Bishops and the Bomb

COVER STORY

Bishops and the Bomb

A theology of peace challenges nuclear strategy

In another age the meeting would have been held in seclusion and secrecy. Last week, however, 276 bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. were debating in the full glare of TV lights and under the gaze of an international press corps. A few years ago precedent would have dictated that division among the prelates be suppressed, lest the faithful be scandalized. But many of the bishops who assembled for the annual meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C., were openly wondering if their ideas were right for the church, or for the nation. And the document that the bishops debated, instead of being couched in the traditional terms of moral certitude, asked Catholics not to read and obey, but to weigh and consider the conclusions, much as had the bishops themselves. Both the candid, probing manner of the debate and the topic of their discussion reflect the enormous changes that are sweeping through the Catholic Church in America.

The document under discussion was the draft of a pastoral letter, addressed to 51 million American Catholics, on the morality of nuclear war. In it, the bishops are seeking to develop a theology of peace that challenges some of the fundamental assumptions and defense strategies of every American Administration, and most of the Western world, since the beginning of the nuclear age. The bishops’ key attack is on the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. They acknowledge that the U.S. threat to use nuclear arms in response to a Soviet assault might prevent the outbreak of war, but they nonetheless conclude that the policy is unsatisfactory because it created, and keeps in place, a balance of terror that all too easily could lead to a holocaust. They are also offended by the cost of maintaining deterrence, which they say takes money away from programs for the poor. In addition, the bishops call for a nuclear freeze, which is opposed by the Administration and many experts, who argue that it would preserve Soviet nuclear superiority. The bishops also urge the Administration to work actively for a disarmament agreement with Moscow.

Doubting that any nuclear war can be limited, the bishops oppose the first use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. To deter the Soviets from using their superior conventional forces in an invasion of Western Europe, the U.S. has kept open the option of using nuclear weapons before the Soviets do. The bishops also criticize the deployment of new MX missiles on the ground that they would quicken the arms race. The Administration insists that the U.S. needs the MX to counter new Soviet weaponry. Surveying the broad sweep of the bishops’ document, Archbishop Edward A. McCarthy, 64, of Miami said last week, “Cataclysmic threats demand dramatic responses. We need to demonstrate that waging peace has become a high priority of the church of the Prince of Peace in this 20th century crisis.”

With the endorsement of Pope John Paul II, a Vatican panel declared in September that prevention of nuclear war “is the greatest moral issue humanity has ever faced and there is no time to lose.” But just how should centuries of Christian theological teachings about war be applied to the realities of the current arms race? For two years the U.S. bishops have struggled with that question. The climax of their debate coincided with events that dramatized the relevance of their talks: a change of leadership in the Soviet Union, the passage of various nuclear referendums at this month’s elections, and crucial discussions on U.S. defense spending.

Since the debate about the morality of atomic weapons began in 1945, U.S. Protestants have led the way, in both mounting demonstrations and developing theology. The pastoral letter, which will be formally issued next May after further revision, is by far the strongest and most dramatic Christian challenge to the structure of U.S. nuclear strategy.

Moreover, the antinuclear crusade is a watershed for U.S. Catholicism. As a group, American bishops were almost jingoistic in their endorsements of U.S. foreign policy. Today dozens of the prelates are avowed pacifists. On nuclear morality and other social issues, says the Rev. Michael Campbell Johnson, Rome-based head of the Jesuits’ Commission for Justice and Peace, the American bishops “may at last be slightly out in front of the [world] church as a whole.” Some feel they may be too far out in front. New York’s Terence Cardinal Cooke, 61, warned his colleagues last week that the nuclear issue has “great potential for seriously dividing our church and nation.”

The pastoral letter was drafted by a committee of five bishops, whose views on nuclear strategy range from hawkish to openly pacifist. The chairman of that committee in many ways exemplifies the new spirit of American Catholicism. He is the Most Rev. Joseph Louis Bernardin, 54, Archbishop of Chicago (see box). As head of the nation’s largest archdiocese (2.4 million members), Bernardin is expected to be added to the ten American Cardinals when Pope John Paul II names new members of the Sacred College. Bernardin has been a close colleague of the Pope’s since they served together from 1974 to 1978 on the Vatican’s international council for the Synod of Bishops.

Bernardin is greatly respected by his fellow American bishops, in part for his ability to work out compromises on controversial issues. Soft-spoken and mild-mannered, he has a knack of achieving his goals without causing commotion or rancor. Says a top Catholic clergyman, in admiration: “When Bernardin makes waves, they’re always smooth waves.”

The choice of Bernardin to chair the nuclear panel was made in 1980 by Archbishop John Roach of St. Paul and Minneapolis, 61, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference since 1980. Says Bernardin of his delicate assignment: “We don’t expect everyone to accept our conclusions, but we believe we must think this thing through to the end.”

At the start of the debate, Cardinal Cooke, who is also military vicar to Catholics in the armed forces, called for stronger emphasis on the righteousness of “defense against unjust aggression,” more realism about Communism and more reaction from bishops in other Western nations who are “anxious about their own defense.” Another conservative, New Orleans Archbishop Philip Hannan, 69, argued that his colleagues should scrap the document entirely because it ignores the evils of Soviet Communism.

Hannan was followed by Seattle’s Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, 61, an avowed pacifist who advocates unilateral U.S. disarmament. He is also risking federal indictment by refusing to pay half his income taxes as a protest against the Administration’s defense spending. Hunthausen last year called the missile-carrying Trident submarine, based near his city, “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound,” but on this occasion his rhetoric was less outrageous. “To many my message seems like foolishness,” he said, “but to me, it is simply the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Philadelphia’s influential Archbishop, John Cardinal Krol, 72, is liberal on disarmament and conservative on church discipline and doctrine. He suggested that the pastoral letter should more clearly acknowledge a nation’s right to resist attack and tyranny from unjust aggressors by all means that are morally licit.

The most difficult issue in the draft was a statement on the morality of nuclear deterrence. Here the bishops took their guidance from a message by John Paul to a United Nations General Assembly disarmament session last June. The Pope had written: “Under present conditions, ‘deterrence’ based on equilibrium—certainly not as an end in itself but as a stage on the way to progressive disarmament—can still be judged morally acceptable. However, to ensure peace it is indispensable not to be content with a minimum which is always fraught with a real danger of explosion.” The question facing the bishops was whether they should be more specific than the Pope.

In the midst of the discussion, the White House launched a carefully wrought defense of its nuclear policies. What deeply concerned the Administration was fear that the bishops’ criticism of nuclear deterrence would encourage the peace movement in the U.S. and abroad and build pressure for unilateral rather than mutual disarmament. That, in turn, might undermine U.S. efforts to negotiate arms limitations agreements with the Soviets.

The Administration’s case was made by National Security Adviser William Clark, a Catholic layman. In an open letter to Bernardin, he said that the White House agreed with the Pope’s stand and, indeed, with much of what the bishops were saying. But Clark said that he and President Reagan were “especially troubled” that the draft ignored American proposals “on achieving steep reductions in nuclear arsenals, on reducing conventional forces and, through a variety of verification and confidence-building measures, on further reducing the risks of war.” Clark noted that the Soviets had mounted a huge arms buildup during the past decade when the U.S. was holding down arms spending. He also argued that it was perfectly moral for the U.S. to make certain that “our deterrent forces remain sufficiently strong and credible to assure effective deterrence.” The goal, he said, is “to prevent war and preserve the values we cherish.” As for the bishops’ stance on the MX, the Administration argues that their opposition to the development of more sophisticated weapons would reduce the prospects of limiting a nuclear war.

The bishops also had to face the terrible paradox of deterrence: it is based on fear and therefore cannot work if one side or the other can be absolutely certain that nuclear weapons will never be used. This point was advanced by William V. O’Brien, a political scientist at Georgetown University, who noted in the Washington Quarterly that “deterrence without credible intention to carry out the deterrent threat will not be effective.” The bishops were divided on whether or not the nuclear button should ever be pushed in defense of the U.S. On the final day of their meeting, the bishops debated the document in a plenary session for two hours, then voted, with only four nays, to hold a special conference in Chicago on May 2 and 3 to polish and issue a final nuclear policy statement. Bernardin’s committee will be getting written comments from the bishops and reactions from the Vatican, which has followed the discussions with keen interest, as well as from bishops in Western Europe who are somewhat worried by what they see as the Americans’ leftward drift.

The final debate made it obvious that the committee has much work still to do. Despite an overwhelming consensus on the basic thrust of the document, the bishops want a stronger biblical and theological rationale for their conclusions. There is likely to be more acknowledgment of U.S. disarmament efforts and further recognition of the Soviet threat. On the key question of the morality of nuclear deterrence, the bishops will be trying to refine their position. Under sharp press questioning in Washington, Bernardin acknowledged that the current text is ambiguous on whether it is ever moral to use nuclear weapons. An earlier draft had said it was possible to use them in retaliation, but only if aimed at military targets. That section was dropped because the bishops decided that any nuclear confrontation would escalate to all-out war. The current version strongly suggests that such conflicts could not be contained, and thus that no use of nuclear weapons could ever be morally sanctioned.

While the bishops were weighing their words, some priests, nuns and lay people have been challenging nuclear might with deeds. At Groton, Conn., nine Catholic protesters were sentenced this month for trying to damage a nuclear submarine. In Denver, two nuns have been convicted of forging Government passes to enter Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant and place signs saying DACHAU and DEATH FACTORY. Sister Frances Russell of Cheyenne, Wyo., is coordinating a tri-state coalition to protest probable deployment of MX missiles in the area. That veteran radical Catholic, Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan, faces a 5-to-10-year sentence for damaging warhead cones in Pennsylvania. “In the 1960s we went to jail alone,” he marvels. “Now there are bishops at our side and Jesuits putting up bail.”

To be sure, the activists on antinuke picket lines represent a small minority of American Catholics. Nonetheless, many people both inside and outside the church are wondering how it is that bishops who only a few years ago praised the Lord and passed the ammunition are now backing what some see as a pacifist-tinged cause.

Several factors are involved. One is the impact of Pope John XXIII, who succeeded the sternly anti-Communist Pius XII in 1958. Pope John sought to reach some measure of accommodation with the repressive regimes of Eastern Europe to help the church survive. He also said total nuclear disarmament was essential, and summoned that watershed meeting in the history of the 20th century church, the Second Vatican Council. Among other things, the council called upon Catholics to take a more active role in promoting social justice in Christ’s name. Many of the bishops who participated in last week’s debate freely admit that Vatican II was a turning point in their lives. Said St. Paul’s Roach: “It was really the mind and spirit of the council that I have tried to assimilate and absorb.”

That emphasis on social justice, particularly the abolition of war, was carried forward by Pope Paul VI in his memorable 1965 address to the United Nations, where he pleaded: “No more war! War never again!” John Paul II is equally fervent. In a dramatic and symbolic speech at the Hiroshima memorial, he demanded that humanity make a “moral about-face” from war.

There was also a change in the leadership of the church in America. The old-fashioned autocratic Cardinals whose pride was in building new parishes and schools gradually gave way to men with a more pastoral, people-oriented outlook. Pope Paul is given much credit for orchestrating the change. He once remarked to his Secretary of State, Jean Cardinal Villot, “Don’t American Catholics understand what vast power they have, and what a responsibility?” Increasingly that power devolved on bishops who rejected a monarchical style of ruling, were open to ecumenical contacts with Protestants and more readily accepted the advice of new priests’ senates and lay parish councils.

The new breed of bishops also has a strong sense of collegiality and a willingness to follow leadership regardless of rank. Bernardin and Roach, despite their relative youth, probably have more influence among their fellow prelates these days than do the Cardinals as a group Other emerging leaders in the hierarchy include Archbishops James Mickey of Washington, 62; John May of St. Louis, 60; and Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, 55. All these men were advocates of a nuclear freeze even before the Bernardin committee issued the text of the pastoral letter. Krol, the leading figure among the older hierarchs, is staunchly in agreement.

American Catholicism has also undergone some profound internal changes. In the age of immigration, Catholics essentially were strangers in a predominantly Protestant land. Reacting to nativist charges that their spiritual loyalty to Rome was somehow more important than political loyalty to their new homeland, Catholic immigrants and their children sometimes attempted to be superpatriots.

Des Moines Bishop Maurice Dingman, 68, explains the change: “We have gone from being a fortress church to a lighthouse church. When we were an immigrant church, we put a wall around the people, and we did a good job of protecting them. We maintained their faith. But we could no longer stay in our shelter. We let down the drawbridge and crossed the moat, and we’re out in the mainstream of America.”

Some bishops point out, with a bit of exasperation, that they have in fact taken provocative positions on major political issues in the past, although without catching the public eye as they have on nuclear arms. The Bishops’ Program anticipated New Deal labor and welfare laws 14 years before the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the hierarchy spoke out strongly against racial injustice in 1958, early in the civil rights struggle.

Through this period the hierarchy continued to back U.S. foreign policy. The Viet Nam War at first paralyzed and then catalyzed the bishops. They called upon the U.S. to end the war in 1971. The bishops argued that any good that could be gained from the fighting was outweighed by the destruction of human life and moral values. One high Vatican prelate believes that many American bishops, feeling they had spoken out too late on the war, “may be compensating now by taking a strong stand [on nuclear weapons]. The Viet Nam experience also influenced them to take a close look at American involvement in other areas.”

In January 1973, the bishops were shaken by a second event, the Supreme Court decision allowing abortion on demand in most circumstances. This legal challenge to the age-old Catholic teaching that abortion is equivalent to murder forced the bishops to adopt a style of political propaganda and maneuver that, until then, had been more characteristic of liberal Protestants. For Catholicism, the abortion decision was a bold attack on human life and dignity. The radical change produced reflection upon other “life” issues, especially the arms race. Says Bernardin: “If you take a strong stand against abortion as the unjust taking of human life, then you cannot remain indifferent to nuclear warfare.”

The bellicose rhetoric of the Reagan campaign alarmed many bishops, who feared that the new Administration might blunder its way into nuclear war. Many bishops became more active in various antinuclear efforts. In November 1980, the bishops authorized the Bernardin committee to begin work on the pastoral letter. Pressed by mounting local demands to help the poor and the unemployed, key church leaders like Roach also assailed Reagan’s $1.5 trillion defense buildup. The ensuing antinuclear wave in Western Europe and the U.S. has strengthened the bishops’ commitment.

There may have been other subtle factors at work. Liberal Jesuit Sociologist John Coleman suggests that the bishops almost instinctively grasped the arms race as a moral issue because they needed to restore their “credibility” with the laity, which had eroded because the hierarchy had no choice but to support Pope Paul’s unpopular (and widely ignored) ban on birth control.

The bishops’ growing interest in political action was also increased by their involvement with the church in Latin America. There bishops, priests and nuns have embraced the social liberalism of Pope Paul and Vatican II, siding with the poor against the oligarchies. A tempering influence on Latin American clergy was Pope John Paul’s admonition that they should not get directly involved in politics. But the general effect of the church’s activism in Latin America was to encourage the U.S bishops not only to become more aggressive politically in the U.S., but to take strong policy stands on human rights in the hemisphere.

During the past year, the U.S. bishop and Protestant activists of like mind strongly opposed Reagan Administration policy in El Salvador. The bishops demanded that the Administration cut off military aid to El Salvador, arguing that it only escalated the violence, much of which has been engendered by the Government. Two weeks ago Archbishop Roach called for an end to U.S. military involvement in Guatemala because of that nation’s human rights atrocities. Nonetheless, the gap between the bishops and the White House on policy in Central America has narrowed slightly. The Administration has seemingly become more sensitive to human rights violations in El Salvador, while Roach has joined Reagan in denouncing oppression by the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

The range and volume of pronouncements by the U.S. bishops on social issues have increased enormously in recent years. The bishops or their spokesmen have issued at least 200 statements since 1966, when the hierarchy reorganized itself into two bodies: the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, a strictly ecclesiastical body, and the U.S. Catholic Conference, the civic and service agency of the bishops. Depending on the issue, the bishops may sound like sanitized Moral Majoritarians or Kennedy Democrats. Besides familiar stands (for tuition tax credits to help private-school parents; against mercy killing, sleazy TV shows and the religious vacuum in public schools), the bishops have taken distinctly liberal stances on welfare, crime, prisons, housing, national health insurance, world food policy, South Africa and the Panama Canal treaty (the bishops were strongly influenced by calls of support from Archbishop Marcos McGrath of Panama City). The bishops have backed both Israel’s right to exist and Palestinians’ “right to a state.”

Next year the bishops will take up a topic that is potentially as divisive as abortion or nuclear weaponry. A committee led by Milwaukee’s Archbishop Weakland is conducting a thoroughgoing moral evaluation of capitalism. The bishops have already advocated the redistribution of economic wealth in the U.S., and have blamed Third World poverty on an exploitive U.S. economic policy and multinational corporations. Conservative critics find this an appallingly simplistic view of economic realities, amounting at best to a kind of global sentimentality and at worst to a repetition of left-wing propaganda platitudes. Last week, without specifically mentioning Reaganomics, a bishops’ panel denounced “current policies which attempt to solve America’s economic ills at the expense of the poor and unemployed.”

As the bishops argue their case against nuclear arms in the months ahead, they will contend that this stance is consistent with the tradition of church teaching on war. Until the Bomb, Christianity’s approach to war had remained fundamentally unchanged for centuries. The earliest Christians refused all military service because they thought Jesus’ love-thy-neighbor teachings mandated pacifism, and because Rome required idolatrous vows. Christianity became an established religion in the 4th century and soon embraced St. Augustine’s “just war” theory, expanded in later centuries by Thomas Aquinas and other theologians.

The traditional conditions for a morally justifiable war, which are generally accepted by non-Catholics as well as Catholics, are that it be declared by a legitimate authority, for a righteous cause, with good intention, as a last resort, and waged with limited means. The two criteria for conduct of a just war that are especially pertinent to today’s nuclear debate are “discrimination” (no direct killing of innocent civilians) and “proportion” (a war’s devastation must not exceed the evil it seeks to overcome). Nuclear pacifists argue that these two factors necessarily rule out atomic warfare.

In 1954 Pope Pius XII cautiously approved the use of atomic, bacteriological and chemical weapons, but forbade these methods if they “entirely escape from the control of man” or cause the “annihilation of all human life within the radius of action.” Pius, who denounced saturation bombing even before the inferno of Hiroshima, declared that wars of righteous aggression, in order to punish an offense or to recover territory, could no longer be justified because modern weaponry had become so devastating. Wars of national self-defense, however, were still permitted.

At Vatican II, a coalition of U.S. and European bishops persuaded the council to accept, grudgingly, the idea of nuclear deterrence. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, promulgated in 1965, declares: “Since the defensive strength of any nation is considered to be dependent upon its capacity for immediate retaliation, this accumulation of arms . . . serves, in a way heretofore unknown, as a deterrent to possible enemy attack. Many regard this as the most effective way by which peace of a sort can be maintained between nations at the present time.”

The council also said that it was morally right for Catholics to be pacifists, denounced the costly arms race and called for disarmament, “not unilaterally” but at an “equal pace,” and “backed by adequate and workable safeguards.” The bishops at Vatican II further declared, “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself.” The World Council of Churches, which represents 350 million Protestant and Orthodox Christians, had said much the same thing four years earlier.

The U.S. bishops’ peace offensive began with a pastoral letter in 1976. It declared that modern conflict “is so savage that one must ask whether war as it is actually waged today can be morally justified.” The bishops said that no Christians can “rightfully carry out orders or policies requiring direct force against noncombatants.” Then came this key statement: “As possessors of a vast nuclear arsenal, we must also be aware that not only is it wrong to attack civilian populations but it is also wrong to threaten to attack them as part of a strategy of deterrence.” The bishops were applying the traditional teaching that it is as wrong to intend to commit an evil act as it is to commit it. In 1979, testifying on behalf of the hierarchy before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Cardinal Krol went further. He flatly ruled out use or “declared intent” to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances, presumably because masses of civilians would inevitably be involved.

The final phase in the evolution of peace theology was the formation in 1980 of the Bernardin committee. Archbishop Roach skillfully chose the membership of the five-man committee to span the spectrum of the bishops’ thinking on nuclear arms. The most liberal member of the committee is Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, 52, of Detroit, who heads Pax Christi, a movement with strong pacifist inclinations. A total of 57 bishops belong to the organization. Gumbleton’s hawkish opposite on the committee is Bishop John O’Connor, 62, who runs the church’s military ministry for Cardinal Cooke. The committee is rounded out by two moderates: Bishop Daniel P. Reilly, 54, of Norwich, Conn., and George A. Fulcher, 60, Auxiliary Bishop of Columbus.

Beginning work in July 1981, the Bernardin committee held 14 hearings and heard from 36 witnesses, including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and his predecessor, Harold Brown, SALT Negotiator Gerard Smith, as well as theologians, Bible scholars, physicians and peace protesters. Bernardin sent a copy of the first draft of the committee’s report to the Pope, who is said to have approved it.

When news of the text’s dovish stance leaked last June, National Security Adviser Clark wrote fellow Catholics asking them to press the Administration views upon the bishops. The topic doubtless came up when Clark and President Reagan lunched with the Pope’s top aide, Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, in Hartford on Aug. 3. On Sept. 13, Weinberger sent Bernardin a carefully worded statement making the same points that Clark made later. In October, retired General Vernon Walters, a State Department troubleshooter, quietly visited Rome to brief Pope John Paul on the Administration’s position on nuclear strategy, among other matters. The White House campaign changed the view of neither the bishops nor the Pope.

The anguished discussion of the bishops in Washington about the morality of nuclear deterrence reflected only part of a far broader debate that is building about the proper place of the bishops and the church they serve in the modern world. The debate involves a number of respected Catholic thinkers. The four main points currently at issue:

Church and State. A few critics make the flimsy charge that the bishops’ activism, particularly their zealous support for measures that would overturn the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling, violates the constitutional principle of church-state separation. Not only is there no clear legal bar against such efforts, but just about every U.S. denomination has entered politics at one time or another. Says Archbishop Roach: “We may never allow the separation of church and state to be used to separate the church from society.” Former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger disagrees with the bishops’ view on deterrence, but says: “Some laymen would like the bishops to confine their discussion to kissing on the first date. Bishops have as much right to comment as anybody else.”

Rabbi Balfour Brickner, a longtime social-action official for Reform Judaism, has battled Catholic officialdom on abortion. Yet he says of the nuclear issue, “They let us carry the ball alone for too long. Bring on the bishops!” But Archbishop Peter Gerety, 70, of Newark, warns, “We have to make clear that we are not trying to write legislation or elect politicians.” In some cases bishops have veered close to doing both on the abortion issue.

The Bishops’ Competence. Numerous critics argue that writing detailed prescriptions on nuclear strategy is simply beyond the bishops’ scope of knowledge. At least one bishop is inclined to agree. Peoria’s Edward O’Rourke, 65, thinks the clergy are experts on moral principles, but not always on how to apply them: “I’m not confident we bishops have the ability to tell the President of the U.S. how to get the world out of the dangerous position in which it finds itself. If I were that wise, I wouldn’t be sitting here in Peoria.” Says Catholic Layman Robert Spaeth, liberal arts dean at St. John’s University, a Catholic school in Minnesota: “I don’t exercise much independence on matters like the infallibility of the Pope, but if a bishop tells me the MX missile is bad, that’s my field.”

In an interview with TIME, Archbishop Bernardin said the technical competence question “makes me smile. There are many people who write about these issues, newspaper editors, for instance. Are they really expert in a technical sense in every field they write about? They write on the basis of study, on the basis of their conversations with people. The same thing is true of us bishops. We do not present ourselves as experts in nuclear warfare or in nuclear armaments, but we do want to share with our people, and all people of good will, what we have learned and what we think the moral implications are.”

Some critics charge that the bishops are usurping the proper role of the laity. Quentin Quade, executive vice president of Jesuit-run Marquette University, says the real issue is not “more or less activism, but who is responsible for putting these values into practice.” Quade deduces from Vatican II that the clergy are supposed to preach principles and the laity are supposed to apply them. Michael Novak, a Catholic philosopher and theologian who is perhaps the most quoted opponent of the bishops’ pastoral, thinks that “they are suffering from hubris, taking on vocations that aren’t theirs.”

The Bishops’ Aides. Some conservatives argue that the bishops are largely endorsing documents drafted by the Washington staff of the U.S. Catholic Conference, which Catholic rightists consider to be unfairly tilted to the left. The favorite target of the conservatives is Father J. Bryan Hehir, 41, onetime Harvard student of Henry Kissinger, who has been in charge of the conference’s office for international justice and peace since 1974. Hehir, who makes no secret of his liberal tendencies, often testifies before Congress on such topics as amnesty for draft resisters, disarmament, world food policy, and human rights violations in Chile and South Korea. He is the top adviser for Bernardin’s committee on nuclear arms as well as for the committee on capitalism.

Bernardin dismisses the criticism that he and his peers are prisoners of their staffs (“It’s kind of offensive and demeaning”). Hehir readily defends the bishops’ campaign: “Protecting human dignity is a thoroughly Gospel task. It can’t be done outside the political arena. That’s why the church does it. It’s not trying to impress people with being au courant.”

Secularization. One criticism of the bishops echoes a complaint that conservative Protestants have long registered against their ecclesiastical leaders: in speaking out on every conceivable issue, the church runs the risk of losing sight of its essential task—to preach the Gospel message. “Some people will feel we have lost our spirituality,” admits Cleveland’s Bishop Anthony Pilla, 50, who nonetheless supports the pastoral letter, with some reservations.

In a new 206-page critique of the bishops’ social policies, Political Theorist J. Brian Benestad of the University of Scranton argues that by subtly secularizing the church, the bishops are surrendering their most effective strategy for changing society. It is papal teaching, he argues, that evangelism and the spiritual education of individuals must be the church’s primary way of reforming society.

“Some people say we shouldn’t talk politics and that we should address ourselves to truly religious issues,” Bernardin answers. “Well, it’s not as simple as all that. It’s our responsibility to address the moral dimension of the social issues we face. These issues, of course, do have a political dimension as well as a moral dimension. I don’t deny that, but that doesn’t mean we’re not permitted to talk about them. But our perspective must always be from the moral or ethical dimension. I reject out of hand that we have taken a leftward swing. What we are trying to do is focus on the teaching of the Gospel as we understand it, and to apply that teaching to the various social issues of the day. Our central theme is our respect for God’s gift of life, our insistence that the human person has inherent value and dignity.”

What impact will the bishops’ words on weapons have? “It’s too early to say what activism will mean in the broader American context,” says Harvard Political Scientist Stanley Hoffmann. “Certainly in terms of numbers alone the Catholics represent a potent political force. In part it depends on what they do with the pastoral letter. If it’s stuck in a file cabinet some place, the long-term effect will be minimal.”

The bishops, of course, have no intention of filing away their forthcoming pastoral letter. But the day is long past when the bishops, or even the Pope, can tell the American Catholic community what to think, let alone how to act. On the issue of abortion, linked so closely by the bishops to that of nuclear arms, surveys by the National Opinion Research Center show that 77% of Catholics think that the law should permit abortion for a danger to the mother’s life, and 44% for social reasons, such as a family’s poverty. American Catholics widely disregard the Pope and bishops on birth control. Says Loyola University of Chicago Psychologist and ex-Priest Eugene Kennedy: “You can’t deliver a Catholic vote on anything any more—Catholics are not one isolated bloc with homogeneous interests.”

But if the bishops cannot persuade skeptical Catholics to join their stand against nuclear arms, both the White House and nuclear-freeze advocates believe that they can become a potent force in shaping and influencing what is likely to become an increasingly important political issue in the months ahead. Says Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb of Mobile, 51, with some trepidation: “We are going to divide America over this issue. But the people of America have shown resilience. They can work through it and heal us.”

Lipscomb and many other bishops talk of the need to begin a dialogue on the issue of the morality of nuclear arms. The importance of the pastoral is that it is not an authoritarian fiat, but basically an invitation to lay Catholics, as well as to priests and nuns, to join the bishops in the kind of anguished soul searching that produced the document. It is that openness, that tentative quality of the pastoral, that appeals to Sister Mary Evelyn Jegen of Chicago, national coordinator of Pax Christi. Says she: “I see that the bishops are caught because they’ve got three hats on. They’re trying to deal with this issue as theologians, as pastors and as public figures. But the fact that they’re trying, and to some extent succeeding, shows the health and strength of the church. And the open consultation with others, their willingness to listen and learn—that’s so new.”

Father Theodore Hesburgh, 65, president of the University of Notre Dame, is not worried about the debate within the church over the propriety of the bishops’ actions. Says he: “You can’t move through the water this fast without a lot of turbulence around the edges.” The situation, he thinks, is stabilizing. And Hesburgh praises the pastoral characteristics of today’s bishops: their concern with humanity as well as with doctrine. “They embrace what is good,” says Hesburgh, “and a little imperfection too. They know that it’s better to encourage little flowers than to sweep the ground clean. It’s exciting to be a priest in the middle of an exciting development: the blossoming of the Gospel in new ways.”

Says Bishop Gumbleton: “We’re offering this as a guide to conscience, not the way it was done in the past: ‘We know best. This is the answer.’ We are trying to engage the whole church in the same process the committee went through.” Gumbleton’s colleague, Bishop Reilly, agrees: “We aren’t claiming this is Almighty God handing down the truth from the mountain as with Moses. It’s the bishops of the U.S., trying to apply the teachings of Jesus Christ to issues never faced before by the human family.”

The Catholic Church, and indeed all churches, has preached peace across the centuries and has never achieved it. That is no reason why they should not continue to preach the message and to try to change mankind. That is their vocation. But peace has never been achieved, even for a while, by moral inspiration alone. It has always required the highly imperfect, compromise-ridden and impure actions of political leaders. The dilemma potentially posed by the bishops’ strivings is that reaching for the best could undermine the good, and that striving for the ideal might undermine the practical. —By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Jim Castelli/Washington, J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago and Bruce van Voorst/New York