| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The U.S. Catholic Press on Central America: From Cold War Anticommunism to Social Justice. By Edward T. Brett. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. viii, 265 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-268-04341-8. Paper, $22.00, ISBN 0-268-04345-0.)

The title and subtitle accurately inform the reader of the contents of this book. Edward T. Brett, a professor of history at La Roche College, analyzes the changing views of the role of the United States in Central America during the Cold War, as expressed in Roman Catholic periodicals. The author focuses on four journals—America, Commonweal, the National Catholic Reporter, and Our Sunday Visitor—that had a wide circulation in the Catholic community of the United States. During the 1950s, such journals backed the anticommunist crusade of the United States. Catholic elites had traditionally supported the nation's foreign policy because they wanted to be perceived as loyal Americans in a Protestant country. The Catholic journals applauded the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration's campaign to destroy the popularly elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1950–1954). Catholics shared the administration's view that the Soviet Union aimed to do to Catholic Guatemala what it had already done to Catholic Poland. Indeed, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York helped CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) agents such as E. Howard Hunt develop contacts with conservative Guatemalan church leaders.

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