Disarming Austin Fagothey
Douglass, James W.
the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and resisting every kind of injustice. All of it was building a new society, the kingdom of God, within the shell of the old society. Jesus' vision of God's...
...Nuclear war was my enemy, and Fagothey, as my ethics professor, justified it with a serene logic...
...But in spite of our blindness to the redemptive dimensions of the other's truth, God had introduced another factor between us: friendship and respect...
...The case he argued at the Gregorian was made possible by the vacuum left by the ambiguities of papal statements on modem war...
...I was stunned...
...After a year's work at the Gregorian, Fagothey returned to Santa Clara to finish writing his dissertation, which he then hoped to have published in the United States--another chilling thought in terms of its possible consequences...
...Fagothey's language was cautious and clinical, but what it aroused in my mind, thanks to Dorothy Day, was the vision of a total evil chosen by ourselves: the death and suffering of entire societies, if not of the world...
...The history of philosophy was a marvelous march of Fagothey's diagrams and propositions across our blackboard...
...By converting me to her vision, Dorothy had become a holy burr in my conscience, prickly but saintly...
...I thought my friend had become one of the most dangerous people on earth...
...In the middle of a lecture, he would sometimes pause with intensity and cross his eyes at the class...
...It is also a philosopher of nuclear war, my Santa Clara ethics professor, Father Austin Fagothey, S.J...
...He said only that he had not been able to complete the project...
...Thus we struggled...
...11 October 1991:571...
...Beside the power of abstraction, Fagothey had a knack for comic relief...
...It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condem- nation" (Gaudium et spes, promulgated December 7, 1965...
...What I began to understand through his developing dissertation was that Fagothey had a piece of the truth...
...Moved again by Dorothy Day and Austin Fagothey, but now with the unique situation of living in Rome, in 1963-65 1 spoke with every bishop who would listen to a young lay theology student obsessed with the idea that the council must condemn total war and support the right of conscientious objection...
...He already had one in philosophy...
...Fagothey and I were destined to spend years of our lives struggling on opposite sides of his concept of a just total war, an idea he would develop at length as a revision of traditional moral restraints upon war...
...Catholic publisher...
...Helped by Austin Fagothey's insights into the contradictions and ambiguities of Catholic thought on war, I committed my life in Rome for the duration of the council to a project opposite to his: a lobbying effort to encourage the world's bishops to make that definitive Catholic condemnation of total war that Fagothey had perceived was lacking...
...What alarmed me most about Fagothey's new project in Rome was that he was no longer presenting his case to Santa Clara students...
...Thanks to the fellowships Fagothey had recommended me for, I moved on to graduate school...
...they] seemed to reach into my very bones, and I could only feel that I had been given some little intimation of the hunger of the world...
...In December 1965, nearing its conclusion, Vatican II issued the only condemnation during its four sessions on any subject, a definitive condemnation of total war...
...Before his death in 1984, Scharper was instru- mental in bringing a wave of liberation theology to the United States, another "notable shift in the thinking of the church...
...Through the "clarification of thought" he brought about in the peace lobby, as Dorothy Day liked to say of illuminating conflicts, Father Fagothey had been a leaven in the leaven...
...Is the kingdom of God my enemy's truth...
...In a sense, Fagothey was truer to Jesus' parable of the leaven than Day was...
...Our extended debate ceased when I graduated...
...All I could say was, would he share his research with me...
...He had been honest enough to recognize that a limited nuclear war was a contradiction in terms...
...The women's fast, and Dorothy Day's in particular, went to the heart of the total war question: the hunger of the world's destitute beneath the waste and terror of the arms race...
...He took roll at the start of each class by scanning the rows of students,jotting down the names he carried in his head that corresponded to the vacant seats...
...My friend looked at me with the ever-present gleam in his eye...
...Yet it was precisely this abstraction of a strictly limited nuclear war that the U.S...
...The argument for limited nuclear war, as made on str~itegic grounds by Henry Kissinger, was also taken up and developed by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara into a "surgical strike" (first strike) doctrine which each subsequent administration has further refined...
...We parted as friends in conflict...
...Father Fagothey taught courses in ethics and the history of philosophy...
...Dorothy wrote: "I had offered my fast in part for the victims of famine all over the world, and it seemed to me that I had very special pains...
...In the course of writing this story, I have continued to debate internally with Father Fagothey...
...Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and humanity itself...
...The adviser finally told Fagothey to forget the idea of ever having his dis- sertation on total war approved for a doctorate in theology at the Gregorian University...
...I cir- culated a document to that effect, influenced by the counter- insights of an old professor of mine...
...But Fagothey looked at Murray's "limited nuclear war" and rejected it...
...Yet since, like Murray, he could see no alternative to a Communist takeover except nuclear deter- rence, Fagothey decided, in his logical fashion, to justify total nuclear war...
...It was in his ethics course that we came into conflict...
...I raised critical ques- tions from the audience...
...fler two years of graduate studies, I moved to Rome to study the theology of war and peace at the Gregorian University, one of the oldest Catholic institutions in the world, My family and I arrived in Rome in Sep- tember 1962, at the same time as 2,300 bishops from all over the world for the opening of Vatican Council II, which would eventually take up the same question as my focus of study...
...A series of extraordinary pilgrims created the "peace lobby" at Vatican II: among them Eileen Egan, Jean and Hildegard Goss- Mayr, Gordon Zahn, Dick Carbray, Thomas Merton (in his cor- respondence with bishops), Daniel Berrigan, William J. Nagle, Lanza del Vasto, Hermene and Joe Evans, and Dorothy Day herself...
...Catholic church's foremost ethicist, John Courtney Murray, S.J., had used to justify nuclear weapons during the Kennedy era...
...The course was based on Right and Reason, the ethics textbook Fagothey had written which was used at many Catholic uni- versities...
...In the span of years between the Vatican Council's declaration and Father Fagothey's death, we had seen each other on only one occasion, at the scene of our old debates, when I had been invited back to Santa Clara to give a talk on nonviolence...
...I thought it a profound corruption of theology and ethics, a leaven which could further corrupt the church, society, and the world...
...In light of the just-war doctrine formulated by Augustine and Aquinas, Fagothey had, in Right andReason, begun to devel- op a concept of total war which would justify the massive use of nuclear weapons...
...Reading through his correspondence with his dissertation adviser twelve years after Fagothey's death, I could see the frus- trations of an extraordinary mind confronted by the changing tide of the church's teaching on war and peace...
...My thoughts took a new direction: How could one believe in the kingdom of God and not respond to the threat of the world's destruction...
...The editor finally wrote back a rejection in the fall of 1965, explaining that between the completion of Fagothey's research and the present time, "there have been some notable shifts in the thinking of the church on almost every level on the moral implications of total war...
...The next two years in Rome, 1963-65, were filled with grace...
...One day between classes at the Gregorian I was startled to run into Austin Fagothey...
...Pushed on different levels by Dorothy Day and Austin Fagothey, I wrote an article for the Catholic Worker and the university's literary magazine, using the just-war conditions Fagothey had helped me understand, to make a case for nuclear pacifism...
...Fagothey said he would be glad to...
...We sat next to each other at dinner, but with the press of cov- ersation from other friends, had little opportunity to talk together...
...He would be doing his dissertation, he said, on a topic that would interest me: the justification of total nuclear war in Catholic teaching...
...Fagothey pursued a truth that I believed profoundly wrong in the effect it might have upon the world...
...He suggested instead using his material for a book and trying to find a publisher in the U.S...
...I thought, too, of the man who wrote the letter rejecting Fagothey's book, Philip Scharper, then editor of Sheed and Ward, and soon to be a founder of Orbis Books...
...As we struggled, the apparently conflicting truths deepened and in a more unified way reached the lives of others...
...He is still my teacher, friend, and opponent--still the leaven...
...He also had a pho- tographic memory...
...I had come to respect him deeply but rejected with all my heart and mind his thinking on nuclear war...
...he ten-day fast of the twenty women in Rome in October 1965 was, I believe, the most profoundly transforming leaven of the final session of Vatican II, when the bishops concluded their deliberations on war and peace...
...Now he also had the situation in Rome where he could effectively change the Catholic church's teaching on war to the point of sanctioning the destruction of humanity...
...It was alien, unholy, trans- forming--a true leaven...
...It rested (and, I thought, untenably) on the assumption of an enemy nation so militarizing its society that it would lose "all right to a distinction between military and nonmilitary objectives...
...What, I asked, was he doing there...
...By teaching me skillfully an idea I hated (and still do), Fagothey provoked me into thinking it through...
...I did ask Fagothey what had become of his dissertation...
...Fagothey thought no pope or church council had ever been definitive enough in statements against total war to rule out its admissibility in Catholic teaching...
...The idea was fantasy...
...Fagothey's dissertation adviser approved his proposal...
...Reading that sentence, I thought first of Pope John XXIII's encyclical, Pacem in terris, the most revolutionary source of change, a leaven coming from the papacy itself...
...Now his audience was the most prestigious Catholic theological faculty in the world, one which the Vatican drew upon for its teaching...
...Jesus' vision of God's kingdom was why Dorothy Day had gone to the park and to jail...
...Fagothey had 570: Commonweal the mind and credentials for such a project...
...Fagothey explained that he had come to Rome at a late stage in his career to get a doctorate in theology...
...Thus he could introduce total war in its ultimate, nuclear form as a reality he thought implicit in the just-war doctrine...
...Other letters revealed that Fagothey's proposal for such a book was seriously considered for several months by a leading U.S...
...He was a small man in his late fifties, with the mental ability to abstract the essence of every philosopher in history and set them all down in a series of propositions our class could remember...
...Twenty-two years later, in the fall of 1987, I spent a morning at the archives of the Jesuit Center in Los Gatos, Califomia, reading the letters and papers of Austin Fagothey, who had died in 1975...
...And for the rest of that day, and on many days since then, I have thought of Austin Fagothey, who had spent many of his days arguing a counter-position to those changes...and thereby helped create them...
...Dorothy came twice to Rome, once on a pilgrimage to Pope John XXIII and again in the final session of the council to fast with other women as a personal appeal to the bishops for a strong statement on war and peace...
...Perhaps pushed further by my continuing criticisms, he developed his just-nuclear-war position in a public lecture at Santa Clara...
...To sacrifice the distinction between com- batants and civilians to a total war necessity, as Fagothey proposed doing, was to break through the just-war doctrine's (and the church's) strongest ethical barrier to nuclear war...
...Scharper had also been one of the pilgrims among the "peace lobby" in Rome, helping to create the council's condemnation of total war and its support of conscientious objection...
...Father Fagothey's thinking on nuclear war was, on the other hand, a blasphemy...
...Several bishops used it as a basis for their speeches at the council, urging that the church take a clear stand against total war...
...But the leaven in my story is not only Dorothy Day...
...Fagothey responded with a critique of my article, which also appeared in the literary magazine...
...He thought the truth I was pursuing was equally misguided in its implications for humanity...
...His mind seemed to have the world under control...
Vol. 118 • October 1991 • No. 17
