Shepherding the Bomb: How Catholic Bishops’ Conferences Constructed Competing National Myths of Nuclear Peace During the Cold War

In 1983, three national Catholic bishops’ conferences, in the United States, France, and West Germany, issued pastoral letters on nuclear weapons ethics that drew on identical doctrinal sources yet reached strikingly different moral conclusions. This article contends that these divergences are best understood as the construction of competing national myths: culturally embedded narratives that translated universal Catholic just war principles into the particular moral self-understandings of each nation. By applying myth and national narrative theory to textually analyze the three pastoral documents, this investigation identifies three distinct mythic constructions: an American myth of deterrence as a temporary waypoint on the road to disarmament, reflecting superpower messianism and a progressive eschatology of moral history; a French myth of dissuasion as political wisdom, reflecting a memorial eschatology rooted in the catastrophic lessons of occupation and lost sovereignty; and a German myth of NATO nuclear-sharing as responsible participation in peace through strength, reflecting a chastened-realist eschatology shaped by historical guilt and the disciplines of collective defense. Beyond the three national cases, the Holy See’s effort to gather these divergent positions into a declared consensus, most explicitly in Cardinal Casaroli’s November 1983 address at the University of San Francisco, is read here as a second-order act of institutional myth-making that naturalized at the transnational level the very divergences pre-publication consultation had failed to prevent. Furthermore, the analysis shows that none of the three conferences recognized the extent to which national culture shaped their theological reasoning, a structural feature of how myth operates that has broad implications for the study of religion, national identity, and Catholic social teaching.