The Bishops' Pastoral Letter

Some months ago I received a call from a reporter for one of the nation's largest news magazines. The magazine was doing a cover story on the growing response to the nuclear threat. The reporter posed the following to me: "You know some of the bishops and other church leaders who are now coming out against nuclear weapons. What's in it for them? What political advantage do they hope to gain by coming out at this particular time?"

I shook my head at how little the secular news media understand about the church or about matters of faith. I replied to this cynical reporter, "This may be difficult for you to understand. But what you are observing among the bishops, among leaders of other denominations, and among Christians in local congregations and parishes is a conversion--a conversion to peace. It is a deeply personal movement of faith in the lives of many Christians, who are discovering together that the meaning of their faith is at stake in their response to the threat of nuclear war."

The U.S. Catholic bishops have worked for the last year on a statement that condemns much of U.S. nuclear-weapons policy. Probably the most important thing about the first and second drafts of the pastoral letter on war and peace of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops is the dialogue it is creating in the church.

Because the document is rather long, and ponderous at points, most Catholics will not read much or all of it. But because of the pastoral letter, there is hardly a Catholic in the country who doesn't know that the bishops have made the nuclear question a top priority. And because of that, it has become an item of conversation on the agenda of every Catholic diocese and most every parish.

The letter begins with a call for a new theology of peace and rightly states, "A theology of peace should ground the task of peacemaking solidly in the biblical vision of the kingdom of God."

The biblical sections of the pastoral, which could be expanded, are far more compelling than those that take moral philosophy as their starting point. The focus of the letter's biblical argument is appropriately on the person and work of Jesus Christ: "The ultimate ground of peace lies in the love that Jesus both demonstrated and commanded."

The bishops rightly point us to the cross, "the ultimate demonstration of the meaning of Jesus' love....In all of his suffering, as in all of his life and ministry, Jesus refused to defend himself with force and with violence."

God wrought the great work of reconciliation in Jesus Christ and his cross. The bishops call us to reconciliation and remind us of Jesus' command to love our enemies, as well as his promise that the peacemakers shall be called the children of God.

The bishops then lay out in some detail two Christian traditions--nonviolence and the just war--and carefully argue that from either starting point nuclear war must be condemned absolutely: "...our no to nuclear war must, in the end, be definitive and decisive."

The pastoral explicitly puts the bishops at odds with several key elements of current government policy and military strategy. The bishops condemn any use of nuclear weapons against civilian targets or military targets located near civilian populations. Not only is it morally unacceptable to use nuclear weapons against civilian populations, it is wrong, say the bishops, even to threaten their use.

The bishops reject any first use of nuclear weapons and remain "skeptical" of the idea of fighting "limited nuclear wars." They specifically condemn those nuclear weapons systems like the MX which seem to offer a nuclear-war-fighting capability, and they even reject the declared U.S. policy of retaliating against Soviet cities if U.S. cities are attacked, which they say would "serve no rational or moral purpose."

The part of the pastoral that causes me concern, however, is the section on deterrence. The bishops offer many strong criticisms of deterrence, but finally accept it "conditionally" as a step toward "progressive disarmament."

Some time ago at a small meeting I had a dialogue with a leading Catholic thinker, who was defending the point of view on deterrence put forth in the pastoral letter. I asked him if he, as a Catholic, could ever push the nuclear button. He responded, "No, as a catholic, I could never do that."

I asked him to explain, then, the foundation of the doctrine of deterrence.

"It rests on your adversary being completely convinced that you will in fact use your nuclear weapons against him," he replied.

I continued, "Then your position depends on none of us in this room telling the Soviets that you don't really mean it."

"Well, that's the problem with the position," he responded.

The other problem is that the government leaders my friend is advising really do mean it. They do not have a Christian inhibition against using nuclear weapons. They, in fact, intend to use nuclear weapons if they perceive U.S. interests to require them to do so.

John Hersey, the author of Hiroshima, writes in his response to the bishops pastoral letter, "The central moral crime against the future of the human race is the use being made by superpowers of the idea of deterrence. The moral deficiency of this idea is that it is a potentially murderous lie. 'Deterrence' causes an endless escalation of provocations, which are bound to lead one day to war. It has deeply embedded in it the notion of balance.

"This notion--considering the overkill already stockpiled by the United States and the Soviet Union makes 'deterence' the engine of an endless buildup of evermore potent weapons. The moment one side develops a new, irresistable, more accurate weapon, the other side must in the name of deterrence counter by producing another even more invulnerable and devastating system. This has reached a point in the Reagan administration of an insane equation of 'deterrence' with the capability of winning a protracted nuclear war."

I share with Hersey the perception that the conditional acceptance of deterrence, meaning the toleration of the possession of nuclear weapons, is a "fatal flaw in an otherwise admirable and absolutely necessary document."

If our Christian faith prohibits us from using nuclear weapons, then it also forbids us to threaten to use them. And without a real threat, their possession is either meaningless or dishonest. It is indeed the possession of nuclear weapons which now most endangers us. And it is their escalation, justified by the present concepts of balance and deterrence, that threatens to plunge the world into nuclear war.

To break with the doctrine of deterrence, which would mean to condemn not only the use but the possession of nuclear weapons, would be to fundamentally break with the very foundation of U.S. national security as it is presently defined. That is, of course, very hard to do, but it is the very thing that is required for our survival.

The superpowers are locked in a deadly stalemate. They have shown no genuine political will to halt the arms race, to reverse its direction, to enter into a meaningful process that would abolish nuclear weapons and finally free the world from the fear of annihilation. There are only accusations and counter-accusations, propaganda and counter-propaganda, rhetoric and falsehood on all sides. Clearly, if left to themselves, neither of the superpowers will turn toward peace. Only public refusal and massive noncooperation will force our respective governments to become serious about disarmament.

The church can lead the way. The most important relationships now are between the churches of East and West, North and South--a new force for peace, united together against nuclear war.

What is most needed now is the clearest possible witness to the gospel in the midst of the many voices speaking to the nuclear question. We must be careful about being too complex and theoretical, but rather speak in words that are so clear that both simple people and powerful rulers can make no mistake about what we really mean.

The church must issue a decisive no to nuclear weapons--no to their use, no to their threatened use, and no to their very possession. That unclouded word is, I believe, what the world's political leaders need most to hear and what the church needs most to say and do for the sake of its own integrity.

A few bishops have confided to me that they would not know what to say to their people if in the pastoral letter they condemned the possession of nuclear weapons. What would be the implications for all those Catholics who are now employed in the defense industry, and who serve in the armed forces? The bishops ask, how could we tell them they are wrong after being silent ourselves for so many years?

There is a way. It begins with repentance on the part of the bishops. We all must confess our own complicity in the nuclear arms race. There is none of us who is righteous in this regard. We all have been too silent for too long. We have known too much, we have accepted too much.

To really set the church on a new course, the pastoral letter should begin with repentance--for Hiroshima, for Nagasaki, for the arms buildup ever since, for threatening the world with such terrible destruction, and for having little to say about it as Christians until until so very recently. If the letter were to begin there, then bishops and parishioners could clasp hands and walk together to a new place. This could be an important step for us all in learning to be the church in this historical crisis.

The pastoral letter says many things for which I am indeed grateful. But, I fear, it still falls short of the kind of clarity we most need now. At places in the letter, theological discourse seems to outweigh prophetic utterance. An unequivocal no to nuclear weapons by the church is obscured by the willingness to "tolerate" such weapons among us under certain circumstances.

In any moral question, when the level of evil and threat to human life becomes too great, the traditional "lesser evil" argument no longer applies. The bishops have previously drawn such a line on the issue of abortion. For the sake of the gospel and our survival, they must now draw the line on nuclear weapons.

Unless the bishops' pastoral letter is a strong no to nuclear weapons under any and all circumstances, it will not be the help it might be to Christians, and it could be used by political leaders in ways contrary to the intent of the bishops. There is much in this statement to be commended, but the crucial flaw around the doctrine of deterrence could undermine its rich appeals to the Scriptures and the strength of the Catholic tradition of which the statement is so full.

The potential in such a statement is great, which is why the bishops are now under a great deal of pressure from the Right of both church and state. A strong prophetic word from the bishops at this time has a tremendous capacity to both disciple the people of God and challenge secular authorities with their awesome responsibilities in the eyes of God.

During the first week of May the bishops will gather in Chicago to agree on the final wording of their pastoral. We pray that they will value gospel faithfulness over "reasonableness" and political acceptability, that they will courageously stand by what they have already said and take their theological and spiritual convictions to their logical conclusion.

Let us all be in prayer for the bishops as they try to listen to what the Lord is saying.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.