Up on Arms

Catholic bishops debate nukes

At an oceanside retreat house in Spring Lake, N.J., five U.S. Roman Catholic bishops assembled last week to touch up a controversial document. According to Peter Steinfels, executive editor of the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal, the document is "the most serious effort the church has ever made, here, abroad, or in the Vatican, to come to grips with nuclear war." The five bishops, led by Joseph L. Bernardin, the new Archbishop of Chicago, spent a year taking testimony from 34 specialists ranging from outraged peace protesters to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. They then sent a 66-page first draft of a nuclear policy statement to the nation's 376 bishops in mid-June, soliciting their comments. The letters and documents that came back, said one committee member, were "voluminous." The Vatican was also heard from.

In its initial draft, the Bernardin panel built upon the hierarchy's briefer statement in 1976 against the arms race. The drafters unanimously agreed on: 1) a condemnation of any first use of nuclear weapons or the threat of first use; 2) a ban on deployment of such weapons against civilian populations, even in retaliation, and even against military targets if massive civilian casualties would result; 3) a call for an immediate multilateral freeze (without using that political label) in weapons production and deployment; and 4) experimental disarmament steps by the U.S. alone to see whether the Soviets would join in. In arriving at these principles, the committee drew on church teachings as ancient as St. Augustine's concept of the "just war," agonizing over whether such moral criteria can even be applied to nuclear devastation.

Some peace activists are dismayed that the draft does not flatly rule out all use of nuclear weapons. They also object to its assertion that it is "marginally justifiable" to possess nuclear weapons in a "deterrence" policy, so long as disarmament talks are proceeding in earnest. But both points essentially reflect positions that Pope John Paul took in a statement to the United Nations last month. Remarked one source closely acquainted with the project: "It is unlikely that the U.S. bishops will be inclined to go further than the Holy Father." What other revisions the bishops as a whole may make will not be known until November, when the text will be submitted for discussion by the full hierarchy meeting in Washington. For now, says Editor Thomas Fox of National Catholic Reporter, "the debate is at white heat. Everybody is trying to get a word in before November."

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