Peace in a Nuclear Age

...Cathy Adlesic valiantly addresses the success the bishops have had in placing the "task of peace-making centrally in the ministry of the church...

...It is also not likely, under the present pope, that such efforts will involve much time spent with the Gospels because in that direction lies the temptation of Christian pacifism and u-nilateral nuclear disarmament...

...He also objects (as do many others including this reviewer and some bishops) to the distinction which accepts nonviolence as an option for individual persons but excludes it as an option for the community...

...Augustine appeared on the scene to argue the case of necesskas, as Catholic leaders have done ever since...

...Still, one might detect the cultural relics of the holy war in the cold war attitudes of some American Catholics and Christian fundamentalists...

...The bishops" new committee, established at their 1985 general meeting to assess the moral status of deterrence, might find a careful reading of these essays helpful in correcting some of the mistakes made in their earlier effort...

...The just-war argument has taken several forms in the history of Catholic theology," says the pastoral (5.82), "but [the] Augustinian insight is its central promise...

...Augustine mediated a "middle ground in which the legitimate claims and inherent limits of both the civil and the religious traditions were recognized . . . Necessitas was an inescapable dimension of living in a world that acknowledged Christian principles and yet remained imperfect...

...Christian pacifism could be moribund until revived by the Waldenses in the twelfth century and taken up during and after the Reformation by the "historic peace" churches...

...Protestant (Alan Geyer...

...The bishops, Quesnell argues, did not ask the kind of questions that would have enabled them to grasp and convey the central thrust of the Gospel vision of peace...

...This is readily apparent from any careful reading of the pastoral letter...

...No mention here that one of the forms was able to justify the holy wars of the Crusades, probably because, as Russell remarks, crusading is no longer morally viable...

...Luttwak seems to think that the Christian revelation forbids the taking of life...

...After Constantine embraced the faith and Christians began to enter the mainstream of the Roman military culture,' killing in defense of the empire became acceptable...

...The efforts have been praiseworthy but few Catholics in the pews can honestly say the task has been accomplished...

...death from nuclear war is in the future and may never come...

...meanwhile, Catholics of college age are flocking to the military academies...

...For Catholics, conscientious objection to war was "morally indefensible" until the Second Vatican Council...

...What is and promises for some time to be central in the ministry of the American church is the protection of fetal life...

...A number of essays in this collection other than those mentioned are assessments of the pastoral letter from the perspective of other contemporary faiths, e.g...

...But evidently the bishops are not yet agreed on what kind of peace to advocate...

...The arguments for Christian participation in war that Tertullian had rejected' 'are here put forth (Augustine's letter to the Roman general, Boniface) as precedents for justifying such action...

...Erich Segal, reviewing Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians in Book World (Feb...

...Such a reappraisal, they wrote, would require "a developed theology of peace which should ground the task of peacemaking solidly in the biblical vision of the kingdom of God" and "place it centrally in the ministry of the church...

...One can safely assume, however, that future episcopal efforts to refine and extend Catholic teaching on war will not concentrate exclusively on just-war theories...

...They offered the pastoral letter as a' 'first step" and began with "a sketch of the biblical conception of peace...

...One prominent archbishop has explained that fetuses are being killed now...

...Yoder holds this distinction to be without any scriptural or theological basis...

...and the historic peace churches (John Howard Yoder...

...Still, one would have hoped that peace advocacy could have gotten as much billing as the pro-life cause or the new and worthy campaign for "Economic Justice for All...

...Others are from Catholic commentators whose views are already well known such as Michael Novak, Bryan Hehir, Peter Henriot, George Weigel, and Francis Winter...

...No wonder one of the contributors to this volume, Edward N. Luttwak (a strategist, not a Scripture scholar) wondered why the bishops chose not "to regain a certain closeness with the original revelation but decided instead to intrude into the complicated domain of strategy, deterrence, and arms control...

...For example, Quentin Quesnell's "Hermeneutical Prolegomena to a Pastoral Letter" suggests that the failure to make the biblical vision clearly relevant to the moral choices of the nuclear age was a failure of hermeneutics...

...Jewish (Arthur Waskow...

...Yoder's essay amounts to a critical exegesis of the pastoral letter which exquisitely faults the letter on its christol-ogy, ecclesiology, and historiography...

...Harakas, Geyer and James Boyle assess the moral acceptability of nuclear deterrence in ways that should interest the members of the bishops ad hoc committee on deterrence...

...In the twentieth century, the letter tells us, "papal teaching has used the logic of Augustine and Aquinas...

...A great deal of time and effort has gone into educational programs in Catholic colleges and universities and in certain dioceses...

...And so it did for the earliest Christian writers of the ante-Nicene period, Tertullian and Ori-gen especially...

...The biblical conception of peace as the bishops presented it made up the first substantive section of the pastoral letter (I A), "Peace and the Kingdom,'' but by the time the reader got to the sections dealing with "The Use of Nuclear Weapons" (II C) and "Deterrence in Principle and Practice" (II D) there was scarcely a glimpse of the biblical vision still around...

...That could also be said about the shaping of the Christian teaching on war...

...But then things changed...

...According to the pastoral letter the moral theory of the just war is still important...

...The essence of papal teaching on war today is the admonition, endlessly repeated, that the two superpowers and other nuclear states should get together to negotiate agreements to outlaw and eliminate nuclear weapons...

...Because of Augustine, Scripture could no longer "settle the issue of violence and war for the early Christian...

...That vision, according to Louis J. Swift ("Search the Scriptures") fell victim to "the political, social, and religious developments that were initiated by the advent of Constantine...

...Consequently, according to medievalist Frederick H. Russell ("The His425 torical Perspective of the Bishops' Letter"), the "just war became the only game in town...

...Edward Doherty In their 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, the Catholic bishops of the United States were responding to the challenge of Vatican II "to undertake a completely fresh reappraisal of war...

...Orthodox (Stanley Harakas...

...He is particularly severe on the letter's attempt to address the faith community, secular society, and government with the same moral discourse...

...8, 1987) calls Constantine's conversion "arguably the single most important fact in the shaping of the modem world...

...All of this is set forth in vivid detail in Parti, "The Tradition of the Church," of Charles Reid's collection of twenty-four essays, by and large the best of the half-dozen or more such collected commentaries on the 1983 pastoral letter...

...Many readers, of whom I am one, were disappointed...

...This statement suggests that Catholic teaching today, unable or unwilling to make sense of revelation, consists mainly of papal and conciliar statements about discrimination and proportionality...