Whenever I hear a Catholic bishop confidently condemn war
against Iraq — Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony is one of the
latest church officials to say “war is not the solution” — I think
of Archbishop Philip Hannan. A retired archbishop of New Orleans
and World War II paratrooper chaplain, Hannan said of his fellow
bishops’ war views: “They don’t know what the hell they’re talking
about.”
The bishops are not experts on defense policy. They are not even
experts on Catholic teaching, as the widespread heresy in their
clerical ranks illustrates.
Nor do they appear paragons of prudence. When they are
questioning George Bush’s prudence, it is reasonable to ask: What
about theirs? Are they experts on prudently assessing evil and
removing it? The abuse scandals in the Catholic Church suggest not.
If someone like Cardinal Mahony doesn’t consider a savage dictator
an “imminent threat,” that’s predictable: He didn’t consider
priest-molesters imminent threats either.
One might think bishops demonstrated to be unreliable at judging
threats to their own flocks’ safety would approach the Iraq crisis
with more circumspection. Passivity in the face of evil is a stupid
policy for churches and nations. And what faith the bishops place
in U.N. inspectors! It is reminiscent of the faith they placed in
the psychiatrists treating their pedophile priests.
It bears repeating that the bishops’ advice to Ronald Reagan
during the Cold War — don’t compete with the Soviets in the arms
race — would have lost that struggle for America. The bishops
preached peace through passivity then, and they are preaching the
same now. They have learned very little from their embarrassing
exercises in amateur-hour defense strategy.
Why can’t the bishops restrict themselves to the presentation of
Catholic teaching and not squander their teaching authority on
personal opinions either for the war or against it? Because then
they wouldn’t be “relevant,” they say, never mind that these
attempts at “relevance” make them irrelevant when their authority
really counts. Moreover, by taking a divisive stance on a
prudential matter open to legitimate disagreement amongst
Catholics, they are not even serving the cause of peace in their
own church.
The irony, of course, is that Catholic officials who usually
reject the Pope’s magisterium are now suggesting it extends to a
prudential matter that goes beyond it. When the Pope repeats the
authoritative teachings of his predecessors, they don’t listen;
when he offers an opinion, they are all ears. Now that the Pope is
saying something they like, they are even policing dissent against
him, implying that disagreement with him about this highly
contingent matter is tantamount to denying his legitimate
authority. Suddenly papal obedience is a virtue for them. It is too
bad that they don’t show such scrupulous obedience when he is
teaching on matters of faith and morals.
If the Pope had come out in favor of the war, these same people
would have returned to badmouthing him. Their newfound respect for
the Pope is as dubious as their understanding of just war teaching.
One obvious reason for not trusting their application of the just
war teaching to the Iraq crisis is that they don’t agree with it.
They are agnostic about the justice of war. Which is why we hear
them talking about “developing” the just war teaching. They want to
“develop” it into the unjust war teaching.
“Developing” a teaching is a euphemism for distorting a
teaching. Any “developed” teaching which contradicts a previous
teaching is not a legitimate development in the Catholic
tradition.
Yet church officials are trying to smuggle pacifism into the
just war teaching. When they speak of war as an intrinsic evil,
they are not representing the Catholic tradition. St. Thomas
Aquinas explicitly rejected that position. To the question, “Is war
a sin?” he answered no. He said that it is not a sin, but an
instrument of justice in stopping evil.
Antiwar church officials are making the same incoherent sounds
about war that in recent years they have been making about the
death penalty: They imply both are intrinsically unjust, but then
say vaguely that some “very extreme” circumstances justify them. If
something is intrinsically unjust, no circumstance could justify
it. So either these church officials don’t understand their own
position or they are fudging it so as to avoid the pacifist label
which would take them out of the debate and discussion. (Since,
after all, if you think war is a per se evil, you don’t need to
sift through the facts.)
Future Catholics will look back at this period of pacifist
tinkering and agree with Archbishop Hannan — the antiwar bishops
didn’t know “what the hell” they were saying.
