Editorials
Editorials THE BISHOPS AS PEACEMAKERS MORE THAN ONE out of every four Americans is a Catholic. That the religious leaders of such a segment of the population should even contemplate condemning a...
...Paul and Minneapolis and chairman of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, repeated the Conference's previous criticism of the neutron warhead as another breach in the "political, psychological, and strategic barriers to the use of nuclear weapons...
...Last January, in fact, Commonweal observed that just as the Supreme Court's 1973 abortion decision had sparked the right-to-life movement into existence, the administration's attitude toward nuclear strategy was likely to provoke "a similarly militant although differently focused right-to-life movement...
...Not even many Catholics are aware-though many are currently finding out-how precarious the moral justification of the nuclear deterrent has been...
...It had to be a temporary resort, designed to be self-eliminating, not self-perpetuating...
...they are simply trying to cope with the fiscal realities imposed by what New York's Governor Carey recently termed "deny-side" economics...
...Already the bishops are being subjected to rather predictable criticism: that they are uninformed, naive, or sentimental about the realities of international politics...
...Buckley gets $402 a month from Social Security, but $211 of that goes for his senior citizen apartment...
...that they should stick to high-minded statements of principle and leave the crucial military details to the experts...
...Not surprisingly, given his emasculation proposals, Mr...
...FROM THE FILE Like most people whose work includes writing editorials, we squirrel away clippings of news items that seem worthy of comment...
...Proponents of bilateral disarmament are currently embarrassed by the absence of progress to date...
...This one is a story from the Washington Post detailing the impact in Virginia of the Reagan budget cuts as they affect just one area, Medicaid...
...they remain convinced, however, that not only is bilateral disarmament alone politically viable, it is also the only approach that promises to reach the goal of disarmament without passing through an intermediate stage where the risks of nuclear war would actually be vastly increased as the disparity in military power either tempted or panicked one or the other superpower...
...more than 35,000 aged, blind, and disabled people just above the poverty line would lose all their medical benefits...
...Jesuits took some comfort in the fact that their new overseer was one of their own rather than a Vatican curial official, and also in the added appointment of Father Giuseppe Pittau, S.J., to assist Dezza, who at 80 is known as no enthusiast for the order's reorientation to social justice...
...Previous efforts to improve product quality have been ill-advised, he said, and in a wonderful sentence he went on to explain that "imperfect products" should be available on the market because consumers have "different preferences for product avoidance...
...a congregation was "inopportune"-and he insisted the process be halted, and Arrupe stay on"for the time being...
...In October, Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco marked the eight-hundredth anniversary of the birth of St...
...The Council raised the problem but reached no clear conclusion...
...the change at the top and the delay in proceeding was "for the sake of better preparation as required by the Holy Father.'' Perhaps suspicions should be held in check...
...And finally in November, Archbishop Roach, in his presidential address at the annual bishops' meeting, declared that "on a global scale, the most dangerous moral issue in the public order today is the nuclear arms race...
...Dezza sent reassurances: Jesuit constitutional procedures for transferring authority were not abrogated...
...And one immediate reaction has been bafflement...
...Pittau, a Harvard Ph.D...
...Why this sudden upsurge in anti-nuclear sentiment...
...It's happening...
...When in April of 1980, Jesuit superior general Father Pedro Arrupe announced his intention to resign "for reasons of advancing age" (he was 72), that automatically set in motion procedures for assembling a body that not only elects new superior generals, but perhaps more important in this context, also sets overall policy for the order-a kind of intra-Jesuit ecumenical council...
...As for the old rule that companies must be able to substantiate claims made in advertising, we will have no more of that nonsense either if Mr...
...nuclear policy...
...the traveling pope was nearly inaccessible-and then events intervened: the assassination attempt and, last summer, Ar-rupe's stroke, which left him partly paralyzed and barely able to speak...
...What this adds up to, in part: at least 800 elderly and bed-ridden patients would be forced to leave their nursing homes...
...some statements are personal, others are analytical...
...It may also encourage the American episcopacy to seek means, as part of a universal church, for applying some parallel pressures on Moscow...
...But frankly, visionary calls are only part of the problem here...
...It is not useful to blur the line of moral argument about the use of nuclear weapons at a time when the secular debate is openly discussing the use of limited nuclear weapons and winning nuclear wars.'' These are only some of the more notable episcopal pronouncements...
...It has been a possibility ever since the Vatican Council pronounced an "unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation" of "any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population.'' It has been a probability ever since the end of last year when not only was SALT II rejected but the Reagan administration began installing in office many of the treaty's most devoted foes and began giving a warm hearing to theories of "fighting" and "winning" nuclear wars...
...Just prior to the bolt of October 6 which replaced him, O'Keefe had written Casaroli that the process of electing a permanent successor for Arrupe could not be delayed indefinitely...
...JOHN PAUL, S.J...
...The reluctant answer was that nuclear deterrence could be tolerated only if it were meant to buy time for successful disarmament...
...Yet that is exactly what is in process today...
...The church needs to say 'no' clearly and decisively to the use of nuclear weapons...
...So far this issue, left over from Vatican I, has been too hot to handle...
...It is simply to acknowledge the truth, and to announce whatever one's moral conclusions in the full light of that truth...
...The Pax Christi bishops asked whether any morally justifiable warfare was possible in view of modern weaponry...
...and further recommended refusal to pay taxes intended for military budgets...
...Bishop Matthiesen was later supported by twelve other Texas bishops...
...Pope John Paul II owes the Jesuits an explanation...
...soon there will be thousands of men and women in the same boat as Virginia's John Buckley...
...Pilla listed a number of practical ways in which his diocese might oppose "modern war and weaponry as we oppose abortion, racism, and poverty...
...If the possession and readiness to use nuclear arms could win no more than tenuous support from a moderate conservative like Cardinal Krol, doubts about the deterrent were reinforced by the new legitimacy of Catholic pacifism...
...In the short-run, to turn J.M...
...But stung by the icy manner in which Casaroli had delivered the peremptory order to the stricken and much revered Arrupe, and uncertain whether the act didn't effectively dissolve the Jesuit Constitution, Jesuit provincial superiors from around the world collectively protested...
...nuclear policy has been foreseeable for some time...
...Reagan's new FTC chairman said the commission could easily sustain the administration's planned 12 percent cut in its budget and that it could "function well" even if an additional 18 percent were cut...
...As a closed society, it is relatively immune from the pressures of public opinion or religious conscience that may act as restraints in the West...
...In theory, the doctrine of the "just," i.e., justifiable, war had always contained a strong presumption against the use of violence...
...he counseled Catholics to disengage themselves from such work...
...Miller has his way...
...Some have spoken out repeatedly...
...In August, John Roach, Archbishop of St...
...The fact is that a collision between Catholic moral teaching and U.S...
...Consolidating this unprecedented movement in the American church will require an extraordinary mix of care and courage...
...Arrupe complied...
...Miller put it...
...The next issue will be dated January 15, 1982...
...The same pattern of deprivation and suffering will inevitably follow in state after state as the social blight of the Reagan budget spreads...
...After all, we all have "different preferences for product avoidance," as Mr...
...But the second item drawn from our file involves more drastic and more human consequences...
...Further conversation was difficult...
...Officials in Virginia are moving to bar nearly 50,000 indigent patients from the Medicaid rolls and to slash medical benefits to an additional 12,000 children...
...Will the issue of deterrence force a sharp division between these approaches...
...This, we believe, was the burden of Cardinal Krol's 1979 testimony on SALT...
...in political science and till lately provincial of Japan, is highly regarded, a man supposedly of Arrupe's stamp...
...So far, most of the statements have limited themselves to phrases about America's "national security...
...The bishops will also have to face the question of the Soviet Union much more directly...
...The presence of nuclear weapons and the readiness of those in power to use them contradict that obligation...
...Also in August, Bishop Anthony Pilla of Cleveland released a pastoral study document in which he stated: "Our moral obligation as Christians and Catholics is to support and defend all human life...
...In the last year over forty American bishops have been party to statements in one way or another soundly critical of U.S...
...12,000 children from low-income families would no longer receive free hospital care, eyeglasses, or other key medical services...
...To point out these crucial asymmetries between East and West is not to deny any basis for reversing the rising tide of nuclear arms...
...Obviously, many difficult decisions lie ahead for the bishops...
...But the Soviet Union has two characteristics that cannot be evaded in any discussion of American defense postures...
...What will he do now...
...Vincent O'Keefe, Arrupe's chosen vicar and an American, continued to be in regular contact with Cardinal Augostino Casaroli, Vatican Secretary of State...
...Said Mr...
...The numerous statements that we've read vary widely in tone and precision of thought...
...that all politicians are the same and that it makes no difference whether you vote or for whom you vote...
...Virginia officials are not unusually heartless...
...As this is going on, there are still people in this country who say In keeping with its usual holiday practice, Commonweal will not publish an issue during the Christmas-New Year's season...
...Things could have been worse...
...Some bishops call for unilateral disarmament, others like Archbishop Quinn specify bilateral disarmament...
...Yet even by traditional moral reasoning, if the actual use of strategic weapons of mass destruction was forbidden, how could one justify a present readiness to carry out such an act, even in the hope that the threat might forestall the actuality...
...A similar division may arise over unilateralism versus bi-laterialism...
...The time to handle it may be approaching.andle it may be approaching...
...There is little evidence that these critics are at all interested in listening to what the bishops are saying...
...The first item is another in the recurring series on Reagan appointments of foxes to guard the chicken coops...
...Only recently has the larger world begun to take notice of this astonishing trend...
...Francis of Assisi with a statement emphasizing, "The teaching of the church is clear: Nuclear weapons and the arms race must be condemned as immoral...
...Presumably, the world's Jesuit provincials have been summoned to Rome at the end of February to hear it...
...As a totalitarian society, it has been matched only by Hitler's Germany in this century as a source of human degradation...
...Like Bishops Hunthausen and Pilla, he recommended support of the campaign for a "nuclear arms freeze...
...What's going on...
...In early October he broke the time-honored tradition whereby "exempt" religious orders enjoy relative autonomy from episcopal control in running their own affairs...
...In June, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle issued a cri de coeur against nuclear arms...
...you've guessed it already if you did not read it in the first place): the Federal Trade Commission should no longer protect consumers from defective products and unsubstantiated advertising claims...
...But practice often lagged far behind theory, and it has been the effect of various kinds of Catholic pacifism to exert pressure on just-war adherents to live up to their beliefs, in this instance to stop giving the deterrent an indefinite number of "second chances'' despite the breakdown of almost all serious efforts at disarmament...
...Last March, seventeen bishops, members of Pax Christi, addressed a letter to Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, chairman of a committee established by the U.S...
...it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the charismatic Karol Wojtyla may indeed have a visionary mission for Jesuits well worth the rest of us hearing...
...Taken as a whole, they constitute a massive vote of no-confidence in the leaders currently determining nuclear policy and a compelling refusal of silent acquiescence...
...The pope's response was to step in, as no pope before him has done since the Jesuit suppression of 1773, with his own "personal delegate," Father Paolo Dezza, S. J., who will run the order in the pope's name until the indeterminate time when a new superior general is elected...
...An example of those who would lose their Medicaid benefits: a man named John Buckley, 58 years old, who has diabetes, is blind in one eye, and both of whose legs have been amputated...
...Further, for a church that in recent centuries often appeared to have all the variety and flexibility of a stony Egyptian pyramid, the autonomy of religious orders has represented a significant legitimation of pluralism and the principle of subsidiarity...
...Blessed are the peacemakers...
...Coming at this time, moreover, the suspicion cast on the order by the pope's act imperils the lives of many Latin American and Asian Jesuits whose survival odds were already slim...
...Even for intimates of the clerical elite like Jesuits, there's nothing on the books but the spirit of the Gospel to restrain the pope from arbitrary action, nor any legal redress should it occur - and men specially vowed to the pope felt the defect here too close for comfort...
...That the religious leaders of such a segment of the population should even contemplate condemning a central premise of America's defense policy is a religious and political development of momentous consequence...
...bishops to examine war-peace issues...
...Catholics who believe that the just-war theory provides better guidance for the preservation of peace, the establishment of justice, and the protection of human dignity than does pacifism-which is the case with this journal-have nonetheless welcomed Catholic pacifists as allies against a widespread and dangerous realpolitik...
...Herewith remarks on two such clippings selected more or less at random from the file on What's Up with the Reagan Team...
...Taken separately, they are open to challenge on specific points...
...Miller (we know...
...Without explaining why, the pope did not like the timing...
...Traditionally, such freedom has been the way the Roman church acknowledges and incorporates the potentially sectarian creativity of zealous reformers like Dominic, Francis, Teresa of Avila, and Ignatius of Loyola...
...endorsed unilateral disarmament as "one obvious meaning of the cross" and "a moral imperative for followers of Christ...
...To see such independence tampered with, even temporarily, is troubling...
...This involves the naming of James C. Miller 3d as the new chairman of the watchdog Federal Trade Commission...
...And in August, too, Bishop Leroy Matthiesen of Amarillo, Texas, condemned the reliance on nuclear weapons, many of which are finally assembled within his diocese...
...Nonetheless, his $402 a month makes him ineligible for welfare, and the state therefore has the option of eliminating his Medicaid benefits...
...Keynes around, we may all be dead...
...American Jesuit provincials at first reacted to the pope's takeover, we're told, with feelings of "helplessness...
...If the sources of the bishops' new anti-nuclear militancy are clear, the same cannot be said of its eventual direction or ultimate impact...
...Well, we suppose it will not be the end of the world if you discover that your new toaster does not toast or that your new color TV set suffers from incurably defective innards, despite the advertising claims of the manufacturer...
...Archbishop Bernardin's committee, which includes both Bishop Gumbleton, a long time Pax Christi leader, and Bishop O'Connor of the military ordinariate, has its work cut out...
Vol. 108 • December 1981 • No. 23
