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...To those who are alarmed, this episcopal intervention ranks with David Hartley's challenge to Parliament...

...To round things out, the ad hoc committee heard from Reagan Administration officials, too: State Department negotiator and trouble-shooter Edward Rowny, Arms Control Director Eugene Rostow, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Lawrence Eagleberger, and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger...

...immediate, bilateral verifiable agreements to halt testing, production, and deployment of new strategic weapons systems...

...To Catholic pacificists, those sentiments sound like capitulation to the status quo...

...Even the threat to use nuclear arms is immoral eral public as the late Cardinal Francis Spellman's vehicle for involvement in U.S...

...Nonetheless, said Commager, "there is always a parallel where great moral issues are involved...

...opposes "proposals which lower the nuclear threshold" and blur the difference between nuclear and conventional weapons, the latter also meriting condemnation...

...The nuclear threat comes home far more directly...

...The race has continued in spite of carefully expressed doubts by analysts and other citizens and in the face of forcefully expressed opposition by public rallies...

...For example, if Russia makes no threatening moves for the next several months or years, the nuclear peace movement will last...

...Not because of communism alone, but rather because of ancient pan-Slavism...

...For the moment it is based on the assumption that the Soviet Union is not really a threat to world peace or humanity's future...

...The ad hoc committee replied with a 105-page document...

...Professor Commager cautioned there was a difference: abolitionism was essentially about blacks in the South...

...by contrast, the concern of the abolitionists for the slaves was morally more abstract...

...But does the abolitionist analogy hold...

...That prospect must give the Quakers some moments of quiet satisfaction...

...As far as the bishops are concerned, antinuclearism has become a permanent facet, a major aspect, of Catholic public witness, just as pacifism (and antinuclearism) has been for the "peace" churches all along...

...Today the opposition to the arms race is no longer selective or sporadic, it is widespread and sustained...

...In November, the nation's Roman Catholic bishops met in Washington to debate the second draft of their pastoral letter on war and peace, due for release in 1983...

...In their view: "Nuclear escalation has been opposed sporadically and selectively but never effectively...

...The committee has not done its work free of tension...

...Many Catholics complained that the seventy-page first draft was too long to be useful...

...To Catholic peace activists particularly, the issues have a strong theological ring: Get rid of the just-war theory once and for all, and equate possession of nuclear arms with use and manufacture...

...In our century, those same Quakers, along with the faithful from other "peace" churches such as the Church of the Bretheren and the Mennonites, have been known for their pacifism and antiwar witness...

...opposes strategic planning "which seeks a nuclear war fighting capability...

...If Outler cast an unblinking eye on the Soviets, he did no less to Quaker pacifism...

...The issue has been badly confused—people act as if Russian imperialism were somehow the product of Marxist-Leninism...

...Nonetheless, while "we have judged immoral even the threat to use such weapons, at the same time, we have held that the possession of nuclear weapons may be tolerated while meaningful efforts are under way to achieve multilateral disarmament...

...and the removal of nuclear weapons from border areas...

...Total abolition...

...Outler said the antinuclear movement seems not to have an objective comparable to abolition...

...One member of the bishops' committee even has a strong stake in "preparedness" and "deterrence," and has said so publicly: Bishop John O'Connor is a member of the Military Ordinariate—familiar to the genThe bishops are sure of one moral imperative: a rejection of nuclear war...

...Right-wing Catholics, as well as bland church-going conservatives, regard with some alarm the bishops' ad hoc committee preparing the pastoral letter...

...Perhaps the analogy, then, is that the Americans wanting to free themselves from the bomb are more reminiscent of their forebears who wanted to free themselves from George III...

...The bishops have, in their text, moved toward a "strong 'no' to the use of nuclear arms...

...Hartley's motion was the first of its kind before Parliament, just as nuclear freeze proposals put before Congress this year were the first of their kind, in this country or anywhere else...

...Like abolitionism, antinuclearism will take a permanent place in the society, remaining an issue until either the bomb is abolished or we are...

...National Review has wondered if the bishops' behavior amounts to an abandonment of church tradition...

...It is middle-of-the-road to any who are not alarmed by the prospect of Catholic bishops involving themselves in national security issues...

...Two former Secretaries of Defense (Harold Brown and James Schle-singer), a SALT I negotiator (Gerard Smith), arms control directors and specialists, and high-ranking former CIA officials rated special attention before the theologians and ethicists, the scripture scholars and peace activists and physicians, when the bishops marshaled their witnesses...

...The antinuclear movement, however, is a reaction in part to the betrayal of the hopes of thirty years for atomic energy: The hopes have turned into threats...

...The bishops' statement, in its current form, opposes the construction of weapons that would "give credence to the concept that the U.S...

...If the analogy holds, then the current antinuclear protests will not cease...

...Would the present antinuclear movement fade...

...It oversees Catholic chaplains in the armed forces...

...The monsignor said he was "chary" of drawing a parallel between abolitionism and antinuclearism—there were too many differences between them to accept the analogy straight away...

...we are sure of one moral imperative—a rejection of nuclear war...

...Antinuclearism, he said, displays a concern for ourselves...

...And it still leaves the American political arena open to reverberations from the refusal of a body of bishops representing some 22 per cent of the population to yield on their opposition to nuclear weapons...

...The clear-cut statement in the first and second drafts that the church intends to involve itself politically on the antinuclear issue: "We reject criticism of the Church's concern that 'it should not become involved in politics,' " states the first draft...

...But Hartley, who was not a Quaker, had given words to sentiments that the Society of Friends, founded just over a century earlier, had made their cause: abolitionism...

...it was a concern about others...

...The noted Quaker historian Hugh Barbour unfortunately was on sabbatical in England...

...military affairs...

...The question begs to be asked, therefore, whether the abolitionist movement of our day is, in fact, the move to abolish the bomb...

...What we have, I'm afraid, is simply a Marxist imperialism grafted on to the old Slavic urge to the West...

...There is also a call for a strengthened command and control over tactical nuclear weapons to prevent "inadvertent and unauthorized use...

...There was an exception to Catholic noninvolvement, however—a New York pastor, Father Joseph Farrell...

...deep cuts in stockpiles...

...They are now in the forefront of the nuclear pacifist movement...

...Offsetting Bishop O'Connor has been Detroit auxiliary bishop Thomas Gumbleton, well known in the peace movement, who has been taking heavy fire from his friends for failing to press his brother bishops to condemn "possession" of the bomb...

...Monsignor Ellis, dean of Catholic historians, chuckled and said that for the most part American Catholics avoided the abolitionist movement "like poison...

...The second draft goes to the bone: "There should be clear public resistance to the rhetoric of 'winnable' nuclear wars, 'surviving' nuclear exchanges, and strategies of 'protracted nuclear war.' We seek to encourage a public attitude which sets stringent limits on the kind of actions our Government will take on nuclear policy in our name...

...And there may be a connection, of sorts...

...a comprehensive test ban treaty...

...The bishops support "sufficiency as an adequate deterrent...

...Can we really expect antinuclearism to continue no matter whatl I put these questions to three historians: Henry Steele Gommager of Amherst College, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis of the Catholic University of America, and Albert Outler of Southern Methodist University...

...seeks a first strike" capability...

...Not that the bishops are unopposed, even from their own...

...Outler then applied the historian's eye to Russia, for he said, "I'm afraid I do regard Russia as a threat to world peace...

...Nuclear pacifism, out to disarm the West, "has more of an 'end of the world' syndrome to it, where the movement to emancipate slaves was by no means the same sort of goal...

...What interests me," said the Methodist historian, "is that there are not the same kind of people in the antinuclear camp as in the abolitionist camp...

...The Roman Catholics, mostly immigrants, were not into abolitionism in the Nineteenth Century...

...But he was the sole exception," Ellis noted...

...Historically more remarkable, however, is the emergence of the Roman Catholic church as a "peace" church...

...Therefore, we cannot at this time require Catholics who manufacture nuclear weapons, sincerely believing they are enhancing a deterrent capability and reducing the likelihood of war, to leave such employment...

...If that situation alters, if Russia suddenly is perceived as a real threat, I think the situation could change, and change, actually, rather quickly...

...As for National Review's fear that a politically involved U.S...

...David Hartley moved that "the slave trade was contrary to the laws of God and the rights of men...

...Professor Emeritus Albert Outler, historian, theologian, and Methodist minister, felt one-could work an analogy, "but only by straining it a lot...

...However, that still leaves the international Roman Catholic church, and every pope since the nuclear age began, condemning outright the use of nuclear arms...

...Historically, he said, "social passions [have focused] on vital issues—issues that are a threat to human life and dignity, or issues that offer some hope of freedom...

...Catholic church "could increase the peril to Judeo-Christian civilization," or William F. Buckley's complaint that the bishops' document "fails to take significant note of diplomatic reality," the bishops have been careful to ensure that no one could accuse them of failing to do their homework...

...The motion failed...

...The Quakers, you know, were quite capable of bankrolling the American Revolution, and did...

...The behavior...

...There were any number of people in the abolitionist movement who were "stridently anti-Catholic," he said...

...As he sees it, slavery collided with the American dream of the home of the brave and the land of the free, as well as with the moral sensibilities of the abolitionists...