Church authority & state power:

...But in trying to frame a Christian approach to the problem of nuclear arms the bishops were clearly not echoing the will of those in political authority...

...Similarly, much of the support came from people who would have opposed such a statement...

...Church authority has, ever since Con-stantine, had an ambiguous relationship to power...

...It has been influenced in good as well as bad ways by the Zeitgeist, and it has been a good as well as a bad influence...

...There have been important counter-trends: the monastic movement, Catholic Franciscanism, the Orthodox non-possessors, the Anabaptists...

...The excitement provoked by the bishops' statement reflects the ambiguous nature of church authority...

...Sometimes the light we hope for is reflected in official statements and deeds...

...It also encouraged those secular peace activists who thought of the Catholic church the way many outside of it still do, as a bunch of lockstep automatons whose leaders deliver the vote, bodies, money, arms, or whatever else is needed on the shores of Rome's latest offensive...

...Or to threaten it even while you fully intended never to carry out the threat...

...Many Catholics dealt that way with Humanae Vitae, just as the right continues to ignore Rome's social teachings...

...The truth, of course, is that Catholic hawks will deal with whatever the bishops say about nuclear arms the way Catholic doves dealt with many just war arguments in the past: by a selective choice of church statements, or by ignoring those aspects of church teaching which conflict with one's deeply held convictions...

...The pastoral will no doubt bristle with Constantinian and non-Constantinian footnotes...

...The tension between these traditions has been fruitful, but in our time it has to take new forms...

...Much of the opposition to earlier drafts came from people who would have supported a statement endorsing U.S...

...It has also upheld, with just as much authority (if authority is what we hope to find in official church statements) the right to own slaves, the obligation to imprison religious dissidents, the right to torture...

...It was indeed funny to see people who insisted on Catholic obedience to the pope and bishops where Humanae Vitae was concerned get spooked at the thought that the bishops might throw a wild curve here, but it is just as funny to see people who feel the right to dissent from Humanae Vitae suddenly become defenders of episcopal authority...

...The nation-state, an abstraction of purely human design, has always mattered more than the God-given life of the particular person for whom Christ died...

...The state is our last great idol, and bishops are not its only worshipers...

...It is hard to reconcile moral absolutism about abortion with the careful qualifying which was present even in the earlier statements . Would it be all right, for example, to threaten abortion in order to achieve a good end...

...Charles Williams once wrote something to the effect that the Lord commanded altars to be built so that he could send down the fire somewhere else...

...It isn't really fair to object to the fact that bishops can be influenced by the right, and then hope that they will be influenced by the left...

...But the statement, despite all that, at least acknowledges the existence of moral imperatives which can't be left to generals and politicians...

...Apart from all the obvious whose-ox-is-gored uses of argument, this implies that the church, at least in the person of its bishops, has little intrinsic authority to address issues of public importance, but exists (or its public statements exist) to be used in the service of positions which have been staked out independently of bishops or other church officials...

...both are, finally, Constantinian...

...Most Christians find themselves somewhere in between the Constantinians and the counter-traditions, confused by a transition which is not yet complete and may never be complete, part of the middle term in a dialectic which is likely to go on and take new forms...

...sometimes it is not...

...It isn't prophetic, but it is a little better than no statement at all...

...it will be used by right and left both, and ignored by many...

...It has been suggested that the stronger early statements resulted from criticism the bishops had received because of their willingness to condemn abortion, while remaining silent about the projected slaughter of post-natal life...

...Church authority can be like those altars...

...It has been pointed out by several commentators, and won't be elaborated on here, that people in and out of the Catholic church or other churches are willing to use clerical authority to endorse any position which agrees with their own, and are just as quick to criticize churchmen for moving outside of their areas of competence wherever a disagreement occurs...

...One's hope has to be for the long haul: it is a hope that the Gospel and sacraments will, despite everything, shine in some lives, give hope, and be the leavening influence which Jesus calls us all to be...

...The confusion reflected in all this is a sign of much deeper confusions, but even confusion is better than the certainties of those who have no doubts about the morality of the arms race...

...For most of its history Christianity was happy to find secular protection and endorsement...

...There are still many Christians who would not agree with Dorothy Day's remark that the fall of the papal states was an act of divine providence, or the statements by some Russian bishops that the end of Czarist Russia stripped the church of a false authority to reveal, in the suffering church that remains, a Christian mystery...

...Whichever side of the debate one is on, some important lessons can be learned from the expectations this pastoral letter raised...

...Those who see a contradiction between the moral absolutism of the Catholic stand on abortion and its toleration of nuclear arms will go on seeing a contradiction, and they won't be wrong...

...the administration would have been much happier if they had said nothing at all...

...It may be unfortunate that the bishops find what was done to hundreds of thousands of people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki less horrible than what is done during an abortion, but it is not surprising...

...They were convened not by bishops or by the pope, but by the emperor, and emperors used them politically...

...Cardinal Bernardin said that the proposed letter "has not really lost its prophetic character or its basic moral thrust," but it is hard to imagine a prophet making a statement like that...

...military policy, and in fact this latest draft has received kind words from the Reagan administration and from American Enterprise Institute's Michael Novak...

...Where it is allied with worldly authority and majority approval it is even likely to be...

...A little...

...I remember my excitement when in my early teens I first read the Catholic Worker's selections from papal and episcopal teaching on social justice...

...It is not necessarily hypocritical to be unhappy when bishops disagree with you and happy when they agree, but it is blind...

...The bishops moved away from a position which seemed to call for an immediate halt to the arms race to one which urges such a halt as a goal, and there are similar backings-away from what was, in the second draft, a stronger condemnation of the possession and possible use of nuclear weapons...

...Although there were church councils before the ones we call "ecumenical," those councils were the ones which formed our approach to Christol-ogy and ecclesiology...

...The "People's church" in Nicaragua and the Moral Majority are not really very far apart...

...With the Enlightenment and the triumph of a secular understanding of government, the church has been freed (in some quarters most reluctantly) from its alliance with coercive power...

...Church authority is neither to be trusted automatically, or automatically distrusted...

...A further reading of church history revealed what had been left out...

...It is blind to our own uses of authority, our own selective readings, our Catholic version of the fundamentalists' favorite sport, proof-texting...

...The bishops' pastoral letter in its final form will probably reflect this confusion, and now that the influence of the right has been felt it will have less impact than it did before...

...Of several minds: John Garvey THE AMBIGUOUS PASTORAL CHURCH AUTHORITY & STATE POWER THERE ARE those who will be disappointed in the third, watered-down draft of the pastoral letter which will be offered for the approval of the American Catholic bishops in May, and I see their point...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...The church has upheld the dignity of labor, the right to a just wage, the duty of peacemaking and hospitality...

...The earlier drafts of the pastoral letter inspired some writers to claim that the Catholic church was entering the ranks of the historic peace churches...