Sidestepping the challenge of peace

...Not Dan Berrigan (who said the equivalent) but Stanley, a wholehearted advocate of muscular Christianity at its most brawny and a fervent antiCommunist...

...Listen to Susan: Dear American Hierarchy: I'm eighteen years old and a freshman at a Catholic college...

...A gopher ball as broad as a harvest moon...

...Now isn't that just like the Protestants, I said to myself when I read that...

...This is the kind of world that Catholic parents must contend with, and this is the front I'm talking about...

...These spoilsports might be especially puzzled as to how the strategy of deterrence could be wrong in 1976 and still morally acceptable in 1982, a time when the hands of the clock had edged closer to midnight...

...But nothing hasactually happened, you protest...

...Reagan get ready to blow up the world and kill millions of pregnant women and their unborn babies, the Russians will come and take over...

...I'm getting myself all worked up like a doily over an evil that, however great, is merely a potential evil...

...The symbol of our religion is the cross, a device that cornered the scandal market some two millennia ago and never quite relinquished its grip...

...If the president's old buddy David Stockman couldn't convey nuances to him, do you think you would have any better luck...

...Five of them I knew...

...How would you like to live in a society where Christian values count for nothing...

...Much less has any theologian pondered the effect of an intention so intense and prolonged upon the mind and will of individuals and of the nation itself...

...It's a shame there's no geiger counter to measure the soul's contamination...

...S. Dear Susan: You don't understand...

...And what then...

...And it soon became evident that Stanley, although quite sincere himself, was of a different cast of mind...

...16 January 1987: 13...

...No matter how exceptional the circumstances detailed in each case, no matter how hedged about and bristling with conditions, the result of such episcopal largess would be to reduce the effective teaching authority of the church to a shambles...

...Dear A.H.: I don't see how you stand by and let that doddering old fool Reagan get ready to blow up the world and kill millions of pregnant women and their unbom babies and not let me have an abortion...

...Keep in mind, now, who's talking...

...To be specific, I thought of Stanley...

...Protestants don't believe in doing things by halves...

...For sin, like most things, gets easier with practice...

...It's obvious why the bishops banished this alarming declaration...

...But, for whatever consolation it may be to Fred, those who put him in this position, and those who have made no effort or insufficient effort to extricate him from it, have the greater sin...

...It's a phrase to be reckoned with...

...Respectfully yours, Susan...

...True, most of us may be just as happy about the ambiguity since it seems to give us leave to think about something more congenial...

...Abraham believed, Kierkegaard tells us in Fear and Trembling, not just when he had his knife poised, ready to cut Isaac's throat, but every step of the journey, every step of the way on the climb to the crest of the mountain...

...Dear A.H.: Why don't you come and spend a few days in my dorm...

...A scandalous proposal...

...Faith motivated Abraham in each of his actions, and each action drew him closer to God...

...Fair enough, bishops, but let's pursue things a bit further...

...Then further on, implicitly likening the ox to the golden calf, they declare: "Nuclear deterrence has too long been reverenced as the idol of national security...

...But," they say, "threat is not use...

...Let's be practical...

...The phrase "sinful situation" survived in quotation marks in the second draft ("All of these conditions are the reason we have called the arms race, with deterrence as its key element, a "sinful situation"), but somebody pruned it from the final version, and, thanks to this kindest cut of all, we can all relax...

...Say what...

...Wham...

...God's command to Fred is not to kill several million people, a command whose reality and whose unequivocal force even the French bishops readily acknowledge...

...An absurd proposal...

...Could it be that there might be a link between Fred's fixed intention to kill millions of people and his willingness to commit adultery...

...Given the proper order, Fred will turn a key and push a few buttons in his bunker beneath the Great Plains, and he'll kill more people than Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan at his most sanguine ever dreamed of slaughtering...

...Taking courage from our Methodist brethren as they took courage from us, let's go back to the language of the first draft and say quite simply that we are living in sin...

...In current conditions," said the pope, " 'deterrence' based on balance, certainly not as an end in itself but as a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament, may still be judged morally acceptable...

...The ideology of deterrence must not receive the churches' blessing even as a temporary warrant for holding onto nuclear weapons...

...And not only did the American bishops serve up a whopping gopher ball in The Challenge of Peace, but we have not heard even so much as a peep out of the committee set up a few years ago to gauge how well a properly chastened Reagan administration would heed the admonitions contained in the pastoral...

...They were sincere people, apolitical for the most part, who were eager to know MICHAEL GALLAGHER, a free-lance writer and translator from the Japanese, received a National Book Award nomination in 1973 for his translation ofYukio Mishima's Spring Snow...

...Now I'm pregnant...

...What would happen...

...Take the case of Fred, a Catholic and a captain in the Air Force...

...Look 16 January 1987: 9 at it this way: The Battling Bishops of the Roman Catholic church are leading the Patriots of Military-Industrial Tech 1-0 in the bottom of the ninth...

...What would happen...

...But what becomes of that authentic Christian witness that bishops never tire of urging upon us in the abstract...

...Could it be also that down deep in his heart there is the thought that if his church has nothing significant to say about the awful situation he's a part of in his daily work except to keep at it, Fred, and don't worry, then why should he pay any attention to what it says about something that he knows is far less important...

...I was a virgin until two months ago when I was gang raped in the lobby of my dormitory by six members of the football team—all of them on scholarships, all of them on drugs...

...Yes, I am concerned about potential evil, about future evil—and my having three children under twelve intensifies my concern—but I'm also concerned, more concerned in fact, with actual evil, with present evil...

...He worked for ten years for the U.S...

...Except of course that the world is that much closerto nuclear massacre...

...Stanley had a logical mind and, conditions or no conditions, he knew the moral equivalent of a blank check when he saw one...

...One, Stanley, I didn't know...

...We have concluded," say the Methodists, "that nuclear deterrence is a position that cannot receive the church's blessing...

...May I have an abortion...

...Tobe fair to the bishops, it's crystal clear that what weighed heavily upon their deliberations in 1982 and 1983 was a qualification John Paul II had delivered in a speech to the United Nations on a June day in 1982 that should go down as a bleak day for the Gospel as a whole and for moral theology in particular...

...Catholic Conference in communications...

...Could it be that down deep in his heart, if he's prepared to do such an unspeakable act, then, what the hell, what's the harm in going to bed with a woman who's not his wife...

...SIDESTEPPING THE mIchael gauagher CHALLENGE OF PEACE THE BISHOPS & NUCLEAR DETERRENCE ¥he United Methodists have come out and said no to nuclear war (In Defense of Creation: The Nuclear Crisis and a Just Peace, Graded Press, $3.25, 96 pp...

...The decision to yield to lust is not merely a potential evil but an actual evil...

...Jesus wept...

...In their pastoral letter of 1983, Winning the Peace, the French bishops acknowledge that theirs is a "poor man's deterrent," which "rests on an anti-city strategy, itself clearly condemned, without appeal, by (Vatican II...

...When we finished our study, Stanley was no longer much concerned one way or the other...

...What's to be done...

...Now 1 won't say that Stanley was then or at any other time a member of the CIA...

...But then after thanking God that I wasn't a simplistic Protestant and that I belonged to so subtle and sophisticated and optimistic and Chestertonian a religious tradition, I had second thoughts...

...But what is Fred doing...

...Devotedly yours in Christ, the American Hierarchy...

...I met Stanley four years ago...

...S. And if Susan were Suzanne, she would have had still greater cause for scandal, for if the American hierarchy waffled on the nuclear issue, the French hierarchy simply capitulated, accommodating themselves to a Socialist government as nimbly as their predecessors accommodated themselves to the Bourbons...

...I got six people willing to devote one night a week for six weeks during Lent...

...Suppose, furthermore, that Fred, a man committed to nuclear massacre and also a married man, goes to a bar on a night +12: Commonweal off from the old bunker, has a few drinks, and then goes to bed with a friendly woman he happened to meet...

...What matters is that Stanley was about as far to the right as you can get, and, as you might expect, he took the peace pastoral as a personal affront...

...Let's get wildly imaginative again, an unwanted state of mind for hierarchies but sometimes the only way to get into contact with reality...

...Let's think for a bit...

...Parents would have no idea what to tell their children...

...And, yes, George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger and Larry Speakes, coached like beauty pageant queens by Georgetown professors who believe in God and deterrence, and — supreme leap of faith — limited nuclear war, may now lard their apologias with terms such as "measured" and "proportionate," speak of "limiting collateral damage," and declare that they wouldn't dream of targeting population centers as such...

...Suppose the American hierarchy took their stance visa-vis their country's preparations for nuclear massacre as a model for their pronouncements in other areas of moral theologySuppose, in other words, they came out today with like concessions in the area of sexual morality, of mercy killing, and of abortion...

...But is,anybody naive enough to think that anything has really changed since the pastoral came out in May 1983...

...Let's see how this naughty-to-do-but-okay-to-threaten-todo works out in practice...

...Wham...

...Let's try to enter into Fred's mind...

...Let me save this committee further expense on coffee and Danish: the Reagan administration has no more regard for your letter than does Stanley...

...I think it's a remarkable commentary on the sex-fixated character of American moral theology that no moral theologian seems to have thought of applying this supremely apt text to deterrence—to our looking at the great Russian population centers with lust for slaughter in our hearts...

...And they were pretty rude about it, going so far as to gore the grazed ox of deterrence, the gentle beast that the pope himself once gave a memorable pat on the rump...

...Let's just say that Stanley was not adverse to letting us think that something of the sort might have been the case, though indeed his extensive travels in the Far East and other places, to which he dropped oblique allusions, may have been nothing more than the customary itinerary of, say, a marshmallow salesman, for all we knew...

...Unless we let Mr...

...It was in those heady days that I recruited a group to read and discuss the second draft of The Challenge of Peace, advertising the endeavor in our parish bulletin...

...Also present, and quite prominent, in versions one and two, but gone from the final version, was this lapidary sentence buried in To Live in Christ Jesus, a pastoral whose 1976 release was one of those great non-events that crowd American ecclesiastical history...

...just what the bishops had said...

...Before he read it, that is...

...For it might well have given the logically-minded—a characteristic prized in Roman Catholicism—cause to wonder how something could be "wrong" and yet "still morally acceptable...

...Let's be honest now...

...The ancients told you not to commit adultery," said Jesus, "but amen I say unto you whoever looks at a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery with her...

...By "waffling" of course, Stanley meant the approval of deterrence, however gussied up with qualifications, an approval designated as the "strictly conditioned moral acceptance of nuclear deterrence...

...Yes, one of Andrew Greeley's surveys might reveal that Catholics are thinking in mpre dubious terms about the arms race, but while we're thinking more dubiously, the Reagan administration is doing more dubiously...

...With two outs and the tying run on first, the Bishops' pitcher rears back and lets fly with a gopher ball...

...As for the terrible things that might follow upon such a declaration, none of them would be as terrible as the failure of the Roman Catholic church in the United States, the foremost of American Christian churches, to speak out in a time of decadence and moral confusion, and declare deterrence—the fixed intention to obliterate millions upon millions of human lives—an abomination in the sight of God and creation...

...If they really believed what they say they believe about nuclear weapons, then I don't see how they could have come to the conclusion they came to...

...Except, of course, that we, the church, have hardened our hearts still more and turned our eyes away from the light still more determinedly...

...They waffled," said Stanley...

...Yet Fred is prepared to do it, and his daily routine reinforces his intention to do so...

...Let's put aside our "strictly conditioned moral acceptance," which by now has lost any bit of coercive power it might once have had, and state quite plainly that unless the administration starts moving with all deliberate speed to abandon deterrence, the same moral strictures that apply to Catholics who cooperate in any way with the procurement of an abortion will apply to any Catholic involved in any way with the production, maintenance, or control of the weapons of mass destruction...

...Does the immorality of use render the threat immoral...

...Why, we're fully capable of taking a stand on a controversial issue and disturbing nobody at all but Michael Novak and William F. Buckley, who don't count because they're two of our own...

...Nobody would know what to be16 January 1987: 11 lieve...

...Anti-faith motivates each of his actions, and each repetition draws him farther from God...

...Suppose the bishops said that in exceptional circumstances such things as sexual intercourse outside of 10: Commonweal marriage, homosexual acts, a fatal injection for a terminally ill cancer victim or deformed baby, and an abortion might be morally justified...

...Yes, I know, we are already sliding in this direction, thanks to the Touchy-Feely cast of so much religious education material and the dearth of effective pastoral guidance, but that only corroborates my contention that the overwhelming majority of American Catholics simply don't know what to think about their government's tireless and quite expensive preparations for nuclear massacre...

...Into the centerfield bleachers...

...Dear Susan: Our pastoral hearts are deeply grieved to hear about your problem, but the answer is no...

...Or as we used to call it, a sin...

...And there goes the old ball game, as well as all the fancy glovework and timely hitting that had gone before...

...To the extent that the American bishops have acquiesced in this bloodlust, moreoever, they have compromised their witness not only with regard to modern war but with regard to everything else as welt...

...You can't beat us for making distinctions and spinning out airy nuances, for giving Caesar full credit and a fair interest rate, too...

...Let me confide in you: Stanley turned out to be right...

...Now we know, of course that the American and French hierarchies—the American after a certain amount of backing and filling—would pronounce Fred blameless in his fixed intention to obliterate millions of people, including babes at the breast, but declare that he has certainly sinned in the second instance...

...It's obvious...

...We're all at the console, then, beneath the Great Plains— not just the Pentagon strategists, not just Ronald Reagan and Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz, but Ted Kennedy and Tip O'Neill, and the American hierarchy, and you and I, too...

...This is not evident...

...It was a time, if you recall, when fear and expectation were abroad in the land that that most patriotic of churches, the Roman Catholic, was going to bestir itself and say something drastic about nuclear weapons and so jeopardize the marriage of cross and flag that churchmen like Francis Cardinal Spellman had consummated with such ardor...

...Let's get wild and imaginative with our logic...

...Although the second and the final drafts of the Peace Pastoral took their cue from this ill-conceived papal concession, the first version (apparently written before the speech, though released just after it) stated in terms plain enough to please a United Methodist bishop that the "deterrence relationship which prevails between the United States, the Soviet Union, and other powers is objectively a sinful situation" (emphasis mine...

...This is not evident...

...Abraham believed, and it was accounted just in him...

...As possessors of a vast nuclear arsenal, we must also be aware that not only is it wrong to attack civilian populations, hut it is also wrong to threaten to attack them as part of a strategy of deterrence" (emphasis mine...

...Morally acceptable...

...But we Roman Catholics do...

...Let's get away from the groves of academe, from those pleasant seminars and workshops, from the germ-free, child-free environments that seem to be the habitat of American Catholic theologians, and get back to what, for want of a better term, we'll call the real world—a place where Twisted Sister, Motley Crue, Miami Vice, and Rambo have their brief time in the sun and, before yielding to other idols, reign over American youth...

...The Court served notice that the segregation of black students would no longer have the blessings of American law, and that the shameful conditions that had been perpetrated under the "separate but equal" fiction were to be remedied with "all deliberate speed...

...Let's take our cue from the Supreme Court decision of 1954 declaring "separate but equal" unconstitutional...