Heritage abandoned?
Steinfels, Peter
THE HERITAGE ABANDONED? GEORGE WEIGEL EXPLAINS IT ALL PETER STEINFELS There is a conventional view of American Catholic thinking on questions of war and peace. It goes something like this:...
...policy and policy makers, there is virtually nothing demonstrating that American Catholic elites had actually concluded the U.S...
...So finally he can sum up, in forlorn tone, the whole awful decline from the heights of John Courtney Murray:' 'From America as Proposition, to America as Amerika, to America as Antichrist, to America as whore: all in one generation...
...The operating assumptions of those journals toward, say, participation in American electoral politics were utterly different from those of the extreme New Left, and Commonweal regularly published sharp criticism of what could rightly be called anti-Amerika currents of thought...
...206 and 215, for example, there are twenty-eight references to Commonweal articles...
...Another decade of uneasiness with U.S...
...Critical impulses were subordinated to a nationalism that sprang from a combination of the immigrants' enthusiasm for their new land and insecurity about their place in it...
...In numerous cases, articles running against his argument appear in proximity to articles he does cite...
...For that down-to-earth political concept, Catholic elites had "substituted a host of confusions," from shalom, the full peace of Christ, to personal conversion and psychological harmony, even to New Left-derived visions of post-revolutionary Utopia...
...He begins a paragraph, 11 September 1987: 491 "In a similar vein," and then cites an economic explanation of the Vietnam war which was not, in fact, at all "in a similar vein" to what had preceded it...
...Now this was a view that probably every anti-war activist entertained in some moments of anger or frustration but which, outside of the Berrigans, very few fully embraced...
...Between pp...
...Despite shortcomings that the bishops themselves acknowledged, the letter — and the discussion it provoked — indicated a new, impressive confidence, competence, and maturity in the American church's approach to war-and-peace issues...
...In 1976, another Commonweal columnist, in Swiftian fashion, compared the American propensity for arming other nations to a social disease spread by a "hooker with...
...This point about the Spanish Civil War was peripheral to Weigel's thesis...
...11 September 1987: 487 This, as I said, is the conventional view of the matter...
...Weigel orchestrates his case not only by twisting the meaning of substantial essays like Schroth's...
...On one occasion, I found him making an important point by conveniently relying on the editorial treatment of a topic in one journal and neglecting the quite different treatment in the other journal...
...One would never know that Catholic critics of the Vietnam war were writing against the background of Cardinal Spellman's highly visible support of the war...
...But virtually none believed that the experiment had failed decisively, or that it should fail, which is what the sixties spelling "Amerika" was presumably about...
...with Nazi Germany...
...At the other end of the spectrum, a similar number of Weigel's references are hopeless misrepresentations: e.g., a column by Thomas Powers, said to ascribe the arms race to "an action-reaction cycle" spurred by the U.S., did no such thing...
...Following the Christmas bombing of Hanoi (the context goes unmentioned by Weigel), a Commonweal columnist quoted a sermon in which the Moron administration was linked to "the same spirit of Antichrist" that primitive Christians had opposed in the Roman state...
...Taken with a good deal more discrimination, however, the book may prove a boon in a dialogue that badly needs to take place...
...the third will be the subject of a separate article...
...My italics...
...Approximately 70 percent of the book traces the rise and decline of Catholic thinking on war and peace, and over two-thirds of that 70 percent is concerned with decline...
...He sees strategic defense systems as playing an essential role in facilitating arms reduction and protecting against nuclear terrorists or "outlaw-nations" as well as accidental war...
...Weigel points to some very real problems, and at the core of his book there is a crucial proposal for the future development of Catholic thinking on war and peace...
...And he provides a critical portrayal of the emergence of the bishops' pastoral letter...
...George Weigel shares the conservative and neoconservative view of international politics...
...Of these I find that only five provided an unques490: Commonweal tionably fair representation of the material referred to or quoted...
...no notion at all of hygiene...
...Stretching...
...The argument of Tranquillitas Ordinis has three prongs, one political, one historical, one theological...
...According to a report in the March 2 New Republic, this means countering "the influence of the left in U.S...
...The publisher of the Madison Foundation's newsletter is the husband of Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the foundation has received a $91,400 government grant to "raise the level of public debate," explains Weigel, on religion and foreign policy...
...According to Weigel, that certainly occurred, but all to the worse...
...Amidst racial conflict, urban rioting, assassinations, and prolonged war, there was a widespread feeling that the fault lines in American civilization went much deeper than the society had assumed a decade earlier...
...Eventually, however, the bishops condemned the war they had previously endorsed...
...As Weigel skips from article to article, briefly summarizing and quoting a highly charged phrase or sentence, insubtantial items are equated with major essays...
...The East-West conflict dominates all other issues, and the key to the East-West conflict is the inherently aggressive and expansionist character of the Soviet regime...
...He first writes that the view of the Viet Cong as independent of the North Vietnamese was a "recurring theme" in Catholic discussions of the war, then states that this assumption "dominated" the debate — although neither of the key Commonweal andAmerica editorials condemning the war, which he cites, makes that assumption...
...They were in thrall to third-world or New-Left perspectives, and minimized national obligation in favor of "global citizenship...
...Post-conciliar statements, by contrast, are subjected to severe scrutiny...
...The underlying premise that the Catholic heritage was "abandoned" rather than, say, "corrected" or "developed" rests heavily on the impression this technique gives that the material under consideration is essentially superficial...
...They could barely imagine any "morally appropriate use of military force," preferring a biblically literalist pacifism to classic just-war reasoning...
...He favors "linkage" of disarmament to progress on human rights and other East-West questions...
...The older Catholic thinking on war and peace was not a frail reed, mostly honored in the breech...
...Twenty-five of them allegedly illustrate two dimensions of the abandonment of the Catholic heritage, namely the abandonment of its anti-Communism and realism toward the Soviet Union and the rejection of its faith in the moral worthiness of the American experiment...
...Even where he is most off-target — and I will make no bones about how far off-target I believe he is — his accusations may provoke Catholic peace activists to some useful rethinking...
...For those not wishing to rely on my estimation of Weigel's bias, I suggest a simple test...
...Such readers are not likely to be overly curious about whether Weigel's account is actually true...
...or its government was "illegitimate...
...everything is flattened into a series of shrill, nagging points, nearly as indistinguishable as passing cars on an endless freight train...
...Many of the columns and essays that Weigel pigeonholes so brusquely were actually thoughtful and well-informed, and cannot be dismissed without an analysis that is not forthcoming in his book...
...It goes something like this: Throughout most of its history, the U.S...
...Weigel's use of evidence here is a case study in irresponsibility...
...Commonweal writers, and I dare say America writers too, may have feared that the American experiment might not succeed — as had John Courtney Murray himself, and in calmer times...
...Though he obviously does not disagree with a column by William Pfaff stressing the glaring bankruptcy of Lenin's revolutionary legacy in Russia, Pfaff did not "think through what such restiveness within Soviet elites might mean in terms of Western policy...
...Only the first two will occupy me here...
...With the help of two research assistants, Weigel has surveyed an imposing mass of literature...
...Schematization...
...Most decisively of all, picturing America as greedy, racist, violent, imperialist, paranoiac, or otherwise corrupt and deranged, they would conclude that the American experiment was not morally worthy...
...GEORGE WEIGEL EXPLAINS IT ALL PETER STEINFELS There is a conventional view of American Catholic thinking on questions of war and peace...
...policy but none bearing specifically on "delegitimation...
...It is a view shared by non-Catholics as well as Catholics, by many with significant reservations about the bishops' letter as well as many largely in agreement with it...
...A distinctive Catholic peace movement finally emerged in opposition to the war in Vietnam...
...Obviously a tremendous amount of work has gone into this aspect of the book...
...Weigel has already attracted a good number of conservative readers simply looking for ammunition in this famous "war of ideas" between left and right to which neoconservative field commanders like Peter Berger, Irving Kristol, and Michael Novak have been devoting their intellects...
...The reader who approaches Tranquillitas Ordinis suspecting a strong political spin on its theological argument will not be mistaken...
...Noting that only Commonweal and the Catholic Worker dissented from this support, Weigel adds that "both . . . seemed more perturbed by the prospects of a fascist Spain than by the possibility of a Soviet-leaning regime in Iberia...
...Schroth's article represented not a rejection of the American experiment but the very opposite, a passionate determination that it should succeed...
...In other instances, Weigel proceeds like a hanging judge, managing to pass negative sentences even on articles whose main point he dpes not question...
...The framework of traditional Catholic thinking about war and peace had been the ideal of tranquillitas ordinis — rightly ordered political community based on assent and, in modern times, reconciling conflicting interests through democracy...
...The reliability of Weigel' s historical account is no light matter, because these are no light accusations that he brings against the American Catholic elites...
...Weigel's formulations back and fill somewhat, but it is clear that he is charging Catholic intellectuals and religious with a root-and-branch rejection not just of American performance but of American promise: they became and "remain convinced of the fundamental moral dubiousness of the American experiment and experience...
...Selectivity...
...It is like an account of Carter's last years that left out the hostages in Iran...
...The pastoral is less a culmination of efforts to give life, at long last, to the Catholic heritage than it is a crystallization of that heritage's abandonment...
...New skepticism arose about the capacity of the nation to carry out its foreign policy skillfully and justly...
...Through World War II, the Cold War, and well into the Vietnam war years, Catholic attitudes appeared to be well represented by New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman, mili-tantly promoting an undifferentiated "crusade against Communism" and wholeheartedly supporting American military forces wherever they were engaged...
...And what can one make of a treatment of Catholic reaction to the conflicts in Central America that overlooks the four murdered churchwomen...
...The elites had turned away from a heritage of internationalism for neo-isolationism...
...But I would also like to attempt the more important task of seeing how Weigel's historical account affects the third, and most valuable, prong of his argument, the theological discussion of tranquillitas ordinis itself...
...Asweeping indictment, and Weigel repeats it, with slight variations, dozens of times throughout the book...
...Nonetheless , Weigel can write,'' Themes of delegitimation came to the fore in 1967" — and follow this with several paragraphs quoting material from Commonweal, all very critical of U.S...
...Weigel deftly refashions this, "America as Antichrist...
...also condemned the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...Some of this criticism is contained in essays Weigel cites but for other purposes...
...Weigel cites Com-monweaVi editorial responses to the Soviets' invasion of Afghanistan and the shooting down of KAL Flight 00...
...The fact that real adherence to just-war teaching, indeed even awareness of it, was much more limited in the earlier period than the later one is acknowledged but never genuinely factored into Weigel's comparison...
...Weigel almost never focuses on actual historical episodes or follows out a line of argument in detail...
...The political prong of Tranquillitas Ordinis is never frankly acknowledged, but it is evident to anyone even mildly conversant with current foreign policy debates...
...but the message was similar...
...A history seminar might have warned him about a number of other problems that af- feet not just these pages but his whole account: Double standard...
...This conclusion is nothing but Weigel's assertion by schema...
...Commonweal is mentioned early in the book, in connection with the Catholic press's support for Franco in the 1930s...
...foreign policy, above all with new waves of nuclear armaments, would precede the bishops' pastoral letter on war and peace...
...A few voices sounded different notes: Jesuit theologian John Ford protested the obliteration bombing of World War II...
...They became less concerned with totalitarianism, including the persecution of the church in Communist lands, and the Soviet threat to peace and justice than with dampening the fervor of anti-Communism...
...e.g., a report blamed for quoting some extravagent praise of Karl Marx "without criticism" actually was explicitly anti-Communist, anti-Soviet, and skeptical about the fulsome praise quoted...
...e.g., an article Weigel describes as "an essay on the flower children" was nothing of the sort, but instead argued a provocative case linking American violence to the self-assertiveness that was a national virtue...
...The quality of a meal is not assured by the number of ingredients, nor is historical accuracy guaranteed by the quantity of notes...
...There were numerous calls for "limits...
...All the more so when it comes in a highly detailed account, some five hundred pages long, and backed by 1500 reference notes...
...Indeed, articles cited to support one Weigel thesis frequently contain material — unmentioned, to be sure — contradicting some other Weigel thesis...
...Pre-Vatican II statements by the American bishops, despite obvious instances of wishful thinking and purely verbal solutions, receive the best possible reading...
...First, his idea of pushing beyond current polarizations appears to consist in accepting premises that can be described alternatively as neoconservative, Reaganite, or liberal interventionist, then suggesting their refinement, e.g., strategic defense systems are inevitable but should be developed in a "mutual or common security framework...
...With the Reagan administration, he wants to break ' 'the vicelike grip of arms control theory" in favor of genuine "arms reduction...
...All these techniques can be seen operating together in what Weigel himself proposes as the "decisive'' change in the outlook of American Catholic thinkers, their alleged loss of faith in the moral worthiness of America...
...P.S...
...Meanings, moreover, are frequently forced to fit the schema...
...Amerika.'" Then, finally, he has to admit, "That spelling does not appear in any of the essays from the prestige American Catholic press reviewed above...
...The sheer audacity of such an argument is challenging...
...Weigel is doing precisely what he accuses, with some justification, many peace activists of doing: using Catholic teaching to support specific prudential judgments that rest not on the teaching alone but on additional 11 September 1987: 489 "political" readings of fact and history...
...Although Weigel appears to be systematically citing texts from Commonweal and America to back his points, in reality he regularly ignores contradictory evidence appearing in those journals...
...Second, if one reads this book with an eye not only to the principles proposed but to the examples given (or omitted) and the sources cited, the congruence with either the policies of the White House or of Commentary magazine is overwhelming...
...arms manufacturers — an episode having lingering effects on Japanese politics even in 1987...
...divinity schools...
...church had little to say on such questions...
...I would like to hazard a guess in a further article...
...Besides a brief interpretive summary of "the heritage" from Augustine through Aquinas to the neo-Scholastics, Weigel surveys the American episcopacy's pre-Vatican II statements, the work of John Courtney Murray, and the discussions provoked by John XXIII' s Pacem in Terris and the Council's Gaudium et Spes...
...To indicate the end point of the change in Catholic attitudes, Weigel repeatedly uses the German spelling "Amerika," which the extreme New Left had employed to equate the U.S...
...Taken in this manner, Tranquillitas Ordinis will be ultimately destructive — destructive not so much of political positions that I would wish to defend and Weigel might not, but of the very goal he professes, to strengthen the "Catholic heritage" regarding 488: Commonweal issues of war and peace...
...What I found appalled me...
...This is what his hun-dreds of references primarily to America and Commonweal are supposed to document...
...Thus there is no examination of the extended internal debate in Commonweal that culminated in the magazine's shift from qualified support of the war in Vietnam to outright opposition, and only a cursory glance at the same process, which took place at a very different pace, at America...
...This is disingenuous...
...A close reader of the pages that follow in the book will notice that despite much quotation of bitter and sometimes (although not always) unjustified attacks on U.S...
...The message was not similar...
...Rather than undergoing genuine appropriation and development by the American church since Vatican II, this "classic Catholic heritage" actually peaked in the late fifties and early sixties with the writings of John Courtney Murray...
...Let interested readers check these three editorials in full (Jan...
...He would welcome a more receptive attitude toward the "discriminate and proportionate use of military force'' in regional conflicts, for countering terrorism, and defeating Marxist-Leninist guerrilla forces...
...Those who have heard the author at public meetings or even, like myself, engaged him in debate know him as an amiable, reasonable interlocutor, apparently serious about the requirements of civil discourse and Christian charity...
...Now this is a very serious accusation, and one notices that Weigel waffles occasionally by saying that the Catholic elites were open or tolerant or -vulnerable toward "anti-Amerika currents of thought," or that they would "countenance...
...Weigel believes these positions are not only consonant with Catholic thought on war and peace but flow naturally from it...
...It is Weigel who imposes, here as with many less vehement passages, those extreme meanings...
...Now along comes a book arguing that this view is completely backwards...
...He sketches six profiles of individuals influential in Catholic peace ranks: Dorothy Day, Gordon Zahn, Thomas Merton, the Berrigans, James Douglass, and J. Bryan Hehir...
...But it suggested something about his methods...
...Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (Oxford, $27.50) is the work of George Weigel, a neoconservative Catholic intellectual who has written a number of critiques of both the "peace bishops" and the pastoral letter...
...The bishops lagged behind both this movement and the shift in general Catholic opinion away from support of the war...
...He traces the "abandonment" of the heritage by Catholic elites during the years of controversy over Vietnam and, more recently, Central America...
...A great deal of it, however, is waste...
...A well-turned peroration — and it takes you a moment to realize that not a single one of those equations of America with Amerika, Antichrist, or whore, actually appeared in the material Weigel cites...
...I don't think that would earn Weigel a passing grade in a graduate history seminar...
...15,1980 -there were two major statements within a month on Af-ghanistan though Weigel chooses to quote only from (the — and Sept...
...For example, to illustrate declining Catholic faith in the moral worthiness of the American experiment, he sums up a 1972 Commonweal article by writing, "Raymond Schroth believed that Calley symbolized an America off course, intoxicated by power, and debased by a sense of manifest destiny that had made it abandon its respect for human life.'' In truth, Schroth had based his whole concern with My Lai on "what radical critics would deny, that the American nation is an organic whole . . . with deep spiritual resources, the deepest of which is respect — based on humanitarianism and Christian theology — for human rights and the dignity of every individual" (March 17, 1972...
...Since then it has been almost entirely abandoned by American Catholic moral and intellectual elites, i.e., by bishops, theologians, social activists, and the sort of people who read and write for Commonweal, America, and the National Catholic Reporter...
...Even, or especially, in its American expression, it was a sophisticated, comprehensive approach that should have equipped American Catholics to confront successfully the twin dangers of the century, totalitarian oppression and total war...
...The Catholic press Weigel surveyed was filled with severe criticisms of many aspects of American life...
...Pfaff, of course, had written explicitly on that topic elsewhere...
...He endorses a strategy of not only resisting the external policies of the Soviet Union but of deliberately and visibly exerting pressure to transform its internal regime...
...All this effort is impressive — and some of it is valuable...
...The tone of the earlier era's discussion of war and peace is represented by John Courtney Murray's "cool and dry" academic discourse, and contrasted unfavorably with the warmer rhetoric of the later period's weekly journalism...
...I began checking not all but a sizable number of his citations from Commonweal...
...Weigel is now the president of the James Madison Foundation, one of the many fledgling not-for-profit groups whose efforts to uproot what they see as an entrenched liberal ideology have flourished under the current administration...
...But only after the Vatican Council did these voices seem more than marginal...
...How then explain the distortions and animus of his historical account, especially as it culminates in something as baseless as charging Catholic moral and intellectual leadership with radical rejection of the American experiment...
...23, 1983) and compare them with Weigefs summaries on p. 193 and p. 210...
...Obviously something else is at work besides an extrapolation of Catholic teaching...
...It would have been much better if he had frankly avowed his political outlook and then done his best to distinguish, as the Catholic bishops did, his own prudential applications of Catholic teaching from the general direction of the teaching itself...
...He picks at minor items as well...
...He also believes that he is not promoting a particular political agenda but using the resources of Catholic tradition to push beyond the present polarizations of policy debates...
...Weigel is mortified not by the phenomenon but by the metaphor which, to be sure, he refashions: "America as whore.'' (Once again, my italics...
...There is something very puzzling here...
...so did Commonweal, which PETER STEINFELS is editor of Commonweal...
...18 and Feb...
...My own scorecard for these twenty-five references to Commonweal comes up something like: Blatant Misrepresentations: 7; Significant Misrepresentations: 3; Moderate Misrepresentations: 2; Fair Representations with Qualifications: 5; Unquestionably Fair Representations: 5. Give or take 2 or 3 in the middle categories...
...Context...
...Not only does this gratuitous suggestion of Commonweal (and Catholic Worker) complacency about the role of Communists in Spain have no basis in fact, the very page Weigel cites as his source emphasizes that Commonweal's anti-Franco position did not imply a pro-Loyalist one...
...A considerable number of liberal Catholics resisted the anti-Communist fevers of the fifties...
...I submit those readers will fiad that, whatever the editorials' flaws, they have been grossly amputated by Weigel to fit a preconceived concept and, more important, they substantially belie his portrait of the psychological, Utopian* anti-interventionist, pacifist, neo-isolationist, anti-anti-Communist, and and-American state of "elite7' Catholic thought...
...Again, unmentioned context: the columnist referred to scandals involving bribery of leading officials in several allied nations by U.S...
...That it confirms their existing political preferences is sufficient...
...Weigel's treatment of changing attitudes toward the Soviet Union never adverts to the fact that it was China, not the USSR, that Washington proclaimed as the chief threat to peace and the justification for our Vietnam stand...
...There is a disturbing way in which Weigel alters terms slightly but significantly...
...The second, longest, and sharpest prong of Tran-quillitas Ordinis is historical...
...terrible examples of, I guess, wimpiness toward the USSR and American intervention...
...Vatican II had urged that the problem of war be evaluated "with an entirely new attitude...
...Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker preached and practiced pacifism...
...Instead, he presents his historical material as illustrations of interpretive categories ("Human Nature and War," "The Question of Intervention") that he has already announced...
...Nor are there detailed examinations of Catholic reaction to single episodes like the My Lai massacre...
...Among the concepts the Madison Foundation seeks to salvage are the 'just war' theory and the morality of Star Wars and third-world interventionism...
...Indeed, "American Catholic intellectuals .. . would be in the forefront of that radical assault on the moral worth of the American experiment...
...Merely to read the first dozen or so pages of Tranquillitas Ordinis is to recognize an intelligence at work not common in much current Catholic discussion...
...Weigel contends, for example, that America's Vietnam policy eventually led Catholic thinkers to con- sider America itself to be "illegitimate...
Vol. 114 • September 1987 • No. 15
