Two priest-friends, one a Jesuit and the other a Josephite, recently were in the news for signing a “declaration of conscience” pledging complete non-cooperation with American prosecution of the war in Vietnam. Joining Dorothy Day, Linus Pauling, Bayard Bustin and about five hundred others, the priests were the brothers Berrigan, Father Daniel, S.J., a poet and theologian, and Father Philip, S.S.J., a writer and college professor.
The Fathers Berrigan are the first priests publicly to disavow the war in Vietnam, and I am sure their act will bring down plenty of fall-out. There is no tradition for this sort of action by priests in this country, and I suppose some bishops will be unhappy over the business. For my part, I could not join the brothers Berrigan in signing the statement, but nonetheless I honor them for doing what they have done.
I suppose this makes me sound like a pacifist, but I’m not. I am unable to deny to the state the right to use force if necessary to protect the common good, and I think it wrong to let evil triumph. At the same time, though, it must be emphasized that war can be waged only for a just cause and by just methods. Sometimes it seems as if such concepts are forgotten by everyone except the pacifists, and I honor them for prodding the conscience of society in this matter.
Week in and week out, we live under the shadow of the Bomb, usually without giving the question much thought. This has been true in a wide sense since we demonstrated what the Bomb could do at Hiroshima in 1945; it has been true in a more particular sense since the Russians, and now the Chinese, showed us there is no secret about the thing. Occasionally, though, a clear Christian protest at this state of affairs can rouse us from our lethargy, and it’s my hope that the stand taken by the Fathers Berrigan et al. will do precisely that. One may, of course, disagree with the specifics of their statement, as I do, but this is not the central point: the central point is that they have done what most needs doing, and that is to insist on the relevancy of morality to the question of national policy and war. In this I think they are in the best Christian tradition.
The Christian tradition has always sought to contain hatred, to restrain violence, to “civilize” warfare. Do not the times when the fighting stopped on holy days seem idyllic when compared with our own almost total lack of restraint? Yet today this idea of putting limits on violence strikes many people as strange. It is for this reason that the duty of bearing Christian witness in this matter is so important.
A frightening number of people are ready to say that no limits can be set on violence once resort is had to armed force. Such thinking represents a relapse into barbarism—barbarism against which the Church resolutely set her face, at least until modem times. We tend to ignore the fact that mass warfare fought with mass armies is a modern phenomenon, and that this change has helped immeasurably to promote the idea of total war. It is this concept, this fact, which is the abomination; it is this which has shattered the Christian tradition of civilized warfare. Only the moral leadership of people like the Fathers Berrigan will help us recapture that tradition.
Once upon a time some limitations on warfare were almost automatic, if only because of man’s technological limitations. Today these restrictions are almost gone. Now only men’s free decisions can impose limitations on the use of force. In an all-out war, literally hundreds of millions of people would die immediately from nuclear blast and heat. Other millions would be condemned to slow death from radioactive contamination or starvation. Imagine what life would be like after the bombs fell; nuclear war would mean a world, as someone once phrased it, in which the living would envy the dead.
I am not saying the problem is simple. There are the Communists, and a government like ours has a terrible responsibility. It must keep the world from being destroyed, yet it must also keep it from falling into the hands of the Communists. Our leaders deserve our sympathy and our prayers. Nonetheless, there are certain basic things I think one can say, while granting the terrible complexity of the situation.
Our problem is to make morality relevant in the modern world. In total war no holds are barred; it completely eliminates the distinction between combatant and non-combatant and constitutes a flat denial that the aims of war and the use of force are limited by moral principles. We must therefore begin, I am convinced, by banning the mentality of total war.
To some, I suppose, this may not seem a giant step, but I think Americans should consider how far we have in the past gone down the road to total war. Consider, for example, our obliteration bombing in World War II; the terrible fire bombing carried out against Tokyo and Dresden and other enemy cities; the use of the A-bomb against the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And we who are Catholic must ask ourselves: where were the Bishops and theologians and just plain Christians then? I hope this is a question to which critics of the Fathers Berrigan will first turn their attention.
