Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Bedeviling issue Hollis, N.Y. To the Editors: Peter Steinfels's two articles "Heritage Abandoned, Parts I and II" [September 11 & 25] are enlightening reading. They free the...
...The Getlein column and Stringfellow quote: These were, it should be emphasized, minor items in the magazine...
...containment" morass to a focus on how U.S...
...I doubt the latter judgment, and in any event I still fail to see how "nuclear pacifism" constitutes a genuine third voice in the argument...
...I tried to illustrate these shifts by representative selections from a vast amount of material...
...David Burrell's letter makes an extremely important point...
...When we do get to politics, there remains an immense task of clarification at hand...
...Re-stating the challenge Washington, D.C...
...But by publishing such material, Commonweal was defining the boundaries of reasonable discourse...
...But I also argue that the most salient pacifist statements of the past generation have been on literalist warrants...
...And when that phase subsided, as it did in many of us, we found ourselves nonetheless far more sympathetic with those groups which had warned us from their beginnings how important it is to keep the state in its proper place...
...Peter Steinfels does not discuss my claim that the American bishops developed, tacitly, a theology of democracy in their nineteenth-century contest with anti-Catholic nativism...
...In Tranquillitas Ordinis, he treats it as a "tragically lost opportunity," a document crippled by "central deficiencies...
...Should Commonweal have defined the "boundaries of reasonable discourse" so as to exclude an essay like Schroth's...
...Just-war thinking did deteriorate — indeed, in some cases completely disappeared — in the "engaged" community...
...Not long after that, in the context of the notorious Zionism-as-racism resolution, he compared the UN to a prostitute...
...We agree that there is room in the Catholic debate for both just-war theorists and principled pacifists, and that the quality of the dialogue between these two traditions will have an important impact on the church's thought and action...
...atragedy of the first magnitude...
...The first of these paragraphs, however, bears on what Weigel later calls "our differences" regarding the history of Catholic discussions of war and peace since 1965, and here it would be no service to obscure our disagreement...
...My suggestion is that pacifists and just-war theorists work together at the level of practical reason: in resisting tyranny and in building institutions of international public life that would more adequately reflect the moral horizon of tranquillitas ordinis...
...These are important agreements...
...Such a bedeviling issue as keeping an adequate measure of peace in a nuclear age needs that type of critique...
...It is this kind of discussion, across the barricades of the public policy debate, that the Catholic heritage urges us all to...
...It sounds like an immoral book to me because it consistently and deliberately uses misleading arguments...
...I'm grateful that Peter Steinfels [September 11 & 25] has offered such a lengthy analysis of my book, Tranquillitas Ordinis...
...agreement...
...It is a sad record indeed...
...a document that, for all its soundness of intention, summed up the abandonment of the heritage...
...Not all were as grotesque as Stringfellow and Getlein...
...Schroth distinguished his criticism from that of what he termed the "more radical critics" of the American experiment...
...What must be rejected...
...These items certainly did not compare to the occasions on which the "boundaries of reasonable discourse" were explicitly discussed and the genuine "grotesqueries" of the hard New Left were severely criticized, by luminaries including Stanley Hoffmann, Richard Johri Neuhaus, and the editors...
...These issues seem basic to me...
...Take the examples in his letter...
...We agree that totalitarianism threatens the evolution of international public order according to the moral norms of the Catholic heritage...
...Peter Steinfels agrees with this, as a general proposition...
...Schroth's denunciation was in the very best tradition of being faithful to the American experiment —and explicitly affirmed the spiritual base of the nation that he wanted redeemed...
...I may be mistaken...
...Did Commonweal's editors believe, with columnist Frank Getlein, in a venereal disease theory of U.S...
...It certainly won't take place if the current policy agenda as defined inside the Beltway achieves a kind of canonical status in American Catholicism...
...and "a sad record indeed...
...how bad things had gotten" (twice...
...and in other cases the specific manifestations of such patterns, e.g., a reduced concern with the Soviet Communist threat, were perfectly plausible and no more constituted, on the face of it, "abandonment" of the Catholic heritage than "development" of it...
...In the course of my research I (not my research assistants) read, in addi4 December 1987: 715 tion to the scholarly literature, some 1,004 editorials, columns, and essays in Commonweal, America, the National Catholic Reporter, Worldview, The Christian Century, and Christianity and Crisis...
...I will make only one comment on George Weigel's suggestions for future "reclamation and development" of Catholic thinking...
...I am afraid that it points up another disagreement between us...
...I am pleased that a former Commonweal editor, James Finn, has described my final chapter on the politics of peace and freedom as a "deeply pondered act of political imagination, itself flowing from the heritage of tranquillitas ordinis" — which suggests, I think, something more than the unacknowledged partisanship with which Steinfels charges me...
...in our reading of what has happened since then...
...I am not making judgments about individuals' intentions and motivations here...
...ROLAND LAIRD Idols of convenience Notre Dame, Ind...
...What was abandoned was the distinctive Catholic understanding of peace as tranquillitas ordinis as that had evolved in the American Catholic context...
...The great majority of these came from America and Commonweal (approximately 54 percent came from America and 42 percent from Commonweal...
...and Getlein were deemed inside the boundaries, if at the margins...
...Peter Steinfels is also interested in this kind of "pushing...
...Secondly, I am quite clear (and say-so in the book) that not all pacifists base their claims on biblical literalism...
...The first order of business in a new Catholic debate is theology: Catholicism must ground a new politics of peace and freedom in a dynamically orthodox theology of peace and freedom...
...In fact, however, I would like to call attention to a point missing in your critique, and easily overlooked in Weigel's analysis...
...it has to do with understandings of political community and its institutionalization...
...I believe that, on balance, they were far more advanced than challenged...
...On the contrary, 1 think that any debate which uses Weigel's description as a point of departure will not be wiser...
...Resources for this are available in the incarnational humanism of John Paul II and major Catholic conciliar theologians...
...It will be biased from the outset, and more importantly it will have dodged many realworld questions about actually applying Catholic war-peace moral principles rather than only discussing them academically...
...Both of us would be grateful for a morally urgent, intellectually sophisticated American Catholic pacifism...
...Weigel goes on to write of them in terms of "unfortunate effects...
...Yes, it may be, in many particulars, misleading, but I don't think deliberately so...
...Further conversation is in order here...
...By contrast,, while I welcome basic theological rethinking by pacifists and just-war theorists alike, I believe that the pastoral letter represents an extraordinary achievement and the platform from which any truly effective church-wide assimilation of the Catholic heritage must be mounted...
...In short, this would seem a less tendentious explanation of whatever shift has occurred, and I write as one who favors the just war theory, precisely because I can offer examples in recent history (in Uganda and in East Pakistan) where neighboring countries carried out limited hostilities in a manner apparently necessary to save further bloodshed...
...We agree that the United States is an important experiment in this peace of tranquillitas ordinis...
...Catholic activists continue to do it today, as do some prominent Catholic intellectuals (the distinguished Scripture scholar John McKenzie, for example, made a blatantly fundamentalist case for Catholic pacifism in a 1986 interview...
...But I have a substantive criticism...
...Weigel thinks it necessary for us all to acknowledge this " sad record'' as a starting point for a "wiser debate...
...In the fourth place, we need a fresh evaluation of the men and women who were influential in shaping the Catholic debate over the past generation...
...foreign policy...
...The now-epidemic notion that American Catholicism had nothing of significance to say on questions of U.S...
...I am judging strictly from the printed public record...
...Did he or the editors therefore have a "venereal disease theory" of the UN...
...And the subsequent sympathy with pacifist perspectives, especially those regarding the state, may well have opened up a new arena for reflection on the part of more traditional Christians...
...But I believe it was crossed on numerous occasions...
...Prospects for this common activity are made less likely by attempts to intellectually "blend" the two traditions: which brings us to "nuclear pacifism...
...this is a basic point of departure between pacifists and just-war theorists...
...And this is what is confused and muddled by the hybrid "nuclear pacifism...
...GEORGE WEIGEL The author replies: One of the problems that I found with George Weigel's Tranquillitas Ordinis was "the gap between the book's occasional pleas for constructive rethinking and its otherwise harsh prosecutorial tone...
...the importance Weigel attaches to them makes me wonder whether he understands the reality of weekly journalism...
...We agree, in short, that nonviolence is not for pacifists alone, and that just law and democratic governance are crucial examples of nonviolent conflict resolution...
...And his implied conclusion that the new boundaries were necessarily a bad thing simply begs numerous questions...
...I was neither writing a history of America and Commonweal editorials, nor doing detailed exegeses of several hundred editorial statements...
...The Calley case did represent "American corruption...
...More importantly they illustrate how to criticize with an open mind and in an irenic spirit...
...Has Gordon Zahn, the best in American Catholic pacifism, still failed to move the pacifist discussion significantly beyond literalist warrants...
...The KAL 007 editorial: Is Weigel really suggesting that the U.S...
...So why worry about it...
...As I said twice in my book, I regard Commonweal as the most distinguished lay-edited journal of Catholic opinion in America...
...Our experience in the sixties with strident criticism of this country quite often reflected the animus required for each person to overcome that simple presumpCatholic thought on war & peace AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS tion...
...My impression is that Weigel would set those boundaries so as to (1) make very difficult any discussion of actual sinfulness in the conduct of American foreign policy...
...With the second through seventh of these paragraphs I am indeed in...
...The fact that it could be forgotten today reflects the success of Catholic thjnking on war and peace since 1965...
...Nuclear pacifists" do not reject the use of nuclear weapons on pacifist grounds but on the just-war grounds of proportionality and discrimination...
...Having first described those discussions as "less than satisfactory" (what prolonged, heated controversy isn't...
...I thank him and Roland Laird for their kind words I must say to Mr...
...If this extension of the classic historiography of American Catholicism can be sustained, it would help ground a new and wiser American Catholic theology and politics of peace and freedom...
...DAVID BURRELL, C.S.C...
...In my book, I wrote that Schroth accepted the view that William Calley symbolized "American corruption.'' That is an accurate formulation of an important current in Schroth's position...
...What would addressing it mean for the public roles of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United States Catholic Conference...
...As for the sin of quoting Stringfellow (in a short item that also quoted Paul VI and contrasted the strong tone of both statements to some anodyne remarks at the White House by Cardinal Krol), it surely represented the anger and desperation of the days surrounding President Nixon's Christmas bombing of Hanoi...
...Paul Ramsey gave the answer in 1963 and 1966: the evolution of international public order according to the vision of John XXIII and Vatican II has to be through, not around, the canons of just-war theory...
...2) practically exclude any examination of the possibility that patterns of international behavior quite at odds with our democratic values may be deeply rooted in American society and culture...
...Big deal...
...Did the apocalypticism of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton have a "leveling" effect on their political vision...
...We agree that the Catholic debate on war and peace, security and freedom, has been less than satisfactory over the past generation, and this has had unfortunate effects on American political culture...
...Readers may have also surmised that I have several fraternal corrections to make in response to Steinfels's account of my work...
...I should have thought at least that the just war theory might have considerable rules about proper means of carrying on that kind of warfare as well...
...Laird that I do not consider Tranquillitas Ordinis an immoral book...
...None of us is infallible in making judgments on these highly complex matters...
...We agree that the proportionate and discriminate use of military force can serve the ends of peace, security, and freedom...
...Perhaps he does not recall that millions of Americans, including major political figures, made excuses for the My Lai massacre, which the military itself had tried to cover up rather than prosecute...
...Dorothy Day and Eileen Egan of the Catholic Worker did this (although Worker pacifism had parallel roots in Peter Maurin's Christian personalism...
...3) render it unlikely that opinion could be mobilized to reverse a major policy defended, with all the means at its disposal, by the government...
...He offers seven paragraphs each beginning, "We agree...
...This process of boundary setting skewed the entire spectrum of debate...
...How should it be addressed...
...This was the case with Raymond Schroth's My Lai essay, which Steinfels claims I unfairly represent...
...To Peter Steinfels's questions about my methodology and "fairness," may I say this...
...But he also wrote that the "first function" of a new and wiser president would be "to accustom the American people, for the first time, to accepting the fact that the nation has gone off course...
...That was the shift I was illustrating...
...To quote an anti-war activist's use of the word "Anti-Christ" under such circumstances (and the item specifically linked it to the Nixon administration) does not scandalize me the way it does George Weigel...
...In some cases, however, these patterns rose and fell and have never had the dominance Weigel states, certainly not in Commonweal...
...PETER STEINFELS 4 December 1987: 719...
...Suppose he or she were to appear...
...But the very grotesqueries illustrate just how bad things had gotten...
...George Weigel is quite right to suggest that "the boundaries of reasonable discourse" were redefined by the Vietnam experience...
...But what should we retain...
...There are dozens of such examples...
...I suspect Steinfels agrees...
...To move beyond it, which both Steinfels and I want to do, requires an acknowledgment of just how bad things had gotten — not to score polemical points, but to learn from (all of our) errors of perception and judgment...
...It would help make clear that' 'engaging in the war/peace debate'' involves much more than judgments on weapons, strategies, and tactics...
...To the Editors: Thank you so much for Peter Steinfels's careful analysis of George Weigel's recent book ["The Heritage Abandoned?'' September 11 & 25...
...that there is no incongruity between Catholic peace activism and a vigorous defense of the persecuted church...
...Steinfels seems to agree that there were problems in the thought of these key figures...
...If he thinks such dramatic language made its entry into Catholic journalism during the sixties and seventies, he should note how the distinguished Paulist editor of the Catholic World, James M. Gillis, described Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945: "The most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and moral law...
...New ecclesiological understandings are also required if the church is not to trade its birthright for their pottage of a lobbying model of "engagement...
...The so-called "peace churches" come out of a tradition which recognized early on a simple fact about human nature: that the state is the most convenient idol to which one might transfer unconditional allegiance...
...We agree that there is a distinctive understanding of peace in the classic Catholic tradition: peace ought to be conceived as a matter of political understandings, institutions, and processes...
...That is the simple fact that a small codicil to the just war theory made it virtually inoperative throughout its history: the rider that "the presumption is always with authority...
...Those boundaries were drawn so wide that William Stringfellow ("It is the radical dehumanization of society by war . . . that justifies comparison of the United States with first-century Rome, and which prompts Christians to discern in the incumbent American regime that spirit of the Antichrist which Christians . . . exposed and opposed in the Roman state...
...Then there is the question of changed Catholic perceptions of America...
...national security policy until Vietnam — and the guilt that seems to follow from that notion — has got to be challenged...
...It is the reclamation and development of the classic heritage in its fullness — not just in its just-war theory component — that is one crucial precondition to a wiser argument in the future...
...The line between radical estrangement on the "Amerika" model and the criticisms acknowledged by Peter Steinfels may be difficult to define...
...We agree that American leadership toward a world that is peaceful, secure, and free is a moral imperative that coheres with the best instincts of the American experiment...
...If I am not mistaken one could search high and low in Mr...
...Fifthly, my book is a challenge to the tyranny of Washington, D.C...
...Why is Weigel so apparently taken aback by these statements...
...Other bishops did this during the new nuclear debates of the 1980s...
...Agreed, we should learn from our errors...
...on my rendering of that history...
...has not shown itself willing to sacrifice innocent lives in pursuit of its interests...
...policy might promote pluralization and liberalization in the USSR...
...I regard this as a tragedy of the first magnitude, not as a way to score cheap debating points...
...If it were, I probably would have had more fun reading and reviewing it...
...Perhaps I'm missing something, but the Catholic Hauerwas has yet to be pointed out to me...
...And it illustrates the problem I was addressing...
...This is what virtually all American Catholic pacifists deny...
...Be that as it may, the classic Catholic heritage, in its linking of peace, security, freedom, and justice, could, if reclaimed and developed today, "push" policy arguments beyond their present polarizations...
...This is what I meant by arguing that it is time to think "beyorid" standard arms-control theory...
...This "pushing" could also move us beyond the "detente vs...
...Let's not add to them...
...That comment made, I wish to return to the previous point and ask what "boundaries of reasonable discourse" are implicit in Weigel's writings, whether in Tranquillitas Ordinis or this letter...
...I hope so...
...The notion thattranquillitas ordinis in the modern world had something to do with democracy was noticeably absent from the post-1965 American Catholic debate...
...That was not the only point made in Commonweal's KAL 007 editorial . But the point was made...
...Unfortunately, his book is enormously imprecise in trying to establish just what the new boundaries were...
...And there is much in it, as I wrote, that "may prove a boon in a dialogue that badly needs to take place...
...I am happy to be able to be an agent in re-creating that kind of discussion...
...Modern historical scholarship on just-war theory has been impressive indeed...
...We are waiting for Stanley Hauerwas, as it were...
...But that statement of unhappy fact still does not —nor did it in the editorial —constitute a "mirror-image analysis of U.S./Soviet relations...
...I shouldn't like to put a seismometer to Dean Swift's grave just now, to record the corpse spinning at 3,000 rpms...
...The book was intended to start a major debate, and it seems to have done so...
...Weigel's effort to sniff out blasphemy here is altogether silly...
...In addition, American Catholicism needs to think through the classic Catholic political theory that allowed the American bishops to evolve their theology of democracy...
...Since this is the larger context that gives moral meaning to just-war rea716: Commonweal soning, the abandonment of this classic Catholic concept of peace led ineluctably to the deliquescence of just-war theory within the Catholic attentive public...
...Nowhere does Weigel mention The Challenge of Peace, the bishops' pastoral on nuclear conflict...
...Reflecting on this research, I concluded that there have been eight major shifts at the "contextual" level of the Catholic debate since 1965...
...Were those patterns advanced or challenged by the editorials and essays I cite (and the several hundred more I researched, but could not cite for reasons of space...
...But what was abandoned was considerably more than justwar thinking...
...And why should he...
...In the context of rather sleazy arms sales abroad, he com718: Commonweal pared the U.S...
...But priority attention, in the "engaged" Catholic community and among many Catholic social ethicists, remains focused on test-bans and SDI and all the rest of the current policy agenda...
...Had these themes framed the American Catholic debate since 1965, both church and country would have been better served...
...I was trying to illustrate, for example, how the emergence of anti-anticommunism and a form of mirror-image analysis of U.S./ Soviet relations had shaped American Catholic perceptions of world realities...
...I certainly have no "bias" against Common weal...
...Peter Steinfels suggests that I believe it was the just-war heritage that American Catholic intellectuals, activists, and religious leaders abandoned over the past generation...
...Getlein's column, for example, was consistently hyperbolic...
...I appreciate the fact that Weigel's response to my critique is written in the former mode, and that he searches for common ground between us...
...I don't believe they did, and I say that in my book (Steinfels suggests that Getlein was "Swiftian...
...What are some of the substantive concerns' that should occupy the process of reclamation and development...
...Did the Berrigans mark a critical point in the "abandonment of the heritage," through their importation of New Left thematics into the Catholic debate...
...Overcome by its sudden experience of power, it has been carried away by a distorted notion of Manifest Destiny to the point that it lost sight of its respect for human life and its belief in the brotherhood of man...
...Had I been appointed by God to orchestrate the debates of the last twenty years, I would of course have arranged many things differently...
...The Schroth essay: Now this is indeed more serious...
...They free the May 8 deterrence editorial from its rigid, hard-nosed context...
...Charging the United States with a willingness "to sacrifice innocent lives in pursuit of its interests'' in a major editorial statement on the KAL 007 shootdown strikes me as an example of this problem...
...It does generate wonder how those of us trained in academic methods of integrity can sacrifice them in the interests of a "war of ideas...
...Bishop Carroll Dozier of Memphis did this, in a seminal 1971 pastoral letter reprinted in full by Commonweal...
...We agree that non-violent means of forcing change and prosecuting conflict are essential to the pursuit of peace, and that a preference for nonviolent solutions is built into the very struc(Continued on page 715) 690: Commonweal CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 690) ture of just-war reasoning...
...And that, it seems to me, makes its intellectual value minimal...
...But I am sorry that I cannot work up George Weigel's shock at either of these examples...
...One doesn't have to spell America as "Amerika" (1960s' version of that spelling) to believe that the country had "lost sight of its respect for human life and its belief in the brotherhood of man...
...Institute of Peace, has involved such major theological and public policy figures as John Langan, S.J., Michael Novak, David Hollenbach, S.J., R. James Woolsey, David Newsom, Harold Saunders, James Watkins, Joseph Nye, Harry Summers, Owen Harries, William V. O'Brien, and James Turner Johnson in a common exploration of basic issues in the ethics, war, and peace debate...
...and on the conditions for the possibility of a wiser debate in the future...
...it also took a battering from several bishops...
...Finally, getting ahead of the intellecr tual curve is what I and my colleagues are doing in the James Madison Foundation...
...But unlike Weigel I am firmly of the belief that those who opposed the war in Vietnam, "grotesqueries" and all, were far more true to the Catholic heritage than those, like the bishops' conference of that period and a number of just-war scholars, who either supported the war or stood on the sidelines without any real politicalmoral engagement...
...But just-war theorists' failure to forcefully take up Ramsey's challenge helped create the intellectual and cultural conditions for the confusions that followed...
...Our differences lie in our sense of the "fact" of an American Catholic heritage of thought on these questions prior to 1965...
...All of this seems problematic to me, as I think it does to Steinfels...
...Then what...
...The scholars' and practitioners' seminar we are conducting, in cooperation with the Woodstock Theological Center and with funding from the U.S...
...I think it will most likely take place if it emerges from a reclaimed and developed classic Catholic heritage...
...Many of the patterns Weigel detects in the war-peace debates since 1965 —neoisolationism, psychologized understanding of "peace," etc.—are real enough...
...Maybe he was just suffering from an impoverishment of polemical imagination...
...stand by my assertion that a thorough review of Catholic and ecumenical opinion journals since 1965 reveals patterns of neo-isolationism, psychologized understandings of "peace," antianticommunism, a deteriorated sense of the moral worthiness of the American experiment, and the other key "themes of abandonment" identified in my book...
...and that many Catholic activists have been remiss in making this linkage...
...Thus nuclear "pacifism" is often a rhetorical intensifier, the hidden assumption being that a pacifist commitment, in whatever form, carries greater moral weight...
...in American Catholic thought on war and peace...
...And I look forward to a wiser debate emerging from it...
...Steinfels's two articles for the word immoral used in connection with Tranquillitas Ordinis...
...But before we get to that, I think it important to note the significant agreements between Steinfels and me...
...I have no doubts about the failings of just-war theorists over the past generation...
...Where has he been...
...to a prostitute...
...The nation had "gone off course...
...That would have been "a sad record indeed...
...Isn't 4 December 1987: 717 this a problem...
...We further agree that there is a connection between peace and freedom...
Vol. 114 • December 1987 • No. 21
