Necessary and Possible

August 16, 2020 – Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Seventy-five years ago this month, the United States unleashed an atomic weapon over the Japanese port city of Hiroshima. An estimated 70,000 people died in the fiery blast and its immediate aftermath; between 90,000-160,000 people died from radiation’s earliest damage by the year’s end. Three days later, the United States bombed the Japanese ship-building city Nagasaki, instantly killing 60,000-80,000 people. Six days later, Japan surrendered to the United States and its Allies, ending the Second World War.

Incredibly, the world has lived with and somehow managed not to use this particular destructive force since then. Not only the use, but the very existence of nuclear weapons has consistently been fiercely denounced by Catholic leaders, from Pope John XXIII’s 1963 call to ban nuclear weapons in his encyclical letter Pacem in Terris, to Pope Francis’s assertion at Nagasaki in 2019 that “a world without nuclear weapons is possible and necessary.”

I wonder sometimes, if we as Catholics know the consistency and clarity of the church’s condemnation of nuclear weapons. It doesn’t seem to be a front-burner issue. Do we consider peacemaking as the church’s essential mission (The Challenge of Peace, 1983), a requirement of faith to which we are “bound before God and every man and woman in the world (Pope Francis at Nagasaki, 2019)? Do we understand what our faith asks of us, as possession of nuclear weapons multiplies and spreads, and the weapons themselves become (if it is even possible to imagine) ever more deadly?

I have sometimes found the Catholic Church’s teaching on peace to be maddening. I envy the simplicity of historically pacifist traditions: violence is never acceptable, period; war is not the answer, ever. .  I know that my Catholic faith can bring me to much the same place, but it can seem painstakingly slow. On the solemn anniversary of the deaths of so many innocents in Hiroshima and Nagaski—not to say during World War II and the countless wars that have followed—let us recall the main points of the Catholic peacemaking tradition, and look for the strengths it can offer.

Catholic teaching on peace begins, as does all Catholic moral teaching, in our reverence for all life as a gift from God and firm belief in the dignity of each human person and all human community. We believe that peace is also a gift from God, the fruit of God’s saving activity, promised to those who live by God’s covenant and established forever by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But how to live in peace in this world, in the already-and-not-yet of the reign of God? Here is where Catholic teaching becomes complicated, or perhaps better said, nuanced. This is why the Second Vatican Council speaks of peace as “more than the absence of war” and as the fruit of an ever more perfect reign of justice (Gaudium et Spes #78). This is why the US bishops could say, writing in The Challenge of Peace in 1983, that there is an inalienable obligation to defend peace and there are moral options in how to do so.

The consideration of such moral options relies heavily on what is perhaps the best-known part of the Catholic peace tradition, just war teaching. Just war theory can be understood as a two-part examination of conscience. The first part, known by the Latin phrase jus ad bellum, examines what situations can overcome the fundamental moral presumption against war. Traditionally, the criteria for justice in going to war include legitimate authority to declare war, a right intention, proportionality to that intent, probability of success, and that war is a last resort. Jus in bello, the second part of the examination of conscience, circumscribes conduct within war, emphasizing the limits of proportionate, discriminate actions and the protection of noncombatants. Entire books can and have been written on each of these criteria. It is at this point in their moral reasoning—jus in bello—that the US bishops built their 1983 case against US nuclear weapons policy.

Is it better to arrive at a firm moral commitment to peacemaking in a single step or by many? Is it enough to know that Jesus is our peace, or do we need a developed and developing body of teaching on the conduct of war and waging peace? Is it a strength or a weakness to engage in a process of analyzing social issues, exploring the perspectives of scripture and Catholic experience and weighing and applying our values?

In the end, I am convinced that the Catholic peace tradition offers us two particular advantages: First, it allows us to engage with the complexity of new and unforeseen issues. Just as our tradition once equipped us to condemn the threat of nuclear weaponry, we are also equipped to reject new evils, such as the emergence of terrorism. Second, our moral practice allows us to see connections, to follow the threads that link the development of weapons of mass destruction to environmental destruction, to the theft of the world’s resources from the poor and to the increasing militarization of our national culture.

The strength of our traditional moral practice—of reading the signs of the times in the light of the Gospel—is that it allows us to see that if we want peace, we must work for justice. And then we can be confident that we walk in the ways of Jesus Christ, who is our peace
.—BJ Brown

The US Catholic Conference’s policy statements on nuclear weapons can be found on this page of the USCCB website. The full text of their 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace, is here.  You can also explore Catholic peacemaking at the website of Pax Christi USA.