An open letter to the bishops
O'Brien, David J.
TO THE COMMITTEE ON WAR & PEACE An open letter to the bishops DAVID J. O'BRIEN DEAR BISHOPS: I hope you will excuse the impertinence of some more unsolicited advice. In the course of preparing a...
...Sincerely, DAVID J. O'BRIEN...
...It is good and proper, after all, to warn of the moral dangers of current deterrence strategies...
...Furthermore, all of us who pay taxes, vote, and accept citizenship share responsibility for the existence of those weapons and for decisions regarding their use, in war or diplomacy, and we thus share in the moral dangers involved...
...Unilateral disarmament is no more clearly the way to peace than is peace through strength or peace through world law...
...How are we going to make our de facto participation in our political and economic systems principled, responsible, and effective...
...Some think that theological research may help resolve differences over scripture and the church, or that social and political research may lead to common political perceptions and strategies...
...So it is in the interest, and I think it is part of the pastoral task, of bishops to cherish both groups, to pastor them by affirming, supporting, and caring for them, but also by calling them to account, asking them what they are doing, and why, a calling that can take the form of conversation with each other through the forums of a shared church...
...As leaders off the church you must affirm both prophetic and political obligations, encourage all members to bring faith and politics into the business of daily life, and assist all groups and movements to take on the peacemaking task in ways which support and enrich one another...
...To whom shall I contribute money...
...the realists keep them and us honest in another way by recalling the fairly harsh realities of the real world, important because real people live there...
...Both sides warn against cowardly compromise, of the Gospel or of human freedom...
...the center to value political and civil rights but forget social and economic rights...
...In the last year some Catholics have decided that one or the other of those men was not a suitable speaker for a Catholic audience...
...Establish diocesan justice and peace commissions to support local efforts and to assist in integrating justice and peace considerations into all aspects of local programs...
...They learn that they need a different language even to converse with such people, and, as they adopt a different language they find themselves facing problems they had not considered...
...This is simply to say that all Christians, whether pacifists or realists, must be peacemakers...
...He did not gather a few followers and flee to the mountains to publish brochures denouncing those who remained behind...
...You do not represent some other-worldly sect, with no responsibility but to proclaim your special truth and hurl down thunderbolts at sinful men and women...
...You bishops, as pastors and teachers, are required to state clearly the belief of the community, to set forth the range of agreement which exists, to speak the truth about the world as you see it, and to insist that individual Catholics and all communities and institutions take action...
...we are called to hunger and thirst after justice, so maybe, meekly and with due humility, we should take a crack answering as well as asking some of the questions...
...Often our assured prescriptions for the moral dilemmas of others are ways of avoiding our own...
...Finally, peacemaking might be politically powerful, because our public life is dying for lack of peacemaking voice, peacemaking persons and peacemaking institutions...
...Most of us, for better or worse, will continue to work and consume and occasionally vote...
...You must establish modes of discourse which will help people to decide intelligently on appropriate forms of action...
...And now we allow that deadly debate to divide the church...
...And they found new problems: the appropriate use of the inescapable power that America possessed, for example...
...Beyond that, the peacemaking imperative is net exhausted by personal commitment and witness...
...It is this positive, active thrust which dominates Vatican statements on peace...
...First, you should specify the range of agreement that in fact exists...
...ACCORDINGLY, I want to argue that the heart of our agreement as Roman Catholic Christians is that we are a peace church about the work of peacemaking - not a pacifist church in any doctrinaire sense, and certainly not a war-making church, but a peacemaking church with heavy obligations in both our private and public lives...
...Differences over Christ and his peacemaking message have been present at least since Con-stantine, and those who would throw out fifteen centuries probably have not thought through the implications of choosing to be a small community of believers awaiting the second coming or asked who would pay the price of such a choice...
...On the one hand, that work will not even be undertaken without transcendent hope born of commitment to peace...
...Such choices involve political, social, economic, even psychological judgments into which Christians may have some insights but for which they have no special competence...
...Shall I pay taxes or not, serve in the military or not, join a vigil at the church or not...
...You bishops could foster extensive conversations across tables between leaders of factions, for example between religiously oriented activists and lay persons involved in decision-making...
...How shall I vote...
...In addition to information and ethical reflection on current policies, there should be constructive efforts to develop alternative policy proposals and to work closely with Catholic scholars from other nations and from international organizations and agencies...
...Worcester...
...or the undeniable brutality of Vietnamese and Cambodian governments...
...I think we should work to deepen it more than broaden it, deepen it in the sense of making the imperatives of peacemaking a more integral part of our lives in church and in society, incorporating those imperatives, and the symbols from which they derive, more deeply, into our prayer, our worship, our common life, enabling us to know more fully what we are called to as Catholic Christians...
...2. Assign priests, sisters, and laity to work with the peace movements in all its manifestations, in the same way that many local churches assigned priests to work with the labor movement in the 1930s...
...At one and the same time they want to use the religious language of peace, love, and community and also have a place for Christian ethics at the policy-making table, no mean feat...
...Government officials warn that great international issues are at stake, and they seem pretty sure they know better than you how to deal with them...
...The last bishops' meeting in November, 1981, was inspiring as bishop after bishop rose to express deep concern and to urge the body to address this most pressing of issues...
...On the quite understandable conviction that getting things done is at least moderately useful and not necessarily a sin, they resent charges that they have "sold out.'' Sometimes their irritation, like that of the pacifist, turns to anger, perhaps because, being Christians, they have that image of Jesus in the back of their heads and thus feel a little bit guilty...
...Both positions reflect a separation of private and public life which is impossible...
...yet it is only in the world that ways can be found to make peace...
...Movements need actions, so demonstrations, vigils, petition drives, are also valuable...
...Good men in the military request that you remember the existence of so many decent officers, some of them Holy Cross and Notre Dame graduates...
...Neither did Jesus tell people to go along and get along...
...The problem you face is historical...
...help make our answers informed, intelligent, and in accord with the demands of faith...
...They usually hold "responsible" positions in one institution or another, and are tempted to think for that reason that they are more "responsible" people...
...you must assist in building communities which empower people to act, support them in their daily lives and call them to account...
...Realists entwined with governments and corporations insist that the problems in South America arise not from their behavior but from the sentimentality of Maryknoll...
...The need obviously flows both ways...
...We will do better not by excommunicating one another or by posing the same choices in the church that are posed outside it...
...You are Roman Catholic bishops, leaders of that church which claims above all to be the living presence of Christ in the world...
...You American bishops fought to gain conciliar praise for Christian soldiers and endorsement of the right of national self-defense, allowing the possession, if not the use, of nuclear weapons...
...Even there, I suspect we would gain more in clarifying our choices than in resolving our differences...
...What passes for political commentary today is eloquent sarcasm directed at Haig and his friends or at Edward Kennedy, Ramsey Clark, and their friends...
...He did not suggest that, after responding to his message, they could go back to business as usual, that disci-pleship would carry no price...
...He endorsed neither hypocritical Jewish lackeys of the Roman regime nor zealous Jewish revolutionaries...
...Insofar as we wish to remain a truly Catholic church, we must insist again and again that this world is our world, that we share responsibility for its fate, and that we are called in a special way to serve at the frontiers where human dignity is most gravely threatened...
...Either by circumstance or temperament, rarely from personal fault, they are inclined to be a touch unconcerned with abstract principle...
...Sometimes pacifists sound like they refer only to the private world of conscience, community, and church: by being private peacemakers we can avoid complicity in evil and give public witness to the Gospel...
...We ought to be able to do better than that...
...It is also a public question: how do we, as an organized body, the church, deal with other publics and with our shared institutions at this time in history...
...Not a bad set of guidelines for your committee...
...If your committee comes down on the side of either Bishop Hunt-hausen, who has refused to pay his taxes, or Cardinal Cooke, who presides over Catholic military personnel, I suspect some Catholics will renounce their fellowship with other Catholics...
...Massachusetts...
...We tend to forget that the problem, after all, is not pacifism or realism, but war and weapons...
...the left to appreciate that social justice and economic progress can come about only with the temporary suppression of civil liberties and political freedom...
...And they didn't have to ask, "What would Jesus do...
...Asking all these people in all these places to be pacifist is a bit much...
...There is a consensus that the use of nuclear weapons, to the extent that they are indiscriminate in their effect, is never allowable...
...1. Areas of agreement FOR ALL THE HEAT of current debate, there is a remarkable range of agreement among bishops and, I suspect, among Catholics...
...But something more is needed, even if the peace movement grows and the process of arms negotiations earlier represented by SALT is revived...
...The general sources of those conditions lie in such problems as nationalism, ideological rigidity, economic conflict, and suppression of human rights - in all quarters of the globe - so that the obligation extends to active efforts to build a world of justice in which conflicts can be peacefully resolved...
...For too long we have accepted with a kind of fatalistic resignation the choices presented us by others...
...With all the skills, talents, and experiences of our membership we have to probe the meaning of peace and the meaning of justice in the contemporary world...
...Might we make more progress if we paid attention to serious political, scientific, and economic research...
...Now it might be said, "See how they pass the buck...
...Given the existence of weapons, of nation states, and of many injustices, what are we to do...
...If nothing else this led to a search for a deeper spirituality and more profound political analysis, strengthening their witness and enriching the church...
...On the other hand, stubborn just warriors also radically divide public and private life: the church,if it likes, can pray and study, but it has no significant public role...
...Peacemaking is pastorally appropriate as well, for in the context of shared faith, it sets the boundaries of discussion, but leaves personal and political decisions to the judgment of the Christian people...
...all of us would be more comfortable if we thought that nuclear strategists really believed war was the ultimate tragedy...
...What kind of witness should our community give, together and individually, in the wider society...
...Well, SALT II was withdrawn, the arms race has accelerated, and here you are, reevaluating...
...You could insist that peacemaking is a central task, not a peripheral one, for the church, and direct your offices and agencies to make that clear in their programming and in diocesan operations . You could keep trying to speak to public issues on behalf of the church, but with modesty, while calling your people's attention to the fact that if they want to get something done by influencing parties, candidates, and government, they will have to do it...
...As Peter Maurin once put it: It used to be said of Christians, "See how they love one another...
...4. Issue a strong appeal to Catholic colleges and universities, and to Catholic scholars in other settings, to give the highest priority to research and education in areas related to world justice and peace...
...3. Encourage religious orders to undertake ministerial efforts in the worlds of government and business especially, both through their own professional employment in such settings and through forms of community life and pastoral action among Christians at work in such settings...
...So they praised conscientious objection and stated unequivocally that acts of war aimed at indiscriminate destruction were wrong, sinful...
...But there is more, much more to be said, for there is that area ' of agreement...
...on the other it will not be fruitful without a willingness to confront the realities of power and the ambiguities of politics...
...it is at least equally important to help citizens to discover, win support for, and implement strategies that have a chance of building justice and making peace possible...
...And then there are the folks in the middle, idealists in their religion, realists in their politics...
...It has something to do, I think, with what is Catholic about us...
...Few corporations seem to do business in ways which build friendship and mutual understanding...
...and seem pretty sure they know the answer...
...Some people would still have to make the compromises and engage in the secular tasks required to build structures ofpeace...
...8. Write a good pastoral letter and make sure it gets read by Catholics and gets noticed by non-Catholics...
...Even the most militant of just-war theorists agrees that war must always be a last resort and is always, in the deepest sense, tragic...
...I leave you with a few: 1. Establish a national justice and peace commission to include leaders of business, labor, government, national organizations and movements to develop more informed and intelligent programs for church work on peace and justice and to share with bishops responsibility for the public witness of the church...
...so were many Catholic pacifists, and so were the Vatican II statements and a growing body of papal pronouncements, fuzzy on specifics but filled with passionate urgency...
...Back home, however, Vietnam forced your hand as some Catholics began to practice pacifism, to claim conscientious-objector status, and to condemn indiscriminate destruction and asked you to do the same...
...I prefer to keep it that way and doubt that any brilliant ecclesiologist is going to provide a "model" of the church which will command universal assent...
...YOU WANT SOME more specific suggestions perhaps...
...Doing so is the appropriate task of the laity, who should find in the church resources of faith, renewal of hope, and loving support which enables them to take on those responsibilities...
...Building awareness of the nuclear danger, and of the social, economic, and political injustices of the world system, is a step, but it is a step that can be taken in ways that remove us even further from politics in its widest sense...
...second, you should clarify the differences present within the church...
...Church leaders must regularly and persistently remind us of the moral danger involved...
...All of us together will make a difference or none of us, even you, will make much difference at all...
...the thoughtful moderates call attention to the victims of tyranny and recall memories of sacrifices made in other wars so that we could be free...
...We are all very Catholic and very American...
...Like him, you refuse either to withdraw or surrender to the world...
...Many pacifists began to sound like realists, slightly to the left still,* but forced to ask policy questions and give political responses...
...Given the evil involved, and the complicity all share, there is another point of agreement...
...Now what would I do if I was speaking for a church that included both Phil Berrigan and Alexander Haig...
...My suggestion is that we talk about them...
...There are to be no more crusades, no holy wars, for example, and almost no one endorses the old simplistic nationalism, at least publicly...
...The pacifists keep them and the rest of us honest by recalling the fairly clear demands of Jesus...
...re-examine its relations with third world nations...
...as church we lament the past, dislike the present, and seek people to blame...
...We have to learn how to be church in ways which draw us back into that wider world we are to serve rather than into ourselves, to a self-justifying isolation and defeatism...
...It is very healthy for them to occasionally meet a sincere, committed Christian who actually works for the government, or even for the church...
...To get something done, they are prepared to fudge a bit...
...As you address the government, don't forget your people...
...Political obligation spreads through the church...
...What is clear, I think, is that if we want Archbishop Bernardin and the episcopal conference to continue looking both ways, toward the church and toward the public, we should be grateful that we have both pacifists and realists asking what they are doing and why they are doing it...
...I am skeptical...
...It is theologically sound, pastorally appropriate, and politically significant...
...Concretely you must wrestle with the problem of translating words into action...
...The church finds it all too easy to warn of dangers and call people away from the sins of the world...
...it carries out that task both by the quality of its own life and by the quality of its participation in the common life...
...If they are right, the weapons cannot be used, and those who argue the contrary have, fortunately, little voice in today's church...
...Our church long upheld the just war theory, for many good reasons and some very bad ones...
...political action is the task of the laity...
...Each and every Catholic has a moral responsibility to work for the elimination of the danger and of the conditions which give rise to it...
...It is theologically sound because, while Christians have the resources to name the evil - war and weapons - and while they have a positive imperative to overcome evil with good - peacemaking - they have no special revelation about how this is to be done...
...To be credible and effective, this event must be preceded by concrete steps to place concerns of mission to the world at the center of the church's life...
...not liberation theology or neoconservatism, but injustice...
...In 1979, you faced SALT II...
...and, from time to time, serve as our spokesmen to the world at large...
...It is morally dangerous in the extreme, then, to possess such weapons...
...Pacifists ask you "what would Jesus do...
...Perhaps worst of all, sitting at meetings with powerful men and touched by the sincerity of the "decision-makers," they may forget the victims, forget those not at the table...
...The truth is, there are very few people out there who don't already know, at some level of awareness, that there is a problem affirming Jesus and yet building nuclear weapons, in loving the poor and yet throwing their neighbors to the wolves, in acknowledging the call to Christian discipleship and yet building missile guidance systems...
...That is the question...
...The categories of the just war, at their heart an effort to place restraints on force and violence in international relations and within war itself, remain essential to a full Christian standpoint on war and peace...
...If nothing else, such actions forced Catholic leaders to recall their long hidden agreement that not only must the church condemn the use and threatened use of nuclear weapons but, at best, it can tolerate their possession only in the context of a firm commitment to peace and a clear policy aimed at their control and eventual elimination...
...Where will I work...
...and work out ways of resolving differences with the Soviet Union...
...Expand the resources of the U.S...
...Could we Catholics not at least try to draw upon the sincere dedication to peace and justice that is spreading through the church, listen to the voice of our sister churches around the world, mobilize the talents and energies of our people, and find some constructive proposals to present to our fellow citizens...
...It would be contrary to your pastoral role to prescribe the forms of action which are appropriate, either for individuals or for publics...
...Governments spend trillions for war, but almost nothing on peace...
...But the Pandora's box could not be closed, for the nukes were still there...
...They understandably expressed some irritation, asking where does the so-called responsibility of the powerful lead...
...6. Call upon the many talented Catholics working in the media for help in determining how best you can communicate the church's peacemaking message...
...Eventually you did, arguing that the war could not be justified in terms of the traditional categories of the just war...
...From the earliest days in our community children should learn that we are Catholics not in order to stand in judgment on everybody else, but in order to build each other up in ways that enable us to carry out worldly responsibilities more energetically and creatively...
...Nor do you represent some branch of civil religion, responsible and domesticated, recognizing the way things are and accepting choices defined by the powerful...
...Your role, at its best, is to direct our attention to the problems...
...2. Areas of disagreement THE CENTRAL DIVISIONS in the church on the peace issue are natural and probably permanent...
...We are called to be peacemakers, not buck passers...
...We should remember that less than two decades ago the nation's most prominent bishop was quoting Decatur's "My Country, Right or Wrong" and Archbishop Robert Lucey was berating critics of his friend Lyndon Johnson...
...At one and the same time our country needs to grapple with the problems posed by revived international economic competition...
...A ringing proclamation of peacemaking is not a soft compromise between pacifism and just war, Gumbleton and O'Connor...
...I want to suggest that you should not choose one of these positions, nor should you compromise the differences...
...Moreover, all agree that pacifism is a legitimate Christian option (a major development in Catholic teaching) and that the church is always biased on the side of peace, what scholars call "contingent pacifism...
...Who, in fact, cares much about ordaining women or electing bishops in a church that cares only for itself...
...Catholic Conference to monitor research and educational material on international justice and peace and to disseminate these resources through the local commissions...
...The Roman Catholic community values both freedom and justice as indispensable to human dignity...
...Bishops blame lay people, lay people blame priests, priests blame bishops...
...Men and women work at careers with energy and imagination, pushing aside their worries that their work contributes to war rather than peace, because, among other things, peacemaking doesn't pay even enough to allow for normal family life...
...Given that agreement several others things follow...
...As the church we must help one another answer it...
...Everyone recognizes that the church must be the church, not the handmaid of the state...
...Because we all have a conscience, and because we are all involved, we would do better to ask ourselves and one another whether, in pursuing private virtue and religious integrity, we ignore the claims of the victims of present or pending violence and injustice or, on the other hand, whether by pursuing public power and responsibility, we ignore the claims of conscience...
...The commitment of the church, John Paul II reminds us, is not to masses or classes, not to " abstract man," but to "real, concrete historical man...
...Sometimes they even got angry, at least inside, perhaps because their very isolation created uneasiness...
...But political problems, and problems of war and'weapons, would remain...
...Defining Christian politics as still the art of the possible, they are tempted to accept the present limits of possibility and lose the Utopian edge of Christian hope...
...How do we worship, pray and care for each other in the midst of war and injustice...
...I wonder if you and they and we might do it together...
...If all Catholics became pacifists tomorrow, there would surely be a major shift in international public opinion...
...Scientists of all sorts insist that such weapons are not, in fact, controllable, even when aimed "surgically" at military rather than civilian sites...
...idealists blame their own failure to convince the public or influence the democratic process on the realists...
...Realists are more concerned with effectiveness than purity...
...Prayer is important, and education on the issues is important...
...It is also a pastoral question: how do we as a community help one another face and resolve these questions...
...5. Revise current approaches to the permanent diaconate and to lay ministry to give highest priority not to internal church work but to work in politics, business, culture, and local community development...
...Few of us in any camp will be altogether pleased with our answer...
...and third, you should develop pastoral programs that will deepen, if not broaden, the agreement, encourage conversation about the differences, and promote peacemaking at all levels of the Catholic community...
...To suggest that all of us together might ask how we are being peacemakers in our various works, including religious works, might be a little more appropriate...
...So daring, for example, are pacifists' ideas, and so dramatically personal is their commitment, that they sometimes come to believe they have the answer and are called to teach and instruct the rest of the church...
...is such isolation a badge of honor or is it perhaps a way of justifying powerlessness and failure...
...What they need is not your repeated insistence that there are problems, but the love and support which will enable them to overcome defeatism and privatism, and to face the problems with people who care about them...
...to encourage them to proceed in an unconscious and self-serving surrender to the status quo is simply unChristian...
...Short of the Kingdom of God, they all arise from the question that has always plagued people with ideals, or ideas, when they confront the practical order: what is to be done...
...Catholicism shares in what Richard Neuhaus calls the "culture forming task...
...I doubt Philip Berrigan or Bryan Hehir or you bishops can do that alone...
...7. Begin plans for a national pastoral council to focus on the church's peacemaking mission...
...We need new political choices in the United States, and they must transcend the categories of the past...
...Similarly, I gather that we Catholics had our fill of ecclesiolog-ical consensus after Vatican I and are learning now to live with some degree of variety based on differing experiences of faith and life...
...In short, Catholics agree that this is the central moral issue of American citizenship...
...On the other hand, they also want to speak in a language that will be understood by wider publics and they want to avoid placing unfair burdens on the consciences of their own members engaged in wider societal processes...
...In short, I doubt there are any single answers to the question: "what is to be done...
...The church should use its own networks, and its ties with sister churches, to give an honest picture of the conditions in other countries and broaden the horizons of American consciousness...
...Rather, I think you should do three things...
...As churchmen, you may worry that either way you will have another Humanae Vitae on your hands...
...Such actions would be (almost) unthinkable today...
...as Americans lacking a sense of common interests, we pursue private interests, even religious ones...
...But that doesn't mean I'm ready to move toward excommunication...
...Can we not make a positive contribution to public debate or must we be simply mindless supporters of tired liberalism or self-serving conservatism...
...Quite the contrary...
...Like the pacifists, too, they have their occupational hazards...
...There is even more precise agreement than that...
...Somebody, somewhere, has to say there is a good of us all that transcends our private good...
...During the Vietnam war, for example, when many peace leaders wanted not only to be right but also to be effective, they found themselves using new languages - just-war language with bishops, the language of constitutional procedure, national' ideals, and national interest with wider publics...
...Instead he said some fairly clear things: that people should love God and one another, and practice some fairly simple virtues of poverty of spirit, meekness, patience, and humility...
...I'm not sure that would be fruitful...
...DAVID J. OBRIEN teaches history at the College of the Holy Cross in...
...If you come down moderate, allowing deterrence and prayerfully awaiting negotiated disarmament, you will lose fewer persons, but they will be among your most dedicated, hard-working followers...
...find new and more equitable policies dealing with world resources...
...If you come down pacifist, more or less, and choose the path of "prophetic witness," you may lost the respect and allegiance of millions who disagree, and not all of them will be simply selfish, or super-patriotic...
...Whatever differences there may be regarding geopolitics and nuclear strategy, all agree that justice is the way to peace...
...In the course of preparing a pastoral letter on peace, I'm sure you are getting a lot of it...
...Yet the church as a whole should avoid the temptation to adopt a uniform position of prophetic witness based on such pacifism...
...At Vatican II the Holy Spirit, through a few remarkable individuals, persuaded the bishops to admit that something more was needed, an entirely new attitude toward war...
...Within your committee you have men absolutely convinced of the immorality of nuclear weapons, so that it is a sin to possess them, and men equally convinced that only these weapons preserve what peace that we have...
...Looking at the range of your committee's expressed views, one thinks of Franklin Roosevelt locking the leaders of mutually exclusive factions in a room, telling them to come up with something all could support...
...Quite properly, they are struggling to be both leaders of the church and participants in the public dialogue...
...In recent months a growing number of bishops have joined Pax Christi and have spoken out against the arms race in pastoral letters ranging from explicitly pacifist statements through carefully phrased arguments for changes in public policy to messages deploring the dangers but urging patient acceptance of the need to maintain arms parity and prayer that peace will become possible...
...It seems to me that the three poles of your committee need, each other, and so do the communities they represent in the church...
...That is no small thing...
...Speaking on your behalf, Cardinal Krol supported the treaty before the Senate, but warned that if it did not turn out to be a step toward significant arms reduction, you, the bishops, would be froced to reevaluate your toleration of current deterrence strategies...
...Conclusion ALL OF US have reason to be grateful for the faith courage of those peace activists who have pushed and shoved the rest of us towards a clearer understanding of the dangers confronting the human community and of our responsibility for those dangers...
...I for one hope that you will not choose, and that you will refuse to choose as a matter of principle...
...Peacemaking is a personal responsibility to be peaceful, as we have always known, but it is also a political task, which, for reasons on which we agree, is a moral imperative of the highest priority...
...It can be done...
...So, what do we do with the disagreements...
...They have norms which limit the options: Christians cannot destroy a nation to save it, and they have reason to resist a peace achieved through the unilateral use of superior force...
...The right tells us to forget human rights...
...It is a personal question: how am I as a Christian to relate to this society...
...then they, not you or I, will find the ways to overcome them...
...insist on our responsibility to address them...
...But they don't, as Christians, know which particular peace program is going to work...
...Ministry within the church is and should be considered as ministry to the ministers, to the men and women who, in the world, are on the front line of the church's contemporary mission...
...Only by actively encouraging debate, by calling one another to focus on the demands of the Gospel, taking responsibility in and for the church, drawing on our own knowledge and experience, will we be able to enter the public arena with something to say worth listening to...
...Indeed, the present administration's determination to pursue a version of nuclear parity that seems to resemble the old superiority, its apparent willingness to use nuclear bargaining chips in international diplomacy, and reckless talk of acceptable limits of destruction seem to have triggered the current wave of episcopal concern...
...The gentle radicals ask you to reflect on the fate of the poor, the refugees, the victims of war...
...The continued growth of a strong peace movement, oriented in a pacifist direction, can only strengthen the church and the nation...
...And so your committee, including among its members: Bishop Gumbleton, .supporting an evangelical pacifism that would call the nation to a radical conversion from our reliance on weapons, Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, the chairman, looking for carefully phrased teaching which will speak to practical issues of public policy, Bishop John O'Connor, Vicar General for the Military Ordinariate, hoping to publicize the moderate side of church teaching, while the church prays and its members fulfill their civic responsibilities...
...In that wider society they may occasionally meet obviously sincere people apparently ready to do quite immoral things, and that must make them even more nervous...
...Bishops, at least, ought to tell their people to stop all that, bring them together to face the problem, make a judgment about it and find ways of acting appropriate to their circumstances...
...Personally, I'd find Berrigan a more proper speaker, and I can't help having reservations about Haig...
...Only the most positive and vigorous revival of political participation, intelligence, and imagination will make it even conceivable that we can do these things, much less do them with fairness and some degree of decency...
...3. Pastoral proposals THERE ARE many ways to do all this...
...Those who refused to do so were accused of being irresponsible...
...that they should hunger and thirst after justice and be peacemakers...
...Once on the effectiveness trail, they have "to get their hands dirty...
...He certainly did not say that there were no options other than those available at the time...
...Accordingly they want to foster a deeper commitment to peace, even though the minority of pacifists who predictably emerge sometimes make them very nervous...
...I insist on the words private and public as constitutive of our peacemaking consensus...
...You were not immune...
...we are not going to enter a monastery or join a revolutionary front...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 10
