Council, Vatican II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World [Gaudium et spes], promulgated December 7, 1965,Google Scholar par. 4–5. The council specifically mentioned space exploration: “Technicae artes eo progrediuntur ut faciem terrae transforment et etiam spatium ultraterrestre subigere conentur” [“Technology is already transforming the face of the earth and attempting to conquer outer space”] (par. 5). As Stephen Schloesser has argued, it is necessary for the council to be “resituated as an event of the mid-20th century” (“Against Forgetting: Memory, History, Vatican II,” in Vatican II: Did Anything Happen? ed. David G. Schultenover (New York: Continuum, 2007), 92). Schloesser mentions the council's Cold War/Atomic Age setting as particularly significant for the fathers’ deliberations (recall that its first days coincided with the Cuban Missile Crisis) and briefly explores Teilhard's “subterranean influence” (a phrase borrowed from Nicholas Boyle, “On Earth, as It Is in Heaven,” Tablet 259.8596 [July 9, 2005], 12) on Gaudium.

5. Robert, F. Hoey, S.J., The Experimental Liturgy Book (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 173.Google Scholar

6. Literature on the American Space Age is extensive. McDougall, Walter A., … the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985)Google Scholar, is comprehensive on the details of what he calls, convincingly, “the quiet triumph of American technocracy” (403) through the period of the early Space Age, although somewhat outdated. McCurdy, Howard E., Space and the American Imagination (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997)Google Scholar, focuses helpfully on the connection between the world of science fiction and the funding of the U.S. space program, or, as he puts it, on the way “imagination and culture … directly affected public policy,” just as, I argue in this essay, they did theology and liturgy (235). Nye, David E., American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994)Google Scholar, connects Americans’ emotional reaction to the bomb and space flight both to each other (in a way which influences my discussion below) and to a lengthy history of American fascination with the “technological sublime.”

7. America's highest-profile Catholic, however, did not necessarily have much interest in the possible deeper meanings of space exploration, placing it largely in the context of American competition with the Soviet Union. “Why does Rice play Texas?” Kennedy, John F. shrugged, when explaining in 1962 why the United States was committing resources to a moon landing. “Recent considerations” include Gilbert, Redeeming Culture, and Kendrick Oliver, To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957–1975(Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).Google Scholar There is little secondary comment on the subject of American Jews and attitudes toward the Space Age; my sense is that Reform Judaism, at least, shared many of the ideas and concerns of the liberal Protestants documented by Gilbert and Oliver. See, for example, the summary of sermons preached by New York rabbis following the successful ascent of Alan Shepard into space, which touched on the promise of space travel to inform humanity about God, the need for a peaceful resolution to conflicts with the U.S.S.R., and the need for space exploration to be equaled by a re-assessment of priorities at home on Earth (“Rabbis Associate God with Space: Astronautic Feats Declared to Affirm Ruler of Cosmos,” New York Times, May 7, 1961, 60).

8. An in-depth study by Andrew Greeley and Peter Rossi found that by the mid-1960s, 26 percent of Catholic school graduates had attended college, a number almost comparable to the 30 percent of Protestants in the sample who reported college attendance. (Catholic graduates of public schools had attended college at a lower rate of 18 percent.) Seventy percent of Catholic high school students and 55–60 percent of Catholics who were attending public schools in the early 1960s reported plans to attend college, versus 60 percent of all Protestants. Greeley, Andrew M. and Rossi, Peter H., The Education of Catholic Americans (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1966), 140 Google Scholar, 192.

9. Chinnici, Joseph P., “Virgil Michel and the Tradition of Affective Prayer,” Worship 62 (1988): 32.Google Scholar Both the American branch of the worldwide “liturgical movement” and the movement known as Catholic Action encouraged a focus on what Vatican II would famously identify, in biblical language, as the “signs of the times.”

10. Gilbert, Redeeming Culture, 251; on the Genesis reading and its political/religious context see Oliver, To Touch the Face of God, 143–48. After their return, astronaut Frank Borman joked to Congress that “one of the things that was truly historic was that we got that good Roman Catholic, Bill Anders, to read from the King James Version” (quoted in John Noble Wilford, “Crew of Apollo 8 Is Saluted by President and Congress,” New York Times, January 10, 1969, 1).

11. Oliver, To Touch the Face of God, 45.

12. Ibid., 44–70.

13. “A Highway to Space,” Life, August 3, 1962, 53. The cutoff point is fifty miles. White joined the Mercury astronauts Shepard, Glenn, Grissom, and Carpenter as a space traveler, although he only reached approximately half their height above the Earth's surface. On the marketing of American astronauts (that Cary Grant smile!), see Hersch, Matthew H., “Return of the Lost Spaceman: America's Astronauts in Popular Culture, 1959–2006,” Journal of Popular Culture 44 (2011): 73–92 Google Scholar.

14. Wolfe, Tom, The Right Stuff (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 158.Google Scholar

15. This interview was reprinted as “An Astronaut's View of God,” in Rev. Clifford Stevens, Astrotheology for the Cosmic Adventure (Techny, Ill.: Divine Word Publications, 1969), 80–86. All citations are taken from this version.

16. Ibid., 82–83.

17. Ibid., 82, 86.

18. Without the Thomistic gloss, this was a conclusion widely shared among liberal Protestants in this period. “God alone creates,” a Lutheran pastor explained in a post–Sputnik sermon, “and it is man’s purpose to discover the nature of His creation” (“Man's Space Search Justified, Cleric Says,” Washington Post and Times-Herald, November 18, 1957, B1). See Oliver, To Touch the Face of God, 46–54, for an overview of Protestant suggestions in this vein.

19. Heyden, Francis J., “The Higher Promise of Space Exploration,” in Space: Its Impact on Man and Society, ed. Lillian Levy (New York: W.W. Norton 1965), 181.Google Scholar The fullest 1960s development of the Thomistic argument for space exploration was Stevens, Astrotheology for the Cosmic Adventure.

20. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Aeterni Patris, calling for a central place for the philosophy of Aquinas in order to counter the errors of modernity while nevertheless engaging with, instead of rejecting, modern thought. In fits and starts over the next forty years, Thomism gradually achieved almost total dominance over Catholic higher education and provided the intellectual structure for what William Halsey calls “the survival of American innocence”—the conviction, in certain Catholic circles, that the universe was “rational and moral” and, therefore, “supplied a rationale for optimism” (The Survival of American Innocence: Catholicism in an Era of Disillusionment, 1920–1940 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 2. On both the structures and characteristics of the Thomistic revival in America, see ibid., esp. 152–68, and Gleason, Philip, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 105–23.Google Scholar On the Albertus Magnus Guild, a professional organization of American Catholic scientists working with a Thomistic rationale, see Ronald A. Binzley, “American Catholicism’s Science Crisis and the Albertus Magnus Guild, 1953–1969,” Isis 98 (2007): 695–723.

21. John J. Wright, “Christian Humanism for the Space Age,” STAF [St. Thomas Aquinas Foundation] News, June 1965, n.p. Pennsylvania Congressman JimFulton inserted one of Wright's sermons into the August 23, 1965, Congressional Record (Fulton to Wright, September 3, 1965). I am grateful to Charles T. Strauss for bringing these, and several of Wright’s other articles, to my attention.

22. At the then-new Priory School in Creve Coeur, Mo., the prior assured parents that the curriculum would include strong math and science, although he added that it would certainly not neglect the humanities, the classics, and religious education (“Prior Calls for More Math, Less Sugar-Coating in Catholic Schools,” n.d. but probably c. 1960, news clipping in archives of the Abbey of St. Louis, Creve Coeur, Mo.).

23. Statistics on Catholic college graduates were compiled by Greeley, Andrew M., From Backwater to Mainstream: A Profile of Catholic Higher Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969)Google Scholar, 87. For the Gathering, C.Y.O., see “C.Y.O. Week Begins in Nation Today,” New York Times, October 26, 1958, 129;Google Scholar the quotation is from Msgr. Engel, Harold, the C. Y.O. director for the Archdiocese of New York.Google Scholar

24. RPI's Newman student paper, the Newman Technologist, and its successor newsletters, carried frequent accounts of lectures on related topics, advice from the chaplain on integrating Catholic faith and scientific discovery, etc. (Copies available at the Archives of the ChapelþCultural Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y.; I am grateful to Fr. Ed Kacerguis and his staff for making these available to me). New Mexico State, Las Cruces, was in the heart of the new aerospace country; on the relationship between the Southwest United States, federal R&D money, and the aerospace industry, see McDougall, … the Heavens and the Earth, 361–88. The Newman chaplain during the early 1960s, Blase Schauer, O.P., ran a wildly successful program that attracted significant national attention as a center of liturgical creativity capitalizing on the scientific interests of his students.

25. Zatsjck, C. H., “Enough of Lens,” letters column, The National Catholic Reporter, September 24, 1969.Google Scholar

26. The University of Notre Dame began a decade-long capital campaign in 1958 with a reminder to its donors that scientific research “constitutes an integral phase [in our] ‘program for the future,”’ and both Notre Dame and the Catholic University of America bragged frequently over the next decade about their faculty's work with NASA (University of Notre Dame: Past, Present, Future, “Challenge 1” brochure, 1958, UND Printed Materials Collection, PNDP 83-Nd-3s, University of Notre Dame Archives, Notre Dame, Indiana [hereafter cited as UNDA]; McDonald, William J., Report of the Rector, 1966, copy available in the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. Google Scholar [hereafter cited as ACUA]). See also Binzley, , “American Catholicism's Science Crisis,” 711,Google Scholar and Gleason, Contending with Modernity, 215–19.

27. Although the age of exploration analogy was very appealing to chauvinistic Catholics, it was a relatively common trope in general in American writing on the Space Age. See, for example, Lindaman, Edward B., Space: A New Direction for Mankind (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 18–19,Google Scholar and Oliver, To Touch the Face of God, 79. See also McCurdy, , Space and the American Imagination, 145.Google Scholar

28. Nevins, Albert J., M.M., “A Whole New Science Opens for Mankind,” in Our American Catholic Heritage (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 1972), 327;Google Scholar “Loyola Fetes 2 Space Experts; Hears Plans,” Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1965, A8.

29. Direct episcopal responses to Titov included Bishop William Scully of Albany, N.Y. (“Bishop Raps Titov's Sally about God,” Washington Post, June 7, 1962, C17), and Bishop John J. Wright of Pittsburgh (“Our Lady of Space,” Marist Missions, July/August 1958, 15–18). “Crudeness” is Wright's term; the comment about Mary as mediatrix is from Sr. Mary Augustine, S.M.S.M., the artist whose painting (Fig. 3) accompanied Wright's article.

30. Cushing's prayer is printed in its entirety in “Cardinal Prays for Apollo Success,” Boston Globe, December 20, 1968, 21.

31. On the Virgin Mary's key role in American Catholic anticommunist action, see Kselman, Thomas A. and Avella, Steven, “Marian Piety and the Cold War in the United States,” Catholic Historical Review 72 (July 1986): 403–24.Google Scholar

32. Local news coverage stressed how difficult it was for McDivitt to fit mass into his busy pre-flight schedule, thereby emphasizing its importance (“Apollo Astronauts Push Towards Friday Blast-Off,” Pasadena Star-News, February 24, 1969).

33. Schreiber, Edward, “Happy Throngs Join City's Welcome,” Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1969,Google Scholar N5, records John Cardinal Cody's invocation at the Chicago parade.

34. Wright, , “Our Lady of Space,” 15–16.Google Scholar

35. On Protestant considerations of the “plurality of worlds,” see Oliver, To Touch the Face of God, 63–69. Reform Rabbi Murray Rothman agreed with the basic point that life on other worlds would accord with traditional Jewish beliefs about God's creative power ( Rothman, Murray I., “Religion's Response to Space Life—VII: No Shock to Judaism,” Boston Globe, April 10, 1965, 4 Google Scholar). Interest in intelligent life was not limited to liberal Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; it was, of course, a major theme of secular science fictionduringthisperiod, and, as JamesGilbertdemonstrates,awide range of evangelical Christians also participated in the “UFO controversies” of the 1950s, often trying to interpret their sightings of supposed extraterrestrial visitors in biblical, even apocalyptic, terms in correspondence with secular scientists (Gilbert, Redeeming Culture, 229–37.)

36. Theologians, beginning with Aquinas himself, had articulated five possibilities for the state of such beings: fallen and redeemed, either through Jesus Christ or through another Incarnation (!); fallen and unredeemed; “natural man with a destiny to redemption”; “natural man without a destiny”; and, “the most exciting—Earth-type man, unfallen, in a state of innocence” ( Harford, James, “Rational Beings in Other Worlds,” Jubilee, May 1962, 21 Google Scholar). Harford is also the source of the protoplasm quotation, which he borrowed from the space theorist Peter Ritner.

37. Heyden, , “The Higher Promise of Space Exploration,” 181.Google Scholar

38. Moran, Jim, “Life in Outer Space,” The Scholastic(November 19, 1962), 12–13,Google Scholar UNDA.

39. Harford, , “Rational Beings in Other Worlds,” 21.Google Scholar

40. See Wood, Linda Sargent, A More Perfect Union: Holistic Worldviews and the Transformation of American Culture after World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Maurice Lavanoux to Robert Bonnette, July 26, 1972, CLIT 46/04, Liturgical Arts Society Records, UNDA (hereafter cited as CLIT).

42. Rev. Verostko, Roman J., O.S.B., “Abstract Art and the Liturgy,” Liturgical Arts 30 (August 1962): 129.Google Scholar

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., 132.

45. Clifford Stevens, the Las Cruces chaplain, remarked that theology was “always in danger of growing old” and losing “the zest for adventure” it ought to have; now it was time for “a vast creative effort to extend the boundaries of theology into uncharted territories” to match the scientific exploration currently taking place. “Theological research scientists could become as common a part of academic life as nuclear research scientists and a theological research laboratory would be a more fitting addition to a Catholic university than a laboratory for research in genetics or depth psychology,” he thought. Stevens, Astrotheology for the Cosmic Adventure, 54.

46. “An Astronaut's View of God,” 84.

47. Cornell, George W., “Satellites Stir Debate of Science vs. Religion,” Washington Post and Times Herald, February 4, 1958, A2.Google Scholar

48. Carling, Francis, “Move Over”: Students, Politics, Religion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969), 13, 23–25.Google Scholar Carling traced much of the activist spirit of the later 1960s to the oppressive and ever-present threat of war that had overshadowed the 1950s and early 1960s. See Boyer, Paul S., By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), esp. 122–30 and 211–40.Google Scholar

49. See Brick, Howard, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

50. For example, an early item on the launch of the American satellite Explorer IV commented that “Soviet Russia has the power to launch intercontinental missiles; the United States has not” (“Explorer IV,” Commonweal, August 8, 1958). American researchers and politicians understood that the military implication of Sputnik—the proof that the Soviets were capable of launching extremely heavy payloads great distances—was far more the point than any scientific knowledge that might result from satellite data. See Paul Dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (New York: Walker & Co., 2001), 143.

51. Harrington, Edwin J., “An Exchange of Views: Race for the Moon,” Commonweal, July 12, 1963.Google Scholar Harrington's letter was responding to an earlier article by scientists Ronald Steel and William Lineberry. The objection was a common one among Americans of all faiths and none— culminating, perhaps, in Ralph Abernathy's trip, along with several hundred other civil rights and antipoverty activists, to protest the Apollo 11 launch. On this subject see Tribbe, Matthew D., No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture (New York: Oxford University press, 2014), esp. 36–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52. “Editorial,” Commonweal, March 9, 1962.

53. “The Bomb and the Individual,” Commonweal, May 18, 1962, 195–96.

54. Most Rev. Roberts, Thomas D., S.J., “Council for Survival,” Commonweal, August 14, 1959.Google Scholar Roberts was an Englishman and archbishop of Bombay from 1937 to 1950, when he resigned and returned to England so that an Indian priest could take up the see. He remained a peace activist throughout the 1960s. On Vatican II's actual deliberations in their cold war/nuclear context, see Schloesser, “Against Forgetting” 98–102.

55. Dom Philip Verhaegen, O.S.B., Prior of St. Andrew’s, Valyermo, newsletter July–August 1965 (copy available in St. Andrew’s Abbey archives, Valyermo, Calif.). This was in fact the premise of one of the best-known novels of the space/nuclear age, Catholic convert Walter Miller's A Canticle for Lebowitz (1960). The sisters at Annunciation Priory, outside of Bismarck, N.D., expressed a similar sentiment, though in softer language, suggesting that their “single power—love, silent, obedient, humble love” was a necessary complement to “Cape Canaveral and Wall Street” (“Fiat, So Be It,” Annunciation brochure, 1960, CLIT 57/05).

56. Walsh made his remarks to the Catholic Association for International Peace (“Expert Sees Hop to Moon in 20 Years,” Washington Post, October 25, 1958, D4.)

57. Herzfeld, Charles, “Space Year I,” Commonweal, September 26, 1958, 634.Google Scholar

58. For Ong, Walter, see, for example, “The Reaches of History,” Commonweal, August 15, 1958;Google Scholar Darwin's Vision and Christian Perspectives (New York: Macmillan, 1960); “The Renaissance Myth and the American Catholic Mind,” in Frontiers of American Catholicism (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 52–85.

59. de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959).Google Scholar Recent translations of Teilhard's work, for example, De Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, The Human Phenomenon, trans. Sarah Appleton-Weber (Eastbourne, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 1999),Google Scholar have corrected a number of earlier mistranslations and infelicities.

60. By 1981, a bibliography covering European and American scholarship and popular articles listed 4,317 works about Teilhard in various languages and of varying lengths, in addition to 600 items by Teilhard. McCarthy, Joseph M., Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: A Comprehensive Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981).Google Scholar

61. Wood, A More Perfect Union, 113. For an extended list of Catholic and non-Catholic admirers of Teilhard, see ibid., 133–34. Among them was the ex-Nazi rocket enthusiast Werner von Braun, who helped found the American space program (see Gilbert, Redeeming Culture, 250). This is not even to mention the effect he had on assorted Protestant theologians, for example, Burhoe, Ralph Wendell, “ACosmic Perspective on Man's Future,” in Images of the Future: The Twenty-First Century and Beyond, ed. Bundy, Robert (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1976), 182–92.Google Scholar Regarding Catholic pride in Teilhard, the artist Patricia Malarcher happened to be working at Harper Bros., Teilhard's English publisher, several months before The Phenomenon appeared. She still recalls her delight at hearing people in the hallways discussing a Catholic scientist (interview with Patricia Malarcher, Englewood, N.J., August 22, 2011).

62. In addition to Wood, A More Perfect Union, 111–38, the sources I found most helpful on Teilhard's theology were S.J., Henri de Lubac, The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin, trans. René Hague (New York: Desclee, 1967)Google Scholar; Derrick, Christopher, ed., Cosmic Piety: Modern Man and the Meaning of the Universe (New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1965);Google Scholar Braybrooke, Neville, ed., Teilhard de Chardin: Pilgrim of the Future (New York: Seabury Press, 1964);Google Scholar Cowell, Siôn, The Teilhard Lexicon: Understanding the Language, Terminology, and Vision of the Writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Portland, Oreg.: Sussex Academic Press, 2001).Google Scholar

63. Clarke, I. F., The Pattern of Expectation: 1644–2001 (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 316.Google Scholar Clarke cited from de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, The Future of Man, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 306.Google Scholar

64. This was true even at the height of Teilhardian mania. Thomas Merton, characteristically sharp, pointed out that Teilhard had “regarded the dead and wounded of Hiroshima with a certain equanimity as inevitable by-products of scientific and evolutionary progress” (“The Plague of Camus: A Commentary and Introduction,” in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart [New York: New Directions Publishing, 1985], 216).

65. The Last Whole Earth Catalog (San Francisco: Random House, 1974), 31.

66. Poole, Robert, “The Challenge of the Spaceship: Arthur C. Clarke and the History of the Future,” History and Technology 28 (September 2012): 271.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Kilgore, De Witt Douglas, Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 115,Google Scholar for Clarke's interest in teleological versions of evolution like the one developed by Teilhard. Avowed atheist Julian Huxley wrote an admiring introduction to the English edition of The Phenomenon of Man, indicating how seriously many non-Catholic thinkers took Teilhard's ideas, although they often found it necessary (as Huxley did) to strip them of their most distinctively Christian themes. On Teilhard's influence on New Age thought, see Wood, A More Perfect Union, 135–36, and on his influence on Esalen, 186. Astrofuturism (which had drawn on a secularized version of Christian apocalypticism in the first place) and explicitly Christian cosmic evolutionism came to inform each other in the period following that covered by this article; as detailed below, Maurice Lavanoux was reading Arthur C. Clarke while developing his ideas about a moon chapel, and Teilhard and his ideas made appearances in a variety of later science-fiction novels, including work by Julian May, Dan Simmons, and, in the late novel The Light of Other Days, even Clarke himself. (This novel, while written by Stephen Baxter, was based on an outline and summary by Clarke.)

67. In fact, Russian scientists did participate extensively in the IGY, which is why several of them were in the United States at the time of Sputnik's launch and available, from the Russian embassy, to speak to the American press. IGY planning had included the idea that nations might pool information to get satellites off the ground, and the existence of the IGY proved ambivalent: it allowed the U.S.S.R. to claim in public that the launch was primarily about scientific progress and the United States to respond with congratulations. Thus the IGY helped the United States save face. It is also true, though, that the secretive launch process was not exactly in the spirit of scientific cooperation that the IGY was supposed to promote, and the abuse of the IGY label to provide public relations cover for a military operation generated some ill will within the international scientific community. On the IGY, see Carter, Paul Allen, Another Part of the Fifties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 277–79;Google Scholar Dickson, Sputnik, 76–79, and 101–4.

68. Lawler, Justus George, “Catholics and the Arms Race,” Commonweal, May 18, 1962, 199.Google Scholar See also Lawler, Justus George, Nuclear War: The Ethic, The Rhetoric, the Reality (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1965).Google Scholar

69. In an earlier article, Lawler had mentioned On the Beach, the 1959 postapocalyptic movie that ended with a shot of a destroyed world—and a Salvation Army banner proclaiming “There Is Still Time Brother.” On the Beach, and its legion of science-fiction cautionary kin, had been a plea for humanity to do something, anything, other than blindly move toward certain death. See Carter, Another Part of the Fifties, 254–55.

70. The United Nations was frequently used as a symbol of the alternative to nuclear disaster. Catholics tended not to be too specific about what political structures in the present might represent the future redemption of all things in Christ. They did sometimes refer to the U.N. as the right type of structure, as Fr. Jim Nielsen did in a sermon at New Mexico State University in early 1967: “I'm sure you have heard people say, ‘I don't like this one-worldism implicit in the United Nations and the ecumenical movement of the churches.’ But can there be any other direction for the Christian and also the American? … Arnold Toynbee insists, ‘unless we develop a loyalty to the human race as a whole, we shan't survive.’ …Now beyond the nation, does not our American hope for all mankind plus our Christian vision of God's kingdom move us towards a new internationalism?” Rev. Jim Nielsen, “James Bond: My Country Right or Wrong,” in And the Voz de la tortuga shall be heard in Our Land: The Newman Center of St. Albert the Great, New Mexico State University newsletter, February 26, 1967, CLIT 46/04.

71. Ong, “The Reaches of History,” 488–90.

72. Walter, J., Ong, S.J., “Technology and New Humanist Frontiers,” in Frontiers in American Catholicism, 99.Google Scholar

73. Ibid., 99–100.

74. While I cannot fully explore this point here, twentiethcentury Catholics had a history of excitement over the idea of bringing the eucharist to places newly accessible through technological achievement. Mass was said on submarines, on zeppelins, and eventually on airplanes—all enthusiastically reported in the Catholic press—and the eucharistization of outer space was the obvious next step. Teilhard’s 1924 prose-poem-prayer “Mass on the World,” which called down cosmic fire to transubstantiate the entire earth, is clearly related to this impulse.

75. Aaron W. Godfrey, “The Reality of Dreams,” typescript, spring 1972, CLIT 55/01. Other examples of this dynamic include “Editorial,” Jubilee, December 1965; the editors’ comments on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., “In Expectation of the Parousia: The Second Coming,” Jubilee, December 1960; James V. Schall, “Christmas and the World,” Commonweal, December 27, 1963, 390, 392. Eventually, Vatican II's eschatological perspective, of concern about the state of the world combined with a conviction that creation would “at the end of time … gloriously achieve completion,” came to serve a similar function (Lumen gentium, par. 2).

76. Nolan, Joseph T., “What Can You Say about the Priesthood at a Time Like This?” U.S. Catholic, May 1968, 18.Google Scholar

77. Rev. Stevens, Clifford, “The Las Cruces Experiment,” Liturgical Arts 34 (August 1966): 143.Google Scholar

78. This latter included a quotation from Jurgen Moltmann: “The new is never totally new. It is always preceded by a dream, a promise, an anticipation. ‘He who does not hope for what is beyond expectation does not find it.”’ This service was prepared by Fr. Scheick, James C. and Sr. Mary Louise Femminineo for St. Brigid’s, Detroit, and published in Robert W. Hovda, ed., Manual of Celebration (Washington, D.C.: Liturgical Conference, 1970)Google Scholar, 6/16–21.

79. It attracted the attention of NBC, turning up in both a nightly news segment (November 1, 1966) and on the Today show (April 17, 1967). On the chapel as a lab, see Peter McLaughlin, “The Form of the Church Building,” The Mediator, Lent/Easter 1967, copy available in Archives of the Archdiocese of Boston.

80. Carr, Aiden M., Conv, O.F.M.., “Of Apollo 8 and Catholic Parishes,” Homiletic and Pastoral Review 69 (February 1969): 412.Google Scholar

81. Nolan, Joseph T., “Bringing Liturgy Down on the Moon,” National Catholic Reporter, August 27, 1969, 6.Google Scholar

82. Liturgical Arts, which ran quarterly from 1930 to 1972, was one of a group of magazines read routinely by the type of well-educated Catholic discussed in this article. Although its focus on art and architecture was more narrow than that of The Commonweal, and its circulation was accordingly smaller, never rising much above a print run of 2,000, the two magazines had substantial overlap in contributors, subscribers, and general tone—unsurprisingly, since they were closely associated from the start, with parent body the Liturgical Arts Society holding its first meetings in the New York offices of The Commonweal. Liturgical Arts was also, as correspondence to its editor indicated, widely read in seminaries and college libraries and frequently passed around among friends, making its readership greater than the raw print numbers might suggest. The Liturgical Arts Society and its journal, though neither survived the retirement and (shortly thereafter) the death of editor Maurice Lavanoux, were major contributors to the debates over liturgy and worship space that surrounded the Second Vatican Council, and Lavanoux lectured regularly on college campuses in the postwar period, making him one of the key figures shaping the developing argument in favor of modernist church architecture. In short, Liturgical Arts' readers and contributors, while more attuned to aesthetic issues than many, were in their other views broadly representative of professionalized, generally liberal American Catholics of this period. On Lavanoux, the Liturgical Arts Society, and Liturgical Arts, see White, Susan J., Art, Architecture, and Liturgical Reform: The Liturgical Arts Society (1928–1972) (New York: Pueblo, 1990);Google Scholar Pecklers, Keith F., The Unread Vision: The Liturgical Movement in the United States of America, 1926–1955 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1998), 226–55;Google Scholar and Osborne, Catherine R., “American Catholics and the Art of the Future, 1930–1975” (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 2013).Google Scholar

83. Rev. Champlin, Joseph, “Church Architecture in the Space Age,” Liturgical Arts 37, (May 1969): 70–72.Google Scholar Specifically, Champlin speculated that a new age of cooperation might make denominational buildings obsolete, pointing to a new interfaith center being built at Columbia, Maryland, as an example.

84. Although in this essay I concentrate on Lavanoux's futuristic enthusiasm, he was also quite capable of crankily asserting that post–Vatican II experimentation had gone too far; he was idiosyncratic, knowing what he liked when he saw it. For Lavanoux's futurist reading, see Bell, Daniel, ed., Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).Google Scholar These essays were originally printed in the magazine Daedalus, and Lavanoux sent copies to several friends and collaborators.

85. “Editorial,” Liturgical Arts 36, (November 1967): 1.

86. It is clear from Lavanoux's letters and notes that he had several articles and the plans for this center drawn up by the sculptor/ architect Pierre Szekely. These have unfortunately been, at least temporarily, lost; however, some of the proposed elements can be reconstructed from Lavanoux's letters and diary notes. Jaime Lara briefly considers the published plans of the Chapel on the Moon in relationship to other Catholic modernist projects in “Visionaries or Lunatics? Architects of Sacred Space, Even in Outer Space,” in Britton, Karla Cavarra, ed., Constructing the Ineffable: Contemporary Sacred Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 127–28.Google Scholar

87. Lavanoux did this fairly regularly at the invitation of Jean Labatut, the Catholic dean of the School of Architecture.

88. There is almost no scholarly writing on Mills; my commentary is based largely on my visits to several of his California houses in February 2011 and on an analysis of a group of house and church plans in the Mark Mills Collection, Special Collections, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. See, however, Bennett, Janey, “Work of Mark Mills: Structural Elegance and a Sense of Reverent Space,” Journal of the Taliesin Fellows 10 (Spring 1993): 18–29.Google Scholar

89. Maurice Lavanoux to Mark Mills, May 10, 1967, CLIT 46/04.

90. Barbara Mills reports that Mark Mills very rarely sketched but simply mulled ideas over while performing other work until he was ready to commit to paper. Mark Mills to Maurice Lavanoux, May 21, 1967, CLIT 46/04, indicates that “many dreams are passing through my mind,” but “right now I don't have time to get them on paper. Let me know if I may go on ‘dreaming’ for a while.”

91. Maurice Lavanoux to Mark Mills, June 26, 1967, CLIT 46/04. Capitalization and punctuation in original.

92. He hardly erased all capacity for scientific research—several other buildings served university-like lab functions.

93. Rev. Mangan, Terence J., C.O., “The Doman Moon Chapel,” Liturgical Arts 36, (November 1967): 3.Google Scholar

94. The Oratorians seem to have been chosen as the ideal religious order for this mission largely because of Mills's close friendship with the priests of the Monterey Oratory, including Emeric Doman, C.O., their provost, for whom he named the chapel. Terence Mangan, C.O., in his theological commentary on the chapel, argued that the chapel was a “futuristic symbol of [the] effort,” already under way within the Oratory, to integrate scientific and religious beliefs, and to integrate priests and their communities, joining “the Christian vision of the ‘new creation’ … to the rapidly changing technological universe that is their home” (ibid.).

95. For the exclusion of the stainless steel sculpture, by Elah Hale Hayes, see Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Library, Renaissance of Religious Art and Architecture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1946–1968 (Berkeley: University of California, 1985), 13.

96. Diary, July 3, 1972, Maurice Lavanoux Papers, UNDA (hereafter cited as CLAV) 3, vol. 31.

97. Diary, August 4, 1972, CLAV 3, vol. 31.

98. A letter to NASA brought back the response that “any technical difficulties caused by weightlessness could be overcome in the instance you cite.” “So that's settled for the time being!” Lavanoux commented (Diary, August 29, 1973, CLAV 3, vol. 31).

99. Diary, May 10–13, 1973, CLAV 3, vol. 31.

100. Diary, July [sic], 1973, CLAV 3.

101. Neil Hurley, S.J., “Liturgy and Play in Our Expanding Tele-Civilization,” Liturgical Arts 40, (November 1971): 7.Google Scholar

102. Ibid., 8.

103. “Pope Hails Success of Apollo 11, Offers Blessing for Its Crewmen,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1969, A3. Paul, who spent part of the day looking through the Vatican telescope, later received the Apollo astronauts in audience.

104. McDougall, … the Heavens and the Earth, 414; see also Tribbe, No Requiem for the Space Age, which argues convincingly that virtually from the moment of the moon landing, and certainly by its first anniversary, Americans developed a resounding indifference to the space program and a strong sense that it had simply not been worth the money invested. By the mid-1970s, NASA's budget had cratered and many scientists and aerospace engineers found themselves abruptly, if in most cases temporarily, out of work.

105. McCurdy, , Space and the American Imagination, 207, 228–29.Google Scholar

106. Wood, A More Perfect Union, 75. McLuhan, of course, was heavily dependent on Teilhard in his analysis of modern communications technology and its possible outcome. See Poole, Robert, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, as well as Lazier, Benjamin, “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture,” American Historical Review 116, (June 2011): 602–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

107. Robert Howes, “Our Thing: Some Further Reflections on Spaceship Earth,” Catholic World, July 1971, 169. See also Lindaman, Space, 14–16.

108. On the history of this phrase, which may have originated with any one of several authors in the mid-1960s, see Wood, A More Perfect Union, 235, n. 14.

109. Fuller's writing on this topic can be found in, among many other places, Buckminster Fuller, R., Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale, Ill: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969).Google Scholar On Fuller’s promotion of the concept, see Anker, Peder, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 68–82;Google Scholar Wood, A More Perfect Union, 75–76.

110. He gave one about “Spaceship Earth” at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut in June 1969; the nuns, who were normally enclosed, and their guests, including Lavanoux and Louisa Jenkins, sat on hay bales in the cow barn while Fuller held forth.

111. Wills, Garry, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1972), 97–117.Google Scholar

112. On this transformation in American culture generally, see Anker, , From Bauhaus to Ecohouse, 83–112; Wood, A More Perfect Union; Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).Google Scholar In particular, Catherine Albanese's discussion of this impulse as a re-appropriation of a long tradition of American nature religion is highly relevant (Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 153–98. For Catholic focus on the inner city in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Koehlinger, Amy L., The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).Google Scholar For some historical background on “green Catholicism” as well as a suggestion on how this story unfolds into the present day, see Taylor, Sarah McFarland, Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Mostly unexplored in this essay are the links between this type of thinking and the liturgical movement's eucharistic vision of human interconnectedness and social justice; see Pecklers, The Unread Vision, 81–149.

113. Rivers, Clarence, Celebration (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 63.Google Scholar

114. “We Live on Division Street,” ad for Rosary College in the National Catholic Reporter, July 16, 1969.

115. Today, Vatican II's Decree on the Media of Social Communications is probably the least read and cited of the council’s sixteen major documents; however, it was regarded as significant at the time. Americans, of course, saw communications technology as one of their special areas of expertise and were key members of the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications, which issued a lengthy Pastoral Instruction on the Means of Social Communications (“Comunio et Progressio”) on June 3, 1971. Bishop John L. May of Mobile, then chairman of the U.S. Catholic Conference's Communications Committee, felt that “U.S. communicators have a global responsibility” as “de facto international leaders in … contemporary mass communications” to be “increasingly sensitive to the cultural and moral imperatives of other societies than their own.” (May's comments, as well as the text of the instruction and an extensive commentary and index, occupied the entire June 7, 1971, edition of Origins, the then brand-new American Catholic aggregator of papal, curial, and episcopal documents.)

116. For a broad sampling of ecumenical ecological theology from the 1980s and 1990s—much of which is explicitly or implicitly influenced by Teilhard de Chardin— see Hessel, Dieter T. and Ruether, Rosemary Radford, eds., Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).Google Scholar For an ethnographic, historical, and theological account of one contemporary group of Catholics who have developed practices and theologies around ecological awareness, see Taylor, Green Sisters.

117. On American romanticism in the 1960s, in which Catholics clearly did participate, see Philip Gleason, “Catholicism and Cultural Change in the 1960s,” in Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism, Past and Present (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 92–96.

118. Halsey, , The Survival of American Innocence, 176.Google Scholar

119. Abbott, Carl, Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006), 1.Google Scholar Other theorists of science fiction have made very similar points; see, for example, Disch, Thomas M., The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (New York: Free Press, 1998), 91.Google Scholar

120. Jameson, Fredric, “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science-Fiction Studies 9 (July 1982): 147–58.Google Scholar See also MacLeod, Ken, “History in SF: What (Hasn't Yet) Happened in History,” in Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy, and Science Fiction, ed. Alan Sandison and Robert Dingley (London: Palgrave, 2000), 8;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Kreuziger, Frederick A., Apocalypse and Science Fiction: A Dialectic of Religious and Secular Soteriologies, American Academy of Religion Academy Series 40 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1982), 15, 173.Google Scholar

121. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, 218, describes this as a “realism of the future.” I. F. Clarke has dated this core technique of science fiction to the emergence of the genre of future-fictions in the late eighteenth century (Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation, 31).

122. The re-emergence of eschatology as a major paradigm for theology in the mid-twentieth century only makes the usefulness of science-fiction criticism in understanding Catholic futurism more clear; for, as Frederick Kreuziger argues, science fiction is itself a basically apocalyptic literature, “involving an intense longing for a new age and a new world … a literature of hope” which “views the present-time as a time of crisis, and concurrently a time of great expectation, indeed imminent expectation” (Kreuziger, Apocalypse and Science Fiction, 49).

123. Scholes, Robert E., Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 75.Google Scholar Scholes's book is a lightly edited version of his 1974 Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature at Notre Dame.