The good soldier Samaritan:

...This shift, it seems, took place under pressure of the pastoral letter...

...For though the doctrine calls for the use of no more force than is necessary, under these circumstances the maximum is necessary...

...IN SHORT ORDER, then, the baby would die, the Good Samaritan would die, and the original victim would die...

...And so the farmers, using the only currency they have, rice, hire seven samurai made masterless by the fortunes of war...

...When you see a film again and again under such circumstances, it affects you differently...

...Nor would strict pacifism bolstered by Gandhi's strategy of non-violent non-cooperation have helped matters much...

...There would not be a reasonable hope of victory, and more evil than good would obviously result from intervention...

...It is true that a spokesman like General LeMay would probably not offer that explanation on a Catholic campus today...

...But actually, it's not...

...Clark's statement and others like it from Mr...

...For if Bishop O'Connor wishes to bring up an example like this as a metaphor of the actual situation that confronts us in all its terrible complexity, it's obvious that we can't think in terms of a John Wayne-style intervention, wading in with a Semitic shillelagh to whale the tar out of the perpetrators...

...Benning, for example, I saw some lesser John Wayne epic in Columbus, Georgia, and I remember reaching up and running my thumb over the winged parachute badge on the breast of my Ike jacket and feeling a warm glow...

...And, above all else, they were pacifists...

...And, finally, there were a lot more Indians than British in India...

...WHAT AM I getting so worked up about then...

...Thus he wouldn't be in a position to give succor to the first victim, and, worse yet, he might rouse the robbers to such a pitch of fury that they would not only beat and rob but actually kill one or both of them...

...Yes, the bishops are worried about masses of people dying-is that unreasonable...

...Tactical' nuclear weapons or other nuclear weapons if understood as not weapons of massive destruction: Perhaps.''' (Emphasis Bishop O'Connor's...

...In fact there are causes in which I might feel obligated to kill...

...The key conclusion he put this way in good old-fashioned catechetical style: "Can the use of nuclear weapons ever be justified...

...The men of the village hold a despairing council and then go to consult an old man who lives apart, a wise elder who has seen more of the world than they...

...In the meantime the common people struggle to survive, and rice is more valuable than gold...

...If I had agonized over my pacifism, however, they had not...

...I also disagree with Gandhi when he said that the use of force makes you like your oppressor...

...In these circumstances, then, two of the conditions necessary for a just war would not be fulfilled...

...Bad public relations...

...If ever there was a movie made that more perfectly illustrated the worth of the just-war theory, I've yet to see it...

...And the men of the village-after they gave up all their rice, whichever wives and daughters caught the brigands' fancy, and whatever else these brutal and rapacious men might have wanted-would have at so dear a price bought not more than a respite from death...

...But the rest of these surpassingly bright boys and girls demurred, realizing that they had no ready answer...

...How many people do you know who have read the drafts of the pastoral letter-any of them...

...Certainly, fervently, I don't want to see my two little daughters perish as did hundreds of little Japanese girls at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or little Chinese girls at Nanking), but, as a Christian, I'm still more horrified at the prospect of being a party to, and assenting with my silence to, preparations to kill millions of little Russian girls...

...Do you see anything else you might like...

...FINALLY, LET'S consider another way of intervening, a way that could be most effective-could be-even if the Good Samaritan is alone, unarmed, feeble, and the forces ranged against him are a dozen fierce robbers armed to the teeth...

...But when our Good Samaritan takes hold of that baby and steels himself to kill it, he not only becomes like the robbers, he becomes far worse...

...There was nothing personal about all of this, naturally...

...For they would have succumbed to starvation soon enough unless their de-spoilers happened to be an unusually enlighted band of robbers willing to leave them enough rice to plant and live on to ensure the next crop...

...Our Japanese Gandhi would also have been up against a quite different foe...

...He's a man whom I honor for his bravery as a soldier, but he is a man, nonetheless, who, as the leader of the fire bomb assaults on Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka, bears a major share of responsibility for the slaughter of, not a dozen or so, but thousands of babies-and not by a quick blow to the head either but by burning them to death...

...And so if Gandhi's methods had been tried in this unnamed village, death would have come swiftly instead of slowly, and it would have been just as anonymous...

...Of course, if it seemed that they were indeed out to kill their victim to begin with, then the right thing could well be to intervene, despite the risk to self, with the hope of somehow preventing this from happening...

...In his famous statement about everything changing with the splitting of the atom but man's way of thinking, Einstein was, in effect, calling for that change...

...Weinberger put an end to a certain ambiguity in official explanations of our nuclear strategy, although not necessarily in the strategy itself...

...Of course, it is not meant to come as a comfort to the Leningrad mother...

...They tore it open-and found copies of Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, the two great encyclicals on reforming the social order...

...Four robbers armed with clubs are assaulting the victim...

...Now a number of critics of the bishops' pastoral, including some whom Bishop O'Connor was addressing, have linked the bishops with Jonathan Schell's concern about planetary destruction and accused them of materialism, of believing in survival at no matter what cost to spiritual values, in short of holding "better Red than dead...

...At least that is true of all those whose views, expressed at that same meeting last October, were collected with Bishop O'Connor's in the booklet Justice and War in the Nuclear Age...

...The British, after all, subscribed to principles...

...In his admirable and, I think, often unfairly reviewed book In Defense of Life, he gave a fine summary of what the church had said on nuclear war up till that point, (1981) and went on to draw some conclusions...

...But the bishops are more concerned about killing...

...How well armed are they...

...Well," I went on, with a slightly malicious inflection that a good religious and dedicated missionary should have eschewed, "what should the farmers have done...

...And this is the viewing that made me think of Bishop O' Connor...

...At any rate, after a few awkward moments, somebody ventured the response that taking up arms under such circumstances didn't conflict with pacifism since it was a matter of fighting against imperialistic aggression...

...But from now on we run into trouble...

...How many sermons have you heard on it?letter-any of them...

...Kurosawa's samurai and peasants fighting in a just cause- fighting for their lives, fighting to prevent helpless women and children from falling into the hands of cruel and vicious men-did not thereby become cruel and vicious men themselves...

...3. Finally, if counter-city warfare is abhorrent to these concerned critics of the pastoral why did it take the advent of the pastoral letter to provoke them into organized action...

...He answered with a distinction...

...Seven Samurai was released in April of 1954, a time when I, a passed-over Pfc., happened to be in Japan at government expense, having returned from Korea the previous fall with my regiment, the 187th Airborne commanded by then Brigadier General William Westmoreland...

...But that's not the Gospel example...

...They are against a particular use of lethal force...

...Indeed they had...

...A farming village, repeatedly victimized by a band of vicious robbers, learns that the robbers intend to attack again, at harvest time...

...In the course of their rampage, they finally made their way down to the cellar, and over in a corner they found an old unopened cobweb-covered packing case with "Roma" stamped on it...

...What would I have done had I been a farmer in that village, even a Christian farmer...

...Just look around, take your time...

...If they did, however, all the Good Samaritan would have to do would be to rush over to the women and children, snatch a baby from a mother's arms, grasp it by the ankles, and threaten to dash out its brains against the nearest rock unless the robbers immediately ceased and desisted...

...If he intervenes, he must use maximum force, probably lethal force, in order to have any chance of victory...

...It is a terrible evil that their lives were cut short...

...And even if you don't know your movies and, as a Catholic liberal, have far more serious things on your mind than movies, I suggest, nonetheless, that there is some merit in bringing this one to your attention at this particular time...

...When you ask questions, no matter how well prepared the soil, you take a certain risk...

...Most of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust would probably be dead now...

...How many robbers are there...

...Let me conclude by putting in question form some of the things that have bothered me: 1. Why have so many critics persisted in accusing the bishops, at least by implication but not always by implication, of having rejected the just-war theory when even a cursory reading of the various drafts of the pastoral should make clear that, even though The Challenge of Peace certainly honors the pacifist tradition and staunchly defends its legitimacy, nonetheless, the tradition that lies behind those specific recommendations that these critics take exception to is not pacifism but rigorously applied just-war theory...

...As it turned out I had to wait ten years to see Seven Samurai, and in the twenty years since, I've seen it three more times, the latest just last month in a hushed upper Broadway theater where, nearly thirty years after it was made, it had a run, all three-and-a-half hours of it, of six weeks...

...Neatly tucked into a parenthesis...

...Now I'm sure that this is not the kind of intervention that Bishop O'Connor had in mind, but whatever the incidental imperfections my example might have, as a rough analogy it will do nicely...

...In a justly celebrated statement-highlighted in Richard Attenborough's superb movie-Gandhi said that there were causes in which he was prepared to die but there were no causes in which he was prepared to kill...

...If you know your movies, you must have realized quite soon that I was describing Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa's much imitated but never equaled masterpiece...

...Just as the Soviets, if their leaders really are the perverse idealists that some members of the current administration make them out to be, might someday decide that they can spare some thirty or forty million comrades for the sake of the final triumph of Communism, so the robbers might not have been that tender towards their offspring...

...We are talking about a willingness to restage Herod the Great's masterpiece: the Slaughter of the Innocents...

...But what has to be stressed here, however, is that the Good Samaritan's strategy is wrong not merely because it may well prove to be inefficacious and bring about the death of three people, but because it involves the intention to kill an innocent person...

...How many sermons have you heard on it...

...Very likely the Good Samaritan's gambit would not have worked...

...it is meant to come as a comfort to us...

...Let's take another example...

...If he intervenes in such circumstances, he's sure to lose and become a victim himself...

...In Philip Lawler's introduction to Justice and War in the Nuclear Age, he writes: ' 'If we reject the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (as all the authors in this volume do...

...Here's our daughters...

...Apart from catching onto a phrase or so in the draft letter, these critics were in gross error...

...For though I'm inclined to doubt that Bishop John J. O'Connor, vicar general of the Military Ordinariate, ever saw Kurosawa's film, I think he'd like it very much...

...And it would also be a good idea for bishops and pastors to go down into the cellar and start unpacking...

...Our Samaritan is warlike enough, but he's all by himself...

...A FILM, A FABLE, & THE PASTORAL LETTER The good soldier Samaritan MICHAEL GALLAGHER IT'S THE Sengoku or "warring countries" era in Japanese history, the late sixteenth century, a period when there has been no functioning central authority for more than two centuries, and Japan is torn by feudal wars, local lords contending one against another to increase the size of their fief-doms...

...There was no rail system to give him mobility, and no mass media to make what happened in a single village in India today frontpage news in London tomorrow, both of these boons, ironically enough, gifts of the conquerer...

...The bishops are not against the use of force, even lethal force...

...But am I beating a dead horse here...

...Strategic nuclear weapons if understood as weapons of massive destruction: No...

...I part company with Gandhi there...

...Even if there had been a potential Gandhi in that little village, he would have lacked all the advantage that Gandhi had...

...There are causes in which I am prepared to kill...

...Beyond being a Jesuit, there was a further significant difference to my circumstances in 1964...

...When I saw Seven Samurai ten years later at a Kurosawa festival in Tokyo, however, I was a Jesuit seminarian and already the pacifist of sorts that I remain, but, still, this magnificent film moved me very much...

...He is directing his force, morever, against those who are directly responsible for the unjust aggression, a very important point...

...Here's our wives...

...One young farmer, however, who lost not only his rice to the robbers in the last raid but a beloved wife, has had enough...

...No problem at all in verifying this condition for the just use of force...

...They might have been highly selective in applying them when dealing with lesser breeds without the law, but the principles were there, nonetheless, highly inconvenient baggage for a conquerer once the wogs started going to Cambridge and Oxford and became aware that British superiority had an Achilles heel...

...I taught one day a week at the University of Tokyo and so was in close contact with the creme de la creme of Japanese youth...

...The Japanese educational system, much like our own, stresses conformity and neglects the Socratic approach...

...The cause in which the Good Samaritan might intervene with force is obviously a just cause...

...I was surrounded by pacifists in the course of my work-pacifists pure as the driven snow, not temporizers like myself...

...Yes, the bishops are worried about planetary destruction- shouldn't they be...

...Official explanations have changed...

...More specifically, it made me think of a talk Bishop O'Connor gave last October to a group of Catholics who apparently felt that the first two drafts of the bishops' pastoral letter on nuclear weapons represented a shocking departure from Catholic thinking in the area of war and peace...

...So there you have it...

...An innocent man is being beaten and robbed, the victim of a vicious, unprovoked assault...

...The just-war doctrine would, as I see it, allow him to intervene...

...But when robbers become that enlightened they're no longer called robbers but landlords...

...Counter-city warfare, after all, long ago became as American as apple pie...

...The robbers would have to have their wives and children with them...

...What force does he have at his disposal...

...For strict pacifism under these circumstances would have entailed exactly what I had said...

...What do I say when Bishop O'Connor puts to me, so the speak, the following dilemma as enunciated before that group: "I am personally haunted by the question: 'What would the Good Samaritan have done if he had arrived as the traveler was being attacked?' Would he have not intervened with force-abstaining from helping the man...

...Will the bishops' critics wait this one out, too, and forcefully voice their abhorrence of the immoral potential of current' 'counter-force' ' strategies only when the government is ready to take its official explanation elsewhere...

...Especially if the Good Samaritan, instead of grabbing the son of the robber chief, had been unlucky enough to snatch up somebody's else's worthless daughter...

...How formidable is our Good Samaritan...

...The young paratrooper, the relatively young Jesuit seminarian-both have given way to the family man past fifty, the father of two young daughters...

...Bishop O'Connor, to give him full credit, has been much more forthcoming...

...It's not enough to have the correct answers tucked away somewhere or other...

...A profound silence greeted my Jesuitical query...

...Well, do you remember the perhaps apocryphal story of a mob of rabidly anti-clerical workers and peasants in some Latin country who broke into the cathedral and indulged in an orgy of destruction and sacrilege...

...And maybe - but I'm not really sure - our nuclear strategy has changed...

...If these critics of the pastoral who also abhor counter-city warfare had anything to do with this shift, it must have been an exercise in'' quiet diplomacy...

...They were so smug about it, in fact, that they got under my skin...

...Catholic campuses have changed...

...How tough are they...

...The advice fills them with dismay...

...What then...

...National Security Adviser William P. Clark has declared that Soviet civilian populations are no longer targeted "as such," which must come as a great comfort to the mother in Leningrad nursing her baby...

...Prevent an injustice from being done and save the victim from further injury...

...So one day, I put it to them: "Look," I said, "you've all seen Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, haven't you...

...But the even greater evil is not simply that the six million are dead-or that those lives were cut short, as they would have been, say, by a plague or famine-but that thousands and thousands of people, most of them at least nominal Christians, killed them, and millions of others, not a few of them fervent Christians, managed to persuade themselves that all this was none of their business...

...Under their leadership the villagers learn the rudiments of the art of war, and when harvest time comes and the robbers strike, samurai and farmers, fighting from prepared positions, destroy the band in a series of desperate, savage struggles...

...Or could it be that some of their public pronouncements as well as, I regret to say, Bishop O'Connor's homily on the Good Samaritan, have been a bit simplistic...

...If our Good Samaritan was indeed a tough customer, and if he had, moreover, six companions just as formidable, making Seven Samaritans, then I'd say, "Go ahead...

...It remains the same, of course...

...I tried to get in to see it at a little movie theatre in Beppu, Kyushu, but the crowd was too large, and I gave up...

...He angrily berates the others for their cowardice, and he finally prevails...

...ACTUALLY, had they thought to turn the question back on me, I wouldn't have had a ready answer either-if I were a strict pacifist, that is, and not one "of sorts...

...Let's consider those circumstances...

...For, though you might not know this, Bishop O'Connor and many of the critics of the pastoral letter acknowledge the immorality of city-busting, Mutually Assured Destruction, or whatever else you'd like to call it...

...In terms of the just-war doctrine, which I, too, revere, several answers are possible depending upon the circumstances...

...The question, given the mood of his audience, was obviously a rhetorical one...

...Which brings me to my third viewing of Seven Samurai, just last month...

...Not necessarily...

...To rout the robbers, he's going to have to attack without warning and inflict wounds on one or two of them that may well be fatal...

...2. If these critics are indeed at least as much opposed to counter-city warfare as they are to the pastoral letter, why is this so little known...

...And make no mistake about it, the intention to do just this again if need be-on a scale so vast as to be literally unconceivable-is the sine qua non of the balance of terror...

...Our Samaritan has a sword...

...And, as happens in Japan, we all pretended that the question hadn't really been asked and went on to other things...

...I saw it, moreover, not only as an elegy to the warrior class but also to ordinary men who take up arms fearfully and fight bravely for their homes and families...

...But the bishops' third draft has already noted the new official position and found it as wanting in some if not all the ways as the old city-busting doctrine...

...Go out and hire the samurai, learn from them, fight alongside them, and, once victory was attained, mourn the brave dead--including four of the seven, who, as befits leaders, lost far more of their number proportionally than did the farmers-and then get on with life, starting with planting a new crop...

...Lay on, Good Samaritan...

...It's you who change...

...The consequences of an unsuccessful resistance would be massacre...

...It's essential, all the more essential in times of grave crisis, to have them all out there on the table where everybody can see them-even if some of the answers don't happen to be convenient for your particular political or social stance...

...Today, I'm sure, most of them are making a lot more money than I, working for Sony, Mitsubishi, and Hitachi or moving up steadily in government service, but in those days they professed to be Marxist in outlook, radical in politics, and, of course, anti-American...

...And so, however attractive might be the images of the Seven Samurai and of the Good Samaritan as John Wayne, I think it's best we put them aside when we start talking about something as complex and awful as nuclear war...

...A few days after I had completed jump school at Ft...

...General LeMay explained it all to my parents and me on the campus of John Carroll University one halcyon June afternoon in 1952...

...He tells them to hire samurai to defend the village...

...Whatever backing and filling there has been in government policy statements recently-and more about that later-this threatened slaughter has been at the heart of basic American nuclear strategy since the day of Curtis Le May, who, as the commander of the Strategic Air Command, happened to be the principal speaker at my graduation from John Carroll University in 1952...

...One condition would have to be met, however, before the Good Samaritan could use this strategy...

...Should they just have said to the robbers when they came riding into the village, 'Here you are, here's our rice...

...Well, I hope that I would have had the cpurage to do exactly what the young farmer did...

...I don't know exactly how Seven Samurai would have hit me had I managed to outwait the crowd that spring afternoon in Beppu, but since I was immensely proud of being a paratrooper-an accomplishment that made up for having been president of the Little Theater Society in college-I have a pretty good idea...

...But suppose he's all by himself and not especially warlike...