Reflections

I was much edified by the Summer 2008 issue of the journal, The Sign of Peace, the publication of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, South Bend. This issue was dedicated mostly to the 25th anniversary of the American bishops’ pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.

The comments on the document included aspects I never thought of before, for example, the remarks of Frank Cordaro:

But it and the economic pastoral that followed were the last consensus pastorals that the US Catholic bishops conference would write with a majority of the bishops appointed under Pope Paul VI. Once the majority of the US Catholic bishops conference was made up of Pope John Paul II appointees, the issues of war and peace were tragically set aside for what they believed to be the more pressing concerns of “Catholic Identity.”

This thought gives a rather new perspective on the question of the US hierarchy and the issues they want to emphasize, especially in a national election year.

Cordaro also says:

Tragically, we find ourselves celebrating the 25th anniversary of The Challenge of Peace amidst pastoral sleep-walking in a collective Catholic amnesia. Today a new generation of US Catholics knows nothing of this peace pastoral. They do not think as Catholics when assessing the war in Iraq and our young know little to nothing of our Church’s just war tradition, the pacifist Catholic option, nor of our stated support for conscientious objection. Today, the US Catholic Church is shamefully more nationalistic than it is Roman Catholic, a spiritual state which is bad for our souls and bad for our nation.

One can usefully read the entire statement of Cordaro. The staff of the Catholic Peace Fellowship point out:

All of this [fear] gave credence to the opening sentence of The Challenge of Peace, that “the whole human race faces a moment of supreme crisis in its advance toward maturity.”

It seems to me that this statement shows evidence of a belief in progress. But one might question such a belief. For example, William Pfaff, in his book, The Bullet’s Song, has this to say about progress in the last chapter:

Utopian thought rests upon the belief in progress… The twentieth century’s doctrines of utopian possibility necessarily rested on the conviction that history is a progression toward some conclusion that will provide an answer to the fundamental questions of existence.

Then Pfaff asks a question: “What if there is no progress? If that is the case, and it is, the twentieth century has closed an era of profound illusions.”

Pfaff ends the chapter on progress with a discussion of Simone Weil and Charles de Foucauld, citing them as persons of religious belief. After writing of these individuals, he ends the book with the words:

There is no serious reason at all to think that a mechanism is at work, or a program is available, to provide us with a future that in essential respects of morality and humanity will be better than the present. We are what we are. To sacrifice living human beings to make “a better world” is an act of totalitarian morality and is also futile. There is no collective solution to the common condition. The only thing we can remake is ourselves. A society’s obligation is to concern itself with its own virtue or perfection. There is an intellectual obligation to address what is, not what one wishes might be.

What are we to conclude from such documents as the pastoral? Perhaps one can dismiss it by noting that it is nothing more than a bureaucratic statement that comes from the institutional Church as institution.

But what to do with the individuals? For example, Francis Murphy, an Auxiliary Bishop of Baltimore, was inspired by the story of Franz Jägerstätter, the words of Pope Paul VI, and the repentance of Fr. George Zabelka, the chaplain who blessed the men who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to initiate the process which resulted in The Challenge of Peace. And there were bishops: Raymond Hunthausen, Archbishop of Seattle, and Leroy Matthiesen, bishop of Amarillo, Thomas Gumbleton, auxiliary bishop of Detroit and a few others. Dorothy Day is cited in the pastoral, but the document reserves this witness for individuals alone. The staff of the Catholic Peace Fellowship rightly criticizes this position.

As the staff also point out, The Challenge of Peace “…. was not very effective at all. US nuclear policy in the period after the pastoral was promulgated remained unchanged; in fact, it became less conciliatory, more aggressive.”

Why do I continue to go downtown each Wednesday to stand in front of the Federal Building, holding up a large sign? Abstractly, I do this because of a distinction made by Ivan Illich: the Church as “she” and the Church as “it.” Illich very much loved the Church as “she” and fought against the institutionalization of the Church as “It.”

But in a practical sense, I suspect I go each Wednesday because of the people there; these are the people I cherish; these are the people I want to be with.

Lee Hoinacki
August 6, 2008, Philadelphia, PA
Lee is a member of CPF

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