A MOMENT Interview: Father Theodore Hesburgh
A MOMENT INTERVIEW WITH FATHER THEODORE HESBURGH An uncommon man talks abbout "the ultimate obscenity" talks about "the ultimate obscenity" Odds are that you'll miss it the first time you walk...
...And the thought struck me that if we're going to get peace in the world—I don't just mean in the Middle East, but in the larger world as well, which finds in the Middle East a kind of surrogate war, with the Russians blocking whatever we try to do just because we're trying to do it, without ever asking whether what they're doing is good for the peace of the world, and the result is just devastating for everybody, for them and for us, it's bad news for everybody— thinking of all this, I decided to do something about it...
...Peace is the work of justice, and there is very much injustice in the world today, and until we get rid of it we are not going to achieve real peace...
...My grandson," he said, "the one you talked to me about...
...So what the bishops have tried to do is to take a very, very difficult subject where there is very, very little precedent to work with—no big moral tomes to work with, just a few novels—and to place the issue in the context of faith...
...We alone have that fragile balance of qualities that makes life and growth possible...
...And then, just before Moore got up at that last session, Avineri got up and said that he had to say something...
...we're talking here about survival...
...maybe that would lead us to rally and save our planet...
...And then the Egyptian got up and said the same thing, that there was no disagreement between them and that they were, indeed, brothers...
...How do our policies stack up against what we believe...
...Obviously, religion has often separated peoples, and ideologies have certainly separated peoples, and race has separated peoples, and geography, and material possessions—and the people we remember as truly great are those who have brought others together in a common endeavor...
...He's the Vice Chairman of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow...
...We're now at a place where defending yourself means committing suicide...
...You do have an elaborate theology on the problem of just wars coming out of Augustine, but there really isn't an elaborate theology of peace except in the sense that peace is at the foundation of most religious thought and most religious orientation...
...We want everybody, down to the parish level, to start discussing this...
...And that ought to be discussed openly and frankly...
...I grew up like most girls my age, thinking of a romantic wedding, a nice house with a picket fence, children in the yard—the American dream...
...And I said to him one day that there are certain things that are very hard to do, even though doing them is totally to everyone's advantage, and the best example is to achieve a measure of peace in the world...
...And maybe, as I've said, what all of us are doing can help revitalize our theology as well...
...The means for that destruction are already manufactured, they are poised on delivery systems...
...Reconciliation—the ability of one human being to talk to another even after being burned, to be able to say, "OK, it is terrible and I wish it hadn't happened but I forgive you"—maybe we can learn that now...
...And when the scientists speak, people say they speak with poor grace, since they're the ones who created the problem...
...That's a pretty important question, and it reflects the feeling of the scientists that at the rate we're going, we might not be able to pull it off...
...That's the reason you ought to be concerned...
...If I can put it in its broadest context, it's meant first as a theological and scriptural challenge, it's meant to comment on the greatest moral issue that's ever faced humanity...
...In a way, I've used this same argument with the Russians...
...Everybody is forgivable...
...Nor is that love an abstraction...
...That's the heart of the thing...
...A MOMENT INTERVIEW WITH FATHER THEODORE HESBURGH An uncommon man talks abbout "the ultimate obscenity" talks about "the ultimate obscenity" Odds are that you'll miss it the first time you walk into his office on the Notre Dame campus...
...I remember so clearly what happened about five years ago, at Bellagio, where we got Christians and Jews and Moslems together, about 30 fairly high-level academic people...
...But put them together, and the scientists will keep the theologians honest on their facts, and the theologians will give moral credibility to what the scientists have to say...
...When the Pope was asked about our work with the scientists and the religious leaders, he thought it was a great idea, but he counselled us to go beyond the gloom and doom, to include in the statement a word of hope...
...But it's very hard to arrange for an invasion from outer space...
...You see, when religious people speak on nuclear issues, people say they're naive, they don't know what they're talking about...
...It becomes a very productive symbiotic relationship...
...We don't expect a big argument from Catholics or from anyone else about the fact that there is no moral justification for killing hundreds of millions of innocent people...
...And there are some people around, some friends of mine, with experience at getting Jews and Moslems together, and it can be an amazing thing...
...And they say, quite modestly, that the principles are easy...
...The terrible thing is that God gave us a beautiful world, and we have not only encumbered it with ugliness, but now we are about to destroy it...
...We had been together for four days, morning, noon and night, and we'd been talking mostly about justice in our traditions, and how our search for justice in the whole world, and particularly in the Middle East, should bring us together as brothers...
...I was talking not long ago with the daughter of a friend of mine, and I asked her whether she thinks about this, and she said, "AH the time...
...And while we all agree on principle, there are going to be people who disagree on the application of the principle, especially as it may seem to run counter to the policy of the highest officials of the nation...
...If you want to know what we could be, look at Venus, look at Mars, look at the Moon...
...I was curious about the contacts between the two, and since I know a great deal about both Christianity and Judaism but very little about Islam, I booked myself on a French tanker last summer and spent 28 days, completely isolated, reading the best books I could find on Islam...
...So they felt they had to say something about this, as every religious person does...
...Our theology here isn't adequate, there's nothing we have that can cope with it...
...Well, at the end of the last session, when we were all ready to leave, Bishop Paul Moore was to give the closing prayer...
...And they turned and embraced each other...
...We can't now turn around and offer reasons for killing hundreds of millions...
...You've had fanatics in every one, and the adventurers, and the swashbuckling types, the imperialists, the academic types—the universities of the Middle Ages were really fantastic places—and you've had reform movements in every one, and the proponents of popular religion when things got too legalistic, the way they did with us in the Middle Ages...
...So we ask a further question about that...
...We've grown up together...
...I'm struck, for example, by the bishops' use of the idea that "we must build a barrier against the concept of nuclear war as a viable strategy for defense...
...There is no reason on earth that can justify killing millions of innocent people deliberately, or even indirectly...
...Until we can purge the evil within, we won't get rid of the evil without...
...moment: Let's talk about that threat...
...And we have great differences between us...
...I'd think I was hearing a Jew quoting Isaiah, and it would turn out to be a Moslem quoting the Koran...
...If we wait for the problem to be settled in geopolitical terms, it won't be settled...
...I do so in this instance not because a Catholic priest is an unfamiliar guest in these pages, but because this Catholic priest is so special a person...
...Blessed are those who can relieve, in a real way, the* fears of our children...
...The idea of discrimination, or of surgical strikes and that kind of thing, becomes somewhat ridiculous in the modern context, even before you get into downwind radiation and other effects...
...if we don't solve this problem, all the others are moot, because it's all over...
...These were the things I said to Velikhov, and he responded by asking me why he should be as worked up about it as I. And I said to him, "Because you have a grandson...
...And then they said, We want you all to talk about this...
...Readers of this magazine know that we do not normally bother to introduce our interviews...
...Pacifism and war and peace aren't enough to serve as props for dealing with the issue...
...And you might be inclined to conclude therefrom that Father Theodore Hesburgh is a Judeophile...
...That's not a Russian problem or an American problem...
...I think I could plot the course of these three religions and find absolute points of contact among all three...
...In his mind, the greatest threat is that in the face of the problem, people are giving up...
...Blessed are the peacemakers...
...There is no elaborate theology of peace in the Church...
...In our theology, the notion of reconciliation is fundamental...
...Now the bishops have a tradition of commenting on everything from A to Z—abortion, pornography, all sorts of aspects of modern life...
...And now I'm faced with the stark reality of wondering whether it would be moral for me to bring children into a world where they might be vaporized...
...Maybe we can use this great evil to realize that our salvation is together, that we have to do it together...
...One of the people at our scientific meetings was a very senior Russian named Velikhov...
...And that's what we're facing here...
...I am among those people...
...It's a moral issue that makes questions of sex look minuscule...
...In a sense, I think the best quote here is from Einstein, after the bomb: "Once this thing happened, everything changed—except our ability to think about ourselves and our world...
...Sure, it would be tough at first to get Jews and Moslems together in Jerusalem, so maybe we'd have to hedge by starting in Cairo...
...The only thing they come down hard on is that there is no way you can justify killing a hundred million people...
...We may come at it with dozens of different ideologies and dozens of different religions, but we have so much in common...
...So we have a program in existence, and at our last meeting of the advisory board, in Jerusalem last April, we decided that it's a nice thing to help get Christians together, but we have a much deeper problem facing us, and maybe this is the place where we can address that problem...
...I'm not talking in the abstract...
...It's interesting that you would use the image of "the reversal of Creation...
...We want to save this earth as a habitable place, and we want to save all the beauty that has been created...
...maybe it can be the greatest civilizing thing we've ever come across...
...When I fantasize about the problem, I sometimes think that the only way we might get mankind and womankind and allkind together would be to arrange for an invasion from outer space...
...There aren't any easy answers here, but there are a few basic principles...
...Do you want to see him vaporized...
...We have a great evil facing us, the greatest we've ever faced...
...They are hair-triggered to computers, which are notably faulty...
...Still, maybe from this great evil that we have created there can come a great good, as the old scholastics might have thought...
...L.F...
...And I decided to start by getting some of the top scientists in the world together to declare themselves on the nuclear threat to humanity...
...Now let's shift, if we may, to the bishops' letter...
...But now we can see that we have to make common cause as human beings on a single Earth...
...As a sidelight, I might say that I've been working with some scientists about the possibility of finding extraterrestrial intelligence, and in our conversations we've talked about what we would ask if we encountered a superior race out there—as any race that could communicate with us would obviously be...
...And at that point, Bishop Moore—like the rest of us—was too choked up to say anything, and he finally managed to say, "I guess that embrace was our closing prayer...
...I just read them one right after the other, going all the way from the year 622 right up to today...
...That's why I sometimes think this may be God's way of bringing us together as human beings...
...And I think the bishops felt that if they didn't comment on this, they'd lose the right to comment on anything...
...We have it in the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us...
...But they had very little to go on...
...They were watching each other...
...And next I'm going to meet with the Buddhists, in Kyoto, and then with the Hindus in Bangalore, and I'm working up to getting the Moslems and Jews together on this, and Christians as well...
...Hesburgh: I have an academy in Jerusalem—actually, it's a couple of hundred yards short of Rachel's tomb, but it's within the city limits of Jerusalem—that I set up 15 years ago at Pope Paul VI's request...
...When we offer the bread, or the wine, it's with words you know: "Blessed are You, Lord of all creation, through Your goodness we have this wine to offer, fruit of the vine...
...Even more, we've got to start discussing with our adversary how we can develop peace...
...as to the rest, let's have what they call a "public moral dialogue...
...In approaching the matter, some Jews have suggested that we have a special witness to bring, since for us the Holocaust is not merely a possibility, but a memory as well...
...Our total interdependence is so highlighted by this threat that is so great and so unprecedented...
...It has led him to undertake mission after mission in the service of people, from work on civil rights to work on technology transfer, from work on immigration to work on education, and now, energetically, skillfully, prayerfully, to work on peace...
...If you go back in history, you discover that there was a time before this bitter enmity when Jews and Moslems worked very well together, when they were very close and there was great mutual respect...
...They came up with what I thought was a fine scientific statement in which, inter alia, they said that there's no scientific answer to the problem, that ultimately it's a matter of morals and ethics...
...This conversation took place when we were walking around outside the hotel in Vienna...
...That puts the monkey on our back, because it asks that we be shown mercy to the extent that we show it to others...
...And now we need to learn how to sit down and talk with the Russians, to try to draw their humanity out of them, to somehow get to the core of the thing and have them see that we are all up against a common evil...
...And I am convinced that the problem is not out there somewhere, but in here, inside ourselves...
...You can't beat that...
...One mark of that specialness is that he was Lyndon Johnson's candidate to head the space program and Richard Nixon's to head the poverty program—two jobs he didn't accept—as well as Chairman of the Civil Rights Commission (to which he'd first been appointed by Eisenhower) as well as the Rockefeller Foundation as well as and so forth and so on—a servant of the public weal...
...this was before the Sadat visit, incidentally...
...Which may be so, but which misses the central point about this most uncommon man, this thorough mentsh: Father Ted is an anthropophile, a lover of humankind...
...There's very much of that, and I think you have to build on it...
...And then I got a group of religious leaders together in Vienna, and they came up with a statement, and it's interesting to see how completely the two statements dovetail...
...And so he said to me that I ought to try to make that possible in Jerusalem, where it all began...
...For the last year and a half, I've wanted to get out of everything else and just think and talk and speak and act about this one issue, and to do something to bring people together on it, especially scientists and religious people...
...We have the capacity to take this beautiful world that God created, the beautiful people that He created, plus everything mat we've created—culture, art, music, science, human institutions—and wipe it all out, turn this beautiful planet into a cinder...
...Do you want to wipe out the whole process...
...They looked at the theology of pacifism, which has been a fairly thin stream in most religions, and they looked at just war theology, which doesn't tell you much that's helpful about proportionality in an age of ICBMs where even if you choose to target only military-industrial targets, you're going to kill 80 million people in the first ten seconds...
...Deterrence is an accepted doctrine, because it's worked for the last 40 years, but if by virtue of the doctrine of deterrence you keep building the stockpiles higher and higher with more and more sophistication, and you end up with many times more force than any rational nation would require in order to defend itself— why, then, perhaps deterrence only makes sense on a temporary basis, and the ultimate framework has to be to get rid of these monsters entirely, lest we destroy ourselves by accident, if no other way...
...After the Holocaust, when the survivors began to have children, that was the sign that they were healing...
...I'm under no illusion that Jews are going to become Christians, or vice versa, but the fact is that we have a very rich tradition that we've shared...
...Well, unless we can learn to think differently about ourselves and our world, we are facing an unimaginable catastrophe...
...And, a few months later, when he came to the meeting at the Vatican, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a picture of a beautiful little boy sitting in a field of yellow flowers...
...Occasionally I have some Jewish people come to mass, at a wedding or a funeral, and I always try to use the occasion to tell them to pay attention to the words...
...We sort of threw them all together, and it was interesting that the Jews and the Moslems got together much more quickly than either the Jews and the Christians or the Moslems and the Christians...
...So they drained as much out of the existing theology as they could...
...I had travelled to South Bend to speak with Father Hesburgh about the nuclear freeze, knowing how actively the Catholic Church has engaged with that issue, and knowing as well that there's not much of that kind of thing that happens in the Church to which Father Ted's not connected...
...Pacifism is a very thin stream in the Christian tradition, and just war doctrine was developed to deal with bows and arrows and spears, not with thermonuclear ICBMs...
...That's also the image that Arthur Waskow, who has taken a leadership role in the Jewish community on these matters, uses...
...Our conversation, however, began with some talk of the Jerusalem peace academy that Father Hesburgh's working on...
...A more telling mark, perhaps, is the number of people, across the land, who find hope and inspiration in his example of disciplined devotion to a better, a more decent world...
...With the Council over, he said, the only way these Christian theologians are going to get together is if we have some place where they can live together and pray together and study together...
...But all those things fade away when you compare them to the moral issue we're facing here...
...That's why the bishops call on us to discuss it, on all of us...
...And the common question that everybody wants to ask, that everybody came to privately, without any discussion, is, How have you become so advanced without destroying yourselves through nuclear war...
...And what he said was that he'd come to the conference with great suspicion, but that sitting next to his brother—that's how he put it—he found that he had agreed with everything the Egyptian had said...
...we have a great moral problem facing us, the greatest we've ever faced...
...And I'd noticed that over at the end of the table, where Shlomo Avineri was sitting next to a Moslem scholar from Egypt, each time the Moslem would speak, Avineri would swing his chair around and just look at him, and each time Avineri was speaking, the Moslem would do the same...
...Maybe we could get a broad ecumenical group from all the religions of the world to meet there to talk about peace and things relating to peace, and bring in scientists and social scientists—the kind of thing people have talked about establishing here in this country, a peace academy, but that hasn't gotten off the ground here...
...So I got them together and we had six or seven meetings in Vienna, and I got the Pontifical Academy involved, and we had our last session at the Vatican in September...
...At our final meeting, he said to me, "You know, I've been thinking about what you said yesterday...
...Yes, I understand that...
...You could eliminate all the human problems by eliminating all the human beings...
...And, in addition to the context of faith, the context of reason—what is a reasonable approach to this horrible problem...
...He felt that the greatest benefit he'd derived from Vatican II was that he got to know so many other Christian theologians he wouldn't have met otherwise...
...It has its limits, and it's got to be tied into what the physicians are doing, and what the lawyers are doing, and what everybody's doing...
...Now, for the first time in human history, we have the capacity to reverse Creation...
...Nuclear war is the ultimate blasphemy—as, rationally, it's the ultimate insanity...
...I think the bishops are simply trying to follow Einstein's lead, to get people to think differently...
...What I dream of is being able to invite them all to this academy in Jerusalem, which Teddy Kollek says is the best building built in Jerusalem by any outside group since World War I. And then we can really concentrate on the nuclear threat...
...And I was amazed at how many points of contact there are in the development of all religions...
...Actually, I was on the Holocaust Commission, and it was while working on it that I was struck that you could take all the problems I've worked on—higher education, or the Third World, or human rights, or refugees, or immigration, a whole series of very tough human problems, all with a moral dimension—and solve them in a moment...
...In theological language, this is, again, the first time we've been able to reverse Creation, to turn it off and destroy it, to fling it back at the Creator, if you will...
...That is essentially the same as our notion of gedder, of a fence that must set certain things apart, a concept that Saul Berman has used in discussing these same things...
...One of the things that must strike any Jew who reads the bishops' letter is what you've already mentioned, the points of identity in the two traditions...
...Otherwise, they wouldn't have, they wouldn't have wanted to expose another human being to this lousy world...
...Yes, blessed are the peacemakers...
...We are all aghast at the Holocaust where six million people were killed without any moral justification, simply because they were Jews...
...there is no reason that would support it, and it is ghastly even to consider...
...We would take turns at the prayers that closed the sessions, and I used to close my eyes, and often I wasn't able to figure out whether it was a Jew or a Moslem praying...
...Our lives are mostly lived, but these people are coming along, and people after them...
...But if you do, he'll call the m'zzuzah on his doorpost to your attention as you leave...
Vol. 8 • July 1984 • No. 7
