Tranquillitas Ordinis - Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace

491 Pages·1987·19.208 MB·English

by  George Weigel

Tranquillitas Ordinis
The Present Failure and Future
Promise of American Catholic Thought
on War and Peace
GEORGE WEIGEL
Oxford New York
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1987
Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1987 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weigel, George.
Tranquillitas ordinis.
Includes index.
1. Peace—Religious aspects—Catholic Church.
2. War—Religious aspects—Catholic Church.
3. Catholic Church—Doctrines. I. Title.
BX1795.W37W45 1987 261.873'08822 86-12742
ISBN 0-19-504193-3
987654321
Printed in the United States of America
In memory of
John Courtney Murray, S.J.
and
in gratitude to
Robert Pickus
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following sources:
Excerpts from The Documents of Vatican II, copyright 1966, all rights reserved,
by America Press, Inc., 106 West 56th Street, New York, NY 10019, and reprinted by
their permission.
Excerpts from “Totalitarianism” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, copyright
1951 by Hannah Arendt; renewed 1979 by Mary McCarthy West. Reprinted by
permissiqn of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. and by Andre Deutsch Ltd. for British
markets.
Excerpts from Roland Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace,
copyright 1960 by Abingdon Press, and reprinted by their permission.
Excerpts from The TTial of the Catonsville Nine, copyright 1970 by Rev. Daniel
Berrigan, S.J., and reprinted by his permission.
Excerpts from Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners, reprinted by
permission of The Continuum Publishing Company.
Excerpts from Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine,
copyright 1963 by Columbia University Press and reprinted by their permission.
Excerpts from Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, copyright 1975
by Oxford University Press and reprinted by their permission.
Excerpts from Divine Disobedience, copyright 1969, 1970 by Francine du Plessix
Gray. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Excerpts from Modern Times, copyright 1983 by Paul Johnson. Reprinted by
permission of Harper & Row.
Excerpts from John Langan, S.J., “The Elements of St. Augustine’s Just War
Theory,” reprinted, with permission, from The Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 12,
no. 1 (Spring 1984), pp. 19-38.
Excerpts from Thomas Merton, “Peace: Christian Duties and Responsibilities,”
“The Christian in World Crisis: Reflections on the Moral Climate of the 1960s,” “Note
on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolent Revolution,” “Christian Ethics and Nuclear
War,” “Christianity and Defense in the Nuclear Age,” and “Note for Ave Maria,”
reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. as agents for the Thomas
Merton estate.
Excerpts from William D. Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love, Dorothy Day and
the Catholic Worker Movement, by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Copyright © 1973 by William D. Miller.
Excerpts from John Courtney Murray, S.J., We Hold These Huths, used by
permission of Sheed & Ward, 115 E. Armour Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64141.
Excerpts from H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, copyright 1951 by
Harper & Row, and reprinted by their permission.
Vlll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Excerpts from Paul Ramsey, “The Vatican Council of Modern War,” reprinted,
with permission, from Theological Studies 27, no. 2 (June 1966).
Excerpts from Paul Ramsey, “Pacem in terris,” reprinted by permission of the
author.
Preface
Those who write long books are under a moral obligation to write short prefaces. As
Thomas More said to the headsman, I shall be brief.
This book takes up what I might call, to paraphrase Robert Frost, a “lover’s
quarrel with my church.”
I am convinced that Catholic social theory, particularly as it developed in the
United States through the Second Vatican Council and the work of John Courtney
Murray, S.J., has been, and could once again be, of great importance to a world that
sought both peace and freedom.
I am equally convinced that the Church in the United States has not only failed to
develop its heritage of thought over the past generation; the Church’s most influential
teaching centers have, in the main, largely abandoned their heritage. Both the Church
and American political culture have suffered as a consequence of this failure. The task
for today, then, is to reclaim and develop the heritage abandoned by many of
American Catholicism’s intellectual and religious leaders in the years since Vatican II.
Some of the abandoners argue, of course, that there was nothing to abandon. I
hope that Part One of this study will put that canard to rest. Reclamation and
development require an understanding of the themes of the abandonment that has
taken place, and of how those themes eventually influenced the Church’s official
commentary on issues of U.S. foreign policy; thus. Part Two. And as it would be
irresponsible to criticize others without taking my own shot at reclamation and
development. Part Three is a sketch toward a new theology and politics of peace and
freedom; one that I hope is faithful to, even as it stretches, the classic Catholic theory
that has been unhappily forgotten. I also hope that this new theology and politics of
peace and freedom has broad ecumenical appeal.
One qualification is important at the outset. The temptation to commit the logical
fallacy of post concilium ergo propter concilium—to think that everything that
happened after Vatican II happened because of Vatican II—is rarely resisted in Amer¬
ican Catholicism today. There is a complex, substantive connection between the work
of the Council and the transformation of American Catholic thought on war and
peace since 1965, a connection to be explored here in some detail. In most cases,
however, I have used the phrase “in the years after Vatican 11” as a temporal reference
point, not as an explanatory principle. I shall be grateful if my readers, of all
theological and political persuasions, keep that distinction in mind.
This has been a collaborative work in more ways that I can briefly acknowledge.
Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and Robert Pickus have influenced my
thought decisively, as well as being close friends and colleagues in a variety of
enterprises seeking to advance peace and freedom. Other friends and associates may
also find ideas suspiciously similar to their own woven into what follows: William A.
X PREFACE
Douglas, Nick Eberstadt, James Finn, Max M. Kampelman, Penn Kemble, Roy
Prosterman, and Robert Woito.
Dean C. Curry; Thomas M. Gannon, S.J.; Marguerite Green, R.S.C.J.; Francis
Kane; William J. Lee, S.S.; Michael Novak; Robert Pickus; and Philip Siegelman
read my first draft and generously took the time to make detailed comments.
This is a better (and shorter) volume because of the good counsel of my editor,
Cynthia Read, whose faith in this project has been an important span in the bridge
between a lumpish manuscript and a book.
A year at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington,
D.C., gave me the opportunity to conduct my research and prepare a first draft in the
flag tower of the old Smithsonian Castle, with the Mall at my feet—an office the likes
of which I never expect to be favored with again. I am very grateful to the Wilson
Center Board of Trustees, to the Center’s Director, James H. Billington, and to
Michael J. Lacey, the Secretary of the Center’s Program on American Society and
Politics, for taking the chance they did on me. Rodger Potocki, who played the Library
of Congress the way Brooks Robinson played third base, was my Wilson Center
research assistant from September 1984 through August 1985; Noah Pickus joined the
team from June through August 1985. Both were indispensable. Fellow fellows
Bohdan Bociurkiw, James Childress, Joseph Komonchak, and Menachem Milson
were particularly helpful colleagues.
I must also thank the Earhart Foundation for the fellowship research grant that
supported the completion of the book; the Homeland Foundation, whose grant made
possible my introduction to computers; and the board of directors of the James
Madison Foundation, who have seen this book as an important part of our work
together.
My wife Joan, and my daughters Gwyneth and Monica, each helped, in their
distinctive ways, to maintain a sufficiency of tranquillitas ordinis on the home front so
that the composition and editing I did there were a pleasure.
This book is dedicated to the memory of American Catholicism’s finest public
theologian and in honor of the work of a Jewish peace activist who defies all the
stereotypes associated with that vocation. The former was a brilliant exponent of just-
war theory; the latter is a principled pacifist, certainly the most thoughtful I have ever
known. These two considerable figures never met. They should have. It would have
been a fine, and needed, argument. I am happy to be able to bring them together at
last, this side of the New Jerusalem, if only on a page.
July 4, 1986 G. W.
Washington, D.C.
Contents
Prologue: Between the Fire and the Pit—Moral Imagination in
the Modern World 3
Part One: The Heritage 23
1. The Catholic Tradition of Moderate Realism 25
The Augustinian Heritage: Peace as Public Order 26
The Medieval Heritage: Peace as Human Possibility 32
Moderate Realism and Political Community: The Distinctiveness of
Catholic Theory 42
2. American Catholicism and the Tradition Received: From John Carroll
to the Second Vatican Council 46
From John Carroll to James Gibbons: American Catholicism and
the Moral Problem of War from the Revolution to the
First World War 48
The American Bishops and World War II 55
Prelude to the Council: The Catholic 1950s 67
3. American Catholicism and the Tradition in Transition:
The Second Vatican Council 74
Pacem in Terris 78
Gaudium et Spes: Vatican II on “The Church in the Modern
World” 92
The Ministry of the Laity in the World, Religious Freedom,
and a Summing Up 103
4. The John Courtney Murray Project 107
The Murray Project: A New Hermeneutic 110
America as Proposition 112
The Moral Problem of War and Peace 122
The Incomplete Project 135
XU CONTENTS
5. The Promise and the Vulnerability of the Heritage 139
The Promise of the Heritage 139
The Vulnerability of the Heritage 144
Interlude: Five Portraits 148
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement: Catholic Anarchism 148
Gordon Zahn: “Traditionalist Catholic Pacifism” and
the Reform of the Church 153
Thomas Merton and Catholicism at the Apocalypse 159
Daniel and Philip Berrigan: The Catholic New Left 164
James Douglass and Countercultural Catholicism 170
Part Two: The Heritage Abandoned 175
6. Themes for the Abandonment of the Heritage 177
The Structure of the War/Peace Debate 178
Themes in Transition 182
7. Vietnam: Vehicle for the Abandonment of the Heritage 216
1963-1966: The Consensus under Pressure 216
1967-1971: From Dissent to Disillusionment 219
1972-1975: From Disillusionment to Illegitimacy 224
The Aftermath 227
Other Voices 229
An Assessment 230
8. The Moral Horizon of “An Entirely New Attitude” 237
The Church and the World 238
Morality and Foreign Policy 240
Pacifism 243
Just-War Theory 248
Peace and Justice 252
“An Entirely New Attitude” 255
9. “The Challenge of Peace”: American Catholicism and
the New Nuclear Debate 257
The American Bishops and Nuclear Strategy: Pre-1980 258
The New Nuclear Debate 261
CONTENTS Xlll
The Evolution and Principal Teachings of “The Challenge of
Peace” 267
The Vatican Consultation 275
“The Challenge of Peace” and the Abandonment of the Heritage 280
10. American Catholicism and the Dilemma of Peace and Freedom
in Central America 286
The American Catholic Debate on Central America 286
The American Bishops and U.S. Policy in Central America 299
The Central America Debate and the Heritage Abandoned:
An Evaluation 306
Interlude 314
Portrait—J. Bryan Hehir 314
Part Three: The Heritage Reclaimed and Developed 325
11. Beyond Abandonment 327
12. To Be A Church at the Service of Peace 335
The Incarnate Christ and the Human Prospect 336
Eschatology and Historical Responsibility 340
Toward a Theology of Peace: Five Issues 342
An Ecclesiology for Pastoral Education and Civic Engagement 348
Sacrament of Human Unity, Community of Charity and Prayer 353
13. To Be a Church at the Service of Peace 356
The Peace to be Sought 357
The Question of the Present International System 359
The Question of the Soviet Union 371
The Question of Intervention 377
The Question of Military Force 381
The Question of the Boundaries of Political Obligation 383
The Question of America 386
The Question of Human Nature 391
Epilogue: The Moral Necessity of Politics 393
Notes 397
Index 477