Churchmen on War

"Oh. Unknown Soldier! However can I make that right with you? ... I will myself do the best I can to settle my account. ... I renounce war because of what it does to our men. ... I renounce it because of what it forces us to do to the enemy. ... I renounce it and never again will I be in another war. '-'I stimulated raiding parties to their murderous tasks. Do you see why I want to make it personal? I lied to the Unknown Soldier about a possible good consequence of the war. . . . The support I gave to war is a deep condemnation on my soul. . . . Men cannot have Christ and war at the same time. I renounce war." Such a fervent outpouring of words came last week not from some pacifist who makes a living on the lecture platform, not from some battle-scarred veteran who had staggered back from the depths, but from a brisk and business-like Man of God named Harry Emerson Fosdick. During the War Dr. Fosdick had "stimulated raiding parties to their murderous tasks'' from Y. M. C. A. huts behind the lines. Today as the personal pastor of the two younger John D. Rockefellers in their $15.000,000 Riverside Church in Manhattan, he is one of the most popularly famed preachers in the land. He delivered his apostrophe to the Unknown Soldier at a Conference on War and Economic Injustice in Manhattan's Broadway Tabernacle before 35 fellow clergymen who. if less emotional, were no less earnestly opposed to war than he. Elsewhere throughout the U. S. churchmen have been talking of war. not in the perfunctory verbiage of pacifist resolutions such as Protestant and Jewish church conferences pass every year, but vehemently as if they had premonitions of some imminent conflict. C. Last fortnight Kirby Page, Socialist minister and editor of The World Tomorrow, published results of a questionnaire circulated among 100,000 Protestant and Jewish clergymen. To 15 questions concerning politics, economics and war he received 20,870 replies. The churchmen voted their disapproval of military training in high schools and colleges (17,023 to 2,579) and U. S. intervention abroad (15,598 to 2,728). They believed the churches should go on record against war (13,997 to 4,638) and 12,904 affirmed that they will not fight in any future war. As to serving as chaplains the ministers were divided, 8,534 for, 8,014 against, 3,779 in doubt. Most pacifistic single sect: the Methodist Episcopal Church.

The annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of New York last week voted a mild peace formula, cheered when Layman Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, A. E. F. colonel and onetime (1921-23) Assistant Secretary of War, cried: "I do not believe our Savior and Lord was a 'peace at any price' man. In any event I don't believe in a conflict of the Protestant Episcopal Church with the laws of our country." During the War Quakers and Mennonites were by law exempt from being conscripted into active service. Anglican bishops and Jewish rabbis speak individually and collectively against war. Ministers of sects ranging from Presbyterian and Buddhist to the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian and Church of Daniel's Band may resolve privately never again to take up arms. But no Roman Catholic priest or bishop alone or in conference may commit his church to deploring a conflict in advance of its actual outbreak. Because it is international, the Church's policy is complicated and various. It has not only preached Crusades and instigated wars between Catholic and non-Catholic nations but also waged its own battles, sometimes with hired condottiere, sometimes with its own troops. In the World War Catholics fought on both sides. Pope Pius X, who attempted to stave it off and died in 1914, was called its first victim. No pope has ever spoken infallibly, in cathedra, on war. As determined by theologians from St. Thomas Aquinas to St. Robert Bellarmine and summarized by the German historian Hermann Hoffman, the Catholic position is briefly this: War is permissible when there is no question that one side is in the right and the other is in the wrong, when the means of peaceful settlement have been exhausted, when there is a chance of success, when war is waged with civilized weapons, that is, without the use of poisons; when it remains a war between armed troops and not against an unarmed populace; when such evils as murder of noncombatants, robbery and plunder, the violation of women, and other immoralities, have been banished.

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