Another way to peace

...It clearly upheld not only "the right, but the duty" of people to defend "the goods, the institutions, and the values that are the constituents and the conditions of its existence...

...Unlike the bishops' pastoral, which saw in nuclear deterrence the indispensable means of enforcing the right of self-defense for the foreseeable future, it counseled the development of a nonviolent, civilian defense as a realistic alternative...

...In 1983, discontent with the French bishops' letter was as much the result of its drafting process as of its content...

...This may explain why thirteen bishops had no misgivings in approving it...

...Their progressive opinion is usually welcomed in the Catholic press because it is theologically strong and introduces a healthy measure of pluralism in the church...

...Written at a time when international tensions are receding and the debate in the churches has become less antagonistic, the new document has lost the polemical tone of its predecessor and devotes its attention to in-depth research on nonviolence and its foundations rather than to searching for concrete alternatives to the present defense system...

...First, the document establishes a tight connection between the ethic of nonviolence and an ethic of human rights...

...letter, the French letter was widely interpreted as a gesture of support to the French government...

...If Lutter autrement succeeds in doing that, it will have achieved a valuable goal...

...Such a conclusion signals the demise of moral argumentation and has traditionally been rejected by Catholic moralists...

...the moral use of violence remains a possibility...

...of progressive theologians...

...Thus, the means employed to defend oneself must be devised so that "the physical, psychological, and spiritual integrity of the adversary is respected...

...Apart from an occasional conversation between Bishop Defois and a few handpicked representatives of Catholic opinion, almost no discussion preceded the final vote...

...Lay people were also among the bishops' critics, including Philippe Warmer, a free-lance journalist and leader of Vie nouvelle ("New Life"), a spiritual renewal movement...

...At the beginning of 1984 they issued A Call to Christians for a Debate on Defense, with a questionnaire asking about various issues of national defense and the role of the church in the debate...

...The French Catholic bishops had especially strong reservations about the U.S...

...La paix autrement capitalized on that invitation, but its positions conflicted with the bishops' on so many points that it looked like a "counterpastoral...

...Most analysts of either conviction see no incompatibility in principle at the level of preparation...

...As a consequence, they play a key role as mediators between the hierarchy and more radical grassroots groups...

...But they carry the argument too far when they assert that the implementation of a nonviolent ethic on purely secular grounds provides the criterion by which to measure the churches' own faithfulness to the Gospel...

...The authors clearly belong to a minority of Christians willing to stand up against the French church's tendency to claim a monopoly on human rights and peacemaking, at least in theory, and to forget its own history...

...For its proponents, bringing nonviolence into play as a last resort, to be used only after the military solution has failed, is hardly satisfactory...

...It was signed by five bishops, a large number of priests, some prominent figures in the Catholic world, including Gabriel Marc, president of C.C.F.D., the main French Catholic development agency, and a variety of groups, including several local Pax Christi chapters which dissented from the conservative views of their Paris office...

...It is not so much a policy statement as a philosophical document...

...The document's linkage of nonviolence to human rights presents two problems...

...To the extent that nonviolence becomes an integral part of a human rights ethic, it implicitly affirms a claim to universality for that ethic...

...Indeed, they may be the tiny remainder of France's once influential school CATHERINE GUICHERD, author o/L'Eglise Catholique et la politique de defense au ddbout des annees 1980: Etude comparatif de documents episcopaux, allemandes, am6ricaines, et franfiases of 1983 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), is currently living andworking in Washington, D.C...

...They successfully blocked an attempt by the authors of the study to declare that civilian dissuasion would lose its credibility if it were combined with armed defense...

...First, it implies that people who reject nonviolent defense are not fully committed to respecting human rights...

...The concept, which originated in the work of MAN, received a good deal of attention when the government funded research on it in 1983...

...Not only are they activists but also intellectuals...

...A second argues that a nonviolent ethic offers a set of principles that will guide individual decisions in particular cases without providing ready-made solutions...

...The attitude of the French bishops was very close to that of the French public and their letter generally enjoyed a positive reception...

...Further, it seriously questioned the pope's assessment that deterrence could be permitted if accompanied by meaningful steps toward nuclear disarmament...

...Two major points in Lutter autrement are worth emphasizing...

...Even if it is a 'lesser evil' with complete awareness of the excesses this phrase has permitted it is an evil...

...However, this does not mean that La paix autrement indulged in a naive form of pacifism...

...The Commission for Justice and Peace, the bishops' main advisory body on international issues, had not even been consulted...

...Following the release of the second draft of the American pastoral, Bishop Gerald Defois, then general secretary of the French bishops' conference, gave an interview to the French daily Le Matin, in which he openly rejected the American bishops' support of a nuclear freeze and a no-first-use policy...

...But its conclusion on this issue remains ambiguous, bearing testimony to the disagreement among its authors...

...The authors of Lutter autrement make room for a secular, nonviolent ethic, but their argument is hard to reconcile with official church teaching, which ultimately anchors human rights in spiritual foundations...

...A second round of discussions led forty groups and a hundred individuals to propose amendments...

...But there is a difficulty in trying to build a universal ethic grounded in a specific faith conviction...

...A steering committee composed of Toulat, Mellon, Boudouresques, Quelquejeu, Warmer, and another Catholic layman, Christophe Deltombe, put a consultation process in place...

...Real difficulties arise, however, when a threat demanding a response materializes...

...When the resulting study was published in 1985, military commentators appreciated the emphasis it put on the "spirit of defense," the absence of which they had so often lamented under the current system of deterrence, but they criticized the method as a "strategy of defeat" that would become relevant only after enemy occupation of the country...

...While acknowledging that the French nuclear deterrent rests on the threat of an inherently immoral act coun-tercity strikes they condoned the deterrent...

...About a hundred responses were received from individuals and groups involved in peace, social development, and human rights activities, and these were used to develop a first synthesis, distributed in May 1985...

...and Bernard Boudouresques, a representative of the "priest workers" movement...

...At the practical level, this debate raises the issue of compatibility between nonviolent and military defense...

...Although the concept of "civilian dissuasion" had high visibility in military circles for a time, it was not widely discussed elsewhere, and the attention it commanded in the defense establishment was short-lived...

...At the present stage of the debate, however, any recognition that nonviolent defense can be considered a legitimate topic for discussion as a valid tool of national security must be considered a significant step...

...In particular, it concluded, "It...no longer seems possible to tolerate nuclear deterrence, even under the justification of an ethics of distress...

...The text reads: "In any case, one shall absolutely refrain from legitimizing violence at the very moment one accepts oneself to be under an absolute constraint to resort to it...

...reliance on violent means undermining the credibility of nonviolent action, which purports to establish a nonthreatening relationship with the adversary...

...The second problem centers on the universalist claim of a human rights ethic...

...In contrast to the highly critical U.S...

...After their incorporation, the final document was released in February 1986 under the title La paix autrement (Another Way to Peace...

...Within a few months, 10,000 copies of the document had been distributed all over the country...

...In La paix autrement, the alternative is called "civilian dissuasion," and is defined as a planned, systematic noncollaboration with the enemy, organized in advance, on a national basis, with the participation of all government and private institutions and relying exclusively on nonviolent means of resistance...

...It is as important to them to provide the basis for a common action with nonbe-lievers in the promotion of human rights and nonviolence as it is to reassert their faith motivation...

...The final purpose of nonviolent action, so the argument goes, is the preservation and the restoration of human rights...

...In April 1987, following a "Call to Christians for a Debate on Nonviolent Action," a new consultation process was launched by the authors of La paix autrement, and in May 1988 a first version of a new document, Lutter autrement: Pour une action non-vio-lente, responsable et efficace (Waging War Differently: For a Nonviolent, Responsible, and Effective Action), was released...

...One such issue is the status of the "nonviolent ethic...

...A few months later, the French bishops issued their own pastoral letter...

...in Paris and a pillar of the Mouvement pour une Alternative Non-violente (MAN...

...This brings us very close to Michael Walzer's analysis of the "supreme emergency" in Just and Unjust Wars, where he argues that in some cases necessity leaves no other choice than to break the moral rules, with full consciousness of acting wrongly...

...It also indirectly but decisively rejected the distinction drawn by the bishops between the threat to kill innocents and actually carrying out that threat...

...But if nonviolent action is to become the first and sole means of resistance to an aggression, a clue has yet to be found for the transition period between the existing system of military defense and a pure nonviolent strategy...

...What does this mean, if not that the resort to violence can never be morally endorsed but is sometimes inescapable...

...Like the American bishops, they found justification in John Paul H's assertion that deterrence may be morally acceptable provided it is accompanied by genuine steps toward disarmament...

...Nevertheless, Lutter autrement is representative of a respectable school of thought in French Catholicism that has been boosted by the debates over the foundations of human rights that took place during the celebration of the bicentennial of the Revolution...

...Rejecting this approach as unrealistic and deceptively Utopian, the second view sees nonviolent action as one response among many in any given situation, as subject to failure as any other...

...At the end of their pastoral letter, the French bishops had invited Catholics to explore the moral aspects of defense policy...

...The critics decided that the debate on national security in Catholic communities had to be broadened and that new ways of defending the country required investigation...

...The second major point to be made: the contradictions in Lutter autrement, sometimes on key issues, are both a weakness and a tribute to its pluralism...

...Christian Mellon, an affiliate of the Jesuit research center C.E.R.A.S...

...Insofar as it grants this possibily, Lutter autrement is not a pacifist document...

...The debate on this document was broader still, and it received more than 1,000 amendment proposals from forty-five groups and eighty persons...

...Although at odds with the church's official position on many social justice issues, they have been careful not to sever themselves from the establishment...

...Still it was not without its critics, the sharpest dissent coming from Catholics involved in peace research and the peace movement...

...Bernard Quelquejeu, a Dominican brother and leading Catholic thinker on human rights...

...Catholics and military strategists, but also in Europe, and particularly in France, where the debate continues...

...Members of the first (pacifists) are convinced of the ethical necessity of nonviolence and regard it as the only acceptable response to all conflicts...

...One school of thought argues that the nonviolent ideal provides first principles that will absolutely shape the actors' behavior...

...ANOTHER WAY TO PEACE Catherine guicherd FRENCH CATHOLICS & THE MORALITY OF DEFENSE The pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, issued by the American Catholic bishops in 1983, roused concern at the time not only among some U.S...

...In other words, even in the worst crisis, it should never be forgotten that one's enemy remains a human being...

...bishops' letter...

...The final document was issued in October 1989...

...The most prominent included several priests and brothers: Pierre Toulat, executive secretary of the French Commission for Justice and Peace and a well-known human rights activist...