(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
Sometimes those leaders too easily assumed that God wanted “us” to win, and they overlooked moral questions. But the “lessons of Vietnam,” so often talked about, now threaten to have the opposite effect.
Pacifists hold a position that can be respected. They do, however, have an obligation to be candid about their principles and to say something realistic about terrorism. To date much of their response has been fatuous — dreamy exhortations to approach our enemies with “understanding” and “good will,” anticipating that they will respond to us in the same way.
Such idle dreams can only convince most people that pacifism is absurd. The great pacifists, like Gandhi, were realists.
But there are also religious voices that express not pacifism but what has been aptly called “passivism.” They do not actually say that the war is morally wrong, but they throw up endless objections, to the point where it becomes almost impossible to pursue the terrorists.
These strictures — not to attack civilians, not to give in to hatred and revenge, not to stereotype people — are valid as far as they go.
But those who ceaselessly issue such warnings seem to have nothing to say about the purposes of the war itself. They do not candidly reject it as immoral and they are willing to enjoy the protection which our military activities bring them. But they hold themselves fastidiously aloof, ready to dissociate themselves morally at any point.
If religious leaders cannot do better than that, they will merely reinforce the idea that religion is irrelevant to real life, simply a way of imagining the world as we would like it to be. Religious leaders should give moral guidance even when that guidance goes against the patriotic grain. But they must at some point also be able to offer heartfelt support to the national struggle.
Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver is one religious leader who has done that: “The first and overriding inequality which Americans face at the moment is this one: The real murderers … are alive and ready to kill again. … No government can keep its legitimacy if it fails to defend its people.”
He points out that the United States is not the only, nor the chief, cause of suffering in the world and that much of the suffering for which we are blamed can in fact be laid at the door of some of the same political leaders who now denounce us.
Archbishop Chaput urges Americans to engage in necessary moral self-examination about their role in the world. But at the same time, he reminds us, “self-examination cannot be allowed to paralyze and prevent the United States from defending its own people.”
Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, in a letter to President Bush, also surveyed the moral terrain and urged, among other things, “… we must be careful to avoid two unsupportable conclusions: first, that [the terrorist attacks] were God’s punishments for moral decay within our nation; second, that they were an inevitable and deserved response to United States foreign policy. These were the acts of men with evil in their hearts … No reason can be given to explain them or the loathing that inspired them …”
Some people are outraged by these statements and accuse the two archbishops of succumbing to patriotic hysteria. But in today’s religious climate such forthrightness is in fact courageous, even though the archbishops assert what sensible people recognize to be merely obvious.
