Hierarchy

...Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had spoken with enthusiasm about how it could deter future war crimes by making it possible to bring individuals to justice for war atrocities...

...The word (like "patriarchy" and like "orthodoxy") has fallen on hard times...

...interests...

...But a rejection of hierarchy is in the air, and it does in fact have to do with a dumbed-down democracy which affects the way we look at almost everything...

...No, indeed...

...Yet Americans would feel better about themselves today had the United States never invaded Cambodia...

...allies refused to accept...

...Prayer is the beginning of the deep listening which is involved in the only kind of obedience that should matter to Christians...

...The United States had originally urged that this court be created...

...If the United States is to be the world's policeman, the argument says, it must be exempted from being held accountable to the law...

...None of these really begin to get at it, I think...

...But some of the explanations offered for the loose attachment so many people feel to the church, or for the Roman reaction to perceived or real threats to the faith, seem too narrowly focused on Roman Catholic issues: Vatican IX is at fault, or the rejection by Rome of the spirit of Vatican II is at fault, or the assimilation of Catholics into the larger society...

...One might say that Washington's arguments are wholly cynical...

...The new American position was that it would support the court only if the United States were exempt from its jurisdiction...

...All of the U.S...

...It is good if it pleases us and makes us feel good...

...It has not in the past had to break the law to uphold international order...

...To be truly obedient is to listen to God's word with our whole selves, to listen with everything that is in us...

...The occasions when the United States actually broke international law were in pursuit of narrow U.S...

...interests, or arose from an American conception of cold-war imperatives which even most U.S...

...So it is with what faith reveals...

...As Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute writes, "everyone knows" that the United States is a "righteous nation...

...This includes the understanding that not all interpretations or interpreters are equally privileged...

...Not to see that what God has done for us, that what has been revealed in Christ, is both heartbreaking and wonderful is to miss the point...

...None of its past acts of vigilantism produced any useful long-term result...

...They struck me as authoritative in a rare way: I would listen to what they had to say about Christ and take it (I can think of no other word) obediently...

...The argument is obviously fallacious as well as fatuous...

...This leads to the claim that breaking the law is essential to advancing the rule of law, and to the notion that the nations of the UN should name Commonweal 9 September11, 1998...

...Under the Rome treaty it is imaginable that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger could have been charged with the war crime of international aggression...

...The case made by the administration was that because the United States is the sole superpower and the "indispensable nation," which others expect to uphold international order, it may sometimes find it necessary to violate international law--in the line of duty, so to speak...

...opinion...

...But, as is often said in Orthodox circles, the true theologian is the one who prays, and the one who prays truly is the theologian...

...Among young Orthodox there is a similar drift, and we never went through Vatican IX...

...But by the time the United Nations' members arrived in Rome to debate the court, the Clinton administration had changed its mind, under heavy pressure from the Pentagon...

...It therefore might find itself, or its soldiers, accused of war crimes, perhaps frivolously or mischievously...

...I am not speaking here primarily of "the hierarchy," but of the idea that some things (ideas, works of art) are more important, more profound, more compelling, than others...

...With the loss of established religion-a good thing--came a sense of religion as a purely personal choice, something private and subjective, and in recent years (as Robert Bellah et al...

...Christian obedience may not be blind--we are not allowed that sort of mindlessness--but it must be obedience...

...armed interventions since the World War II that have been recognized by the international community as in the general interest, from the Korean War through the Gulf War to the intervention in Bosnia, have respected international law...

...The record shows that the country would have been better off respecting international law...

...I do not think this is true...

...He doesn't need to do this in an authoritarian way, but he may very well need to do it...

...It says that Washington should be allowed to act as an international vigilante, and be trusted because of its self-evident virtue...

...To share the life God calls us to share, God's own divine life, and to be able to forgive as we are forgiven, require a self-emptying...

...Of course, not all their fears are groundless...

...showed in Habits of the Heart, University of California Press), it serves a more or less consumer-oriented, therapeutic role...

...Most young Greeks are not churchgoers, and the relatively low number of young people who attend the church in countries formerly dominated by the Communists has been blamed too easily on communism...

...Among many of the young Orthodox I know who do go to church, there is the same "pick and choose" attitude toward Orthodox teaching that you can find among "cafeteria Catholics...

...some teachings and teachers are more authoritative than others...

...In the July 17 issue a survey of the attitudes of young Catholics revealed their loose attachment to the institutional church...

...We say of a great work of art or music that there is something "compelling" about it...

...They did the contrary, even in terms of U.S...

...I have met a few people who seemed to me to incarnate Christian truth...

...This is a profoundly undemocratic (though not antidemocratic) notion, but it is essential to understanding Christian orthodoxy...

...No doubt in part because it has been abused or invoked too easily, in too authoritarian a fashion...

...The position taken by the United States in Rome split the policy community, Congress, and U.S...

...This is what presents the problem...

...The word's roots imply not submission to an external authority, but deep listening...

...no doubt because it has too often been used to end discussion, rather than to deepen reflection...

...and the editorial in the August 14 issue asked, "Is it fair to say that this papacy is in the hands of fear-filled men...

...If the United States stops being the policeman, the argument goes on, the world will be sorry, because not only is no other nation qualified to play the role, no other would be trusted to do so...

...If one looks at the past, there is no reason for the United States to make this argument...

...While it is true that a deep listening is required of the hierarchy as it is of all of us, it is in fact traditionally, and for good reason, the job of the bishop and not the theologian...

...The idea that some truths are matters of life and death is simply not a part of the way we see the world...

...Why has it been lost...

...There is no social stigma involved in not being associated with any church or temple, and this is probably a good thing...

...leaders...

...Xenophobia is involved, as in Senator Jesse Helms's (RN.C...

...But a good many people, particularly in the military, have been convinced by a certain style of self-avowed "tough-minded" political advocacy that in the "real" world, respect for international law is weakness...

...The New York Times called it a "shameful performance...

...These included the invasion of Cambodia and the secret war waged in Laos (both ancillary to the Vietnam War), as well as an unhappily long list of military interventions in the Caribbean and Central America, and some CIA strong-arm work elsewhere...

...But there doesn't seem to be any other compelling reason to be a believer...

...opposition to the court...

...They certainly did nothing for international order or democracy...

...otherwise, what good is it...

...And it is simply not a part of the lives of many people today...

...Let me suggest that one problem has been the loss of a living sense of hierarchy...

...ashington's opposition to the international criminal court established by the UN majority at a meeting in Rome in July has revealed the intellectual confusion which prevails in the American government and policy community over America's proper role in the world...

...And there have been fearful reactions among Orthodox hierarchs, including a book burning in Russia, in which the works of important modern Orthodox theologians were torched, apparently with the approval of at least one bishop...

...The Washington Post approved the administration's policy...

...The Panama and Grenada episodes are national embarrassments...

...interventions in Panama and Grenada might have led to similar charges against U.S...

...As corrupting as communism was, the same low church-attendance numbers can be found among young people in every church in Holland, England, Italy, and France, where the Communists weren't in charge...

...This has to do not with submission to an authority in some external sense, but rather with the understanding that in order to be transformed by God's word Commonweal 8 September 11, 1998 we must be still, and allow it to form US, This has to do not only with hierarchy as a principle, but at times with the hierarchy itself...

...Not only was the United States overwhelmingly defeated, but the court, as created, will have jurisdiction over Americans if they are charged with war crimes in a country which has signed the treaty...

...A bishop may not be charismatic, a good administrator, or even very bright, but if he is doing his job he may find it necessary to say of some theological teachings, of some interpretations of Scripture, or of some forms of behavior that they do not correspond with what we have been given in our tradition...

...This is defended as a realistic claim, given the way the world works--even if it is absurd in principle...