Editorials

...AND IMPLEMENTATION The bishops know that their work cannot end with passage of the pastoral letter in Chicago...

...The bishops' pastoral falls in this last category...

...and one would have to admit that even this acceptance rests more on a resort to papal citation than on any well developed moral defense...

...In sum, the new section on deterrence has gained in relevance - and lost in bite...

...At one point, they call for unqualified Catholic opposition to the nuclear deterrent on the basis of the Gospel and moral law...

...But the comparison is explicit, extended, and very critical of the Soviet regime in a later section on the superpowers...

...This, we believe, should remain...

...At another point, they call for it because it will preserve the world from nuclear holocaust...

...But even as it stands, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response is a wise and challenging guide for the church's peacemaking effort, and a serious contribution to the national search for a way back from the brink of nuclear catastrophe...

...For a few friends of the Reagan administration deterrence is a dream of restoring the military edge which made Moscow blink at the time of the Cuban missile crisis...

...But the complaint that the pastoral is insufficiently' 'prophetic" has a substantive dimension as well...

...We would add our own observations on a few points...

...It should be deleted...

...In style a properly "prophetic" statement would be short, laced with ringing phrases, issuing assertions without elaboration, launching condemnations without qualification...

...For the time being, deterrence remains the worst method of staving off nuclear disaster except for all the others...

...Deterrence, however, means different things to different people...

...does not target the Soviet civilian population as such," it seems to us an advantage that the pastoral directly deal with this latest formulation of American targeting policy, even if it does invite skepticism...

...There is, of course, the terrible, truly unimaginable destructive power of tens of thousands of nuclear warheads...

...The problem is not that this position is held...

...This third and, we hope, final draft of the pastoral letter has already been the subject of many judgments...

...STILL SOME CHANGES...

...Let everyone, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless," wrote Augustine in The City of God, acknowledge this misery for what it is...

...What was surprising, however, was the reaction of a number of peace activists who seemed to put their usual skepticism toward the administration aside and dutifully take these claims at face value...

...The pastoral letter, it is said, is not "prophetic...

...It is too long, too slowed by quotations, too burdened with passages "traded off" among committee members of differing viewpoints...

...Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zechariah might sound different if they had been required to prophesy as a committee...

...They favor unilateral nuclear disarmament, and they evaluate the successive drafts of the pastoral largely by the one criterion of whether it moves toward or away from their own conviction...

...The document they have forged is not perfect...

...The comparison is implicit in a novel criterion of "comparative justice" that has been inserted into the document's otherwise traditional presentation of just-war theory, and we would agree that this passage is obscure and open to self-serving interpretations...

...And if anyone either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still," he warned...

...Nonetheless, the bishops' position strikes us as earned, based on a grappling with all the facts...

...A pastoral letter need not be written "for the ages," especially one dealing with the question of whether there will be any ' 'ages'' at all...

...The alternative would be to leave the letter open to the charge of inaccuracy or irrelevance...

...But the second argument does not follow, at least not automatically, from the first...

...but they remain suspicious of popular efforts to influence the delicate adjustments of politicians and arms controllers...

...For almost two years now they have been concentrating their minds on the horrible potential of nuclear weapons, the intricacies of deterrence theory, the developing moral teaching of the church, the demands of God's word...

...But the pastoral will in fact be stronger, not weaker, for making its moral claims accompanied by a totally unvarnished view of Soviet brutality and domination...

...Peace activists have objected to both of these additions as contributing to the anti-Soviet fears that fuel the arms race...

...Implementation of The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response will not be easy, cheap, or...

...3. The softening of the passage on "no first use" seems a reasonable concession to the concerns of Europeans, as well as to practical realities...

...Fifteen hundred years after Augustine the mental pain involved in thinking about war is all the greater...

...1. The new and early prominence that the third draft gives to the distinction between the bishops' teaching authority on matters of universal moral principles and their authority on questions of concrete prudential application has been taken by some to be a weakening of the document...

...Thomas J. Reese, writing in America and worried that the latest draft does not stress that deterrence puts us "in a damnably sinful situation," nonetheless admits, "Unilateral disarmament could just as likely increase the possibility of nuclear war as lessen it...

...But that did not make either a justifiable war or the human injustices that might or might not necessitate it any easier to contemplate...

...On the other hand, the deterrence section suffers from a void of moral theory, a void, it should be plainly said, largely attributable to its heavy (and no doubt inescapable) reliance on the pope's statement to the United Nations last June...

...Such a person has simply "lost human feeling...

...There may have been good theoretical objections to Krol's use of the word "tolerable" as well as his insistence that such toleration was contingent on progress toward disarmament...

...The SALT II testimony of Cardinal Krol, which treated deterrence as a lesser evil only morally "tolerable" while efforts for disarmament proceeded, has fallen victim to theologians' complaints that it let a good end (temporary nuclear stability) justify a bad means (the deterrent's inherent threat of indiscriminate or disproportionate killing...

...In many cases, the pastoral's critics simply believe that the nuclear deterrent is immoral, period...

...Still, it should be read and evaluated in a time frame larger than one session of Congress...

...Such is peacemaking.uch is peacemaking...

...The bishops have tried to say a decisive and definitive "no" to nuclear war, but without saying a definitive "no" to deterrence...

...One journalistic pseudo-Isaiah, complaining that the draft pastoral lacked a single memorable phrase, offered his own alternative, filled with memorable phrases like, "As Christians, therefore, we have decided to alter completely our priorities...

...One group of observers, for example, seem interested mainly in whether the pastoral is "for" or "against" the Reagan administration...

...Some say that is a contradiction...

...A newsletter should exchange ideas...

...Politics is politics, and except for the tactical shrewdness of this move, it should have surprised no one...

...Its implementation may depend ultimately on the commitment of individual bishops at the local level, but the conference as a whole must set an example...

...The Challenge of Peace is, first of all, a challenge to them...

...Politically and morally, the bishops' position is the best that can be done...

...It is precisely because The Challenge of Peace is a long, nuanced document that cannot be dismissed by expert opinion, on the one hand, and that holds out the potential of forging a new consensus in the nation's largest religious denomination, on the other, that it has been debated on the front pages of the daily papers instead of relegated to the church news...

...Although some readers have questioned the inclusion of the government's statement to the bishops that the U.S...

...But this raises questions about the church that we cannot explore here: Is the teaching role of our bishops to be exercised in the inspired manner of Isaiah...

...Reese says "no," while the conservative theologian Germain Grisez, in his criticism of the pastoral, effectively says "yes...

...If the third draft of the pastoral has been subject to a number of snap judgments, it has also received numerous criticisms of a more measured sort...

...2. The section on deterrence has been improved in certain ways...

...4. Comparisons between the United States and the Soviet Union have been introduced at two points in the document...

...And there are the brain-racking paradoxes of deterrence that seem to turn so many of our commonsense notions, including our moral ones, upside-down...

...Not that the advocates of "prophetic" statements have such matters in mind...

...The administration itself detonated this line of thought by ostentatiously and inaccurately hailing the latest draft as an endorsement of its own nuclear arms policies...

...They are thinking of public impact...

...The Challenge of Peace deserves to be accepted overwhelmingly by the American bishops...

...They have had to accommodate different views within their own committee...

...The pastoral itself admits the force of the argument against the deterrent...

...Does our faith require us to refuse all complicity with these weapons even if that not only weakens our defense of political values that do matter but also actually brings the holocaust nearer...

...While the bishops may repair this impression through the amending process and while Cardinal Bernardin and Archbishop Roach were right in correcting the administration's attempt to co-opt the pastoral, there is a larger point: the issues the letter addresses stretch back several administrations and will not go away tomorrow (or in November, 1984...

...The word is meant to indicate something of style, something of substance...

...Others, like the New York Times or the New Republic, feel that deterrence needs to be defended against the extravagances of our own strategists and technicians no less than against Soviet designs...

...Weakening or strengthening, we believe this recognition of the limits of episcopal authority and the extent of the individual Catholic's conscientious responsibility is absolutely proper...

...government, by European hierarchies, and by the Vatican...

...but both those formulations put a degree of moral and psychological pressure on deterrence that is absent in the pope's blander and unelaborated declaration...

...Finally there are those who see deterrence itself as generating its own instability and therefore the proper object of constant citizen vigilance as well as elite reform, indeed a system of ' 'peace of a sort'' that must be put under steady and deliberate moral pressure in the determination that no escape from its dangers will pass unexplored...

...All too often, the critics' position does not...

...If the bishops would like to emphasize that there is no unalterable relationship between internal regimes and external behavior - that the Athens which is democratic at home may practice imperialism abroad - fine and good...

...As soon as possible , a major conference or series of conferences should address the question of preaching on the pastoral letter...

...Are there not other more appropriate and equally authentic models by which today's church formulates its doctrine...

...A second line of criticism is equally superficial...

...it can be improved by amendment...

...The already stretched resources of the USCC's international justice and peace office should be reinforced...

...But too many of the "prophetic" critics of the bishops have not, at least not publicly, faced the question at all...

...The reason is not because, as some bishops have urged, the pastoral would go down better with a little bit of ' 'flag waving," but simply because these things are true...

...quick...

...Even the transforming of deterrence by nuclear "war-fighting" doctrines did not start with the Reagan administration...

...We say that there is no way to say a definitive "no" to deterrence without at least risking a "yes" to nuclear war...

...A good many of them, unfortunately, show little evidence of the "mental pain" that marks the bishops' own hard-wrought effort...

...they have been subject to appeals and arguments mounted by organized Catholic groups to the left and right, by the U.S...

...they have tried to respond to the suggestions voiced last November by fellow bishops...

...They were pushed in that direction, of course, by the substitution of the word "curb" for the word "halt" in a passage that had been taken, justifiably, as an endorsement of the nuclear freeze movement - the new terminology being promptly seized upon, with considerably less justification, by anti-freeze leaders as a repudiation of the freeze resolution now before Congress...

...Pronouncing a Catholic anathema on nuclear weapons will not make them go away, not even America's, let alone the Soviet Union's...

...Reading lists, discussion guides, audio-visual materials need to be developed - presumably from multiple sources - and reviewed...

...All this will demand a sensitivity to the consensus the pastoral represents, to the diversity of viewpoints it recognizes, and to the complexity of its subject matter...

...And they are forgetting that religious statements, filled with ringing phrases and sweeping condemnations, have been rolling forth from various church bodies for years - to the maximum emotional satisfaction of their authors and with minimum impression on the public...

...Others would not go that far, but do see deterrence as a crumbling barrier threatened by Soviet advances" and Western peaceniks and badly in need of vast technical refurbishment...

...Local diocesan efforts should be regularly surveyed...

...It could, in fact, increase the likelihood of their use...

...Indeed, some of the outstanding critics have never spelled out their case in full...

...Undoubtedly, the pastoral would have profited from some editorial blue-penciling...

...The Catholic bishops who have now produced the third draft of the pastoral letter on war and peace in a nuclear era have obviously not spared themselves any mental pain...

...its own moral acceptance of deterrence is ' 'strictly conditioned...