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Living with Faith and Hope:
Reflecting on the U.S. Bishops' Peace Pastoral |
The following address was given at the University of Great Falls on March 11, 2009 at the invitation of the university and the Diocese of Billings-Great Falls. Bishop Zavala announced Pax Christi USA's new nuclear disarmament campaign publicly following the address.
Thank you. I am so pleased and honored to be with you tonight. I would like to express my gratitude to the Diocese of Great Falls-Billings and the Catholic University of Great Falls for sponsoring tonight’s gathering. And I want to give special thanks to Bishop Warfel for this invitation to come, and also for his leadership in our Church on concerns of justice and peace, for he has served on the International Policy Committee of U.S. Bishops Conference, and as a bishop member of Pax Christi USA.
I have been asked to share a reflection on the U.S. bishops’ landmark pastoral: “The Challenge of Peace,” written in 1983, by exploring the challenges of peace today, as well as the opportunities for charting new paths for peace for our country and our world.
The peace pastoral was a prophetic document issued at a time of heightened tensions between the nuclear powers. Yet it is very relevant for today, as I believe we are at a new moment for eliminating nuclear weapons from the world’s arsenals. This gives me great hope, and I will share more about how I believe the Church can bring its moral voice to helping our country’s leaders take decisive steps toward nuclear disarmament. It is an opportunity that we must seize upon, and do so with renewed urgency.
A second set of challenges to peace that I will reflect upon comes from the direction our country took following the events of September 11th. Part of the title for tonight’s talk “Living with Faith and Hope,” is from the name of the pastoral that the bishops issued in November 2001, two months after September 11th. The letter primarily spoke to the grief and vulnerability we were experiencing as a nation, but it also elevated a moral voice at a juncture when our nation’s leaders were crafting parameters for the so-called “war on terror.”
I believe that the way in which this “war on terror” has been carried out has, sadly, contributed to a terrible spiral of violence engulfing our world. Most particularly, Iraq is a clear example of how violence begets violence. And as the U.S. is poised to deepen military engagement in Afghanistan, I would hope we could step back from the brink and reflect on the consequences rising from our country’s over-reliance on military strategies to address terrorism and resolve international conflicts.
I am here speaking as the Bishop President of Pax Christi USA, the national Catholic peace movement. Pax Christi’s mission is to live out the gospel call to nonviolence and to promote peacemaking as a priority in our Church, and as leaven for our nation. Since our inception, Pax Christi has raised a moral voice in calling for a nuclear weapons- free world and has tried to work faithfully to build a more just and peace-filled world.
As members of Christ’s body, we are all called upon to help envision new paths for peace for our wounded world, and to do so “with faith and hope.” And this we must!
First, I would like to draw on Jesus’ call to “read the signs of the times,” by bringing the light of the Gospel and Catholic Social Teaching into dialogue with lived history.
Let me begin by looking at the unique challenge posed by nuclear weapons. The Peace Pastoral was very much a document informed by a deliberate and detailed reading of the signs of the times in the early 1980s. Written at a time when the nuclear standoff between the Cold War enemies of the Soviet Union and the United States literally was based on a MAD policy—Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD). Deterrence was the mechanism on which the MAD policy relied. Each side was deterred from attacking the other for fear of the other side wreaking total destruction upon it. “Peace” as it were, was maintained through this precarious balance, always threatening to break down into an unthinkable nuclear war. At the time the Pastoral was being discerned, there were even those in Reagan Administration who were proposing “limited” and “winnable” nuclear wars. The nation was building hundreds of weapons each year, and developing new ways of delivering them.
The Peace Pastoral addressed this dangerous direction by reasserting Vatican II’s condemnation of nuclear war and declaring that nuclear weapons could never be used. And on the central question of nuclear deterrence, the Pastoral was guided by Pope John Paul II’s declaration at the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament the previous year that: “In current conditions "deterrence" based on balance, certainly not as an end in itself but as a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament, may still be judged morally acceptable. Nonetheless in order to ensure peace, it is indispensable not to be satisfied with this minimum which is always susceptible to the real danger of explosion.”
The Peace Pastoral took His Holiness’ position and went on to lay out what the US Bishops called a “strictly conditioned moral acceptance of nuclear deterrence” based on three criteria: First, a reliance on deterrence could be an interim strategy only. As the Pastoral stated, “We cannot consider it adequate as a long-term basis for peace.” Second, the purpose of maintaining nuclear weapons in the interim could only be to “prevent the use of nuclear weapons by others,” and finally, a reliance on deterrence could only be used “not as an end in itself, but as a step on the way to a progressive disarmament.”
Ten years later, in the Anniversary Statement, The Harvest of Justice is Sown in Peace, we bishops further specified that “progressive disarmament” must mean a commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons, not simply as an ideal, but as a concrete policy goal.
Sadly, the strict conditions of the Pastoral remained unmet through the mid 1990’s and so in 1998, Pax Christi USA marked the 15th anniversary of the Peace Pastoral by issuing its own evaluation of the morality of nuclear deterrence. The report, issued by 105 US Catholic Bishop members of Pax Christi USA concluded that the strict conditions for the moral acceptance of nuclear deterrence were not being met. We found that the policy of nuclear deterrence had been institutionalized. It was in no way an interim policy, but rather had become the very “long-term basis for peace” that we rejected in the 1983 Pastoral. And we found that the role of nuclear weapons had been expanded in the post-Cold war period well beyond the narrow role of deterring the use of nuclear weapons by others to include a whole range of missions including protecting so-called “vital interests”. And we concluded that the United States had no intention or policy position of eliminating these weapons. Rather, it was clear to us that these weapons had become fully integrated into US war-planning and strategy documents and that our nation intended to maintain and rely on these weapons indefinitely. We said at that time that nuclear deterrence as a national policy must be condemned as morally abhorrent and urged instead, for the United States to take up the Vatican’s call to outlaw nuclear weapons just as biological and chemical weapons had been outlawed.
Click here to read part two of this speech.
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