American Catholics and Peacemaking: A Personal and Historical Reflection

Iam an American historian and have never thought of myself as a professional in peace studies. While I have written about the Catholic community and peace for forty years, I am not a theologian. Nevertheless, for some years I did direct Peace Studies at the College of the Holy Cross and occasionally team-taught the introductory course.¹ For many more years I taught a first-year history course on "war and conscience" in which I tried to use the history of modern wars to initiate students into what Holy Cross rather pretentiously refers to as engagement with "fundamental human questions."² I tried to keep up on the literature of a century of war, and through that literature to capture with students some of the brutal reality of modern war. By helping students in that course and others establish some critical distance between their faith, Christian and American, and their political assumptions, I may have encouraged some moral reflection and political activism. But I fear that, in recent years, I ended the course sounding a bit like our bishops in the deepest gloom of the Iraq war, "raising some ethical questions" but offering less help than I should in answering those questions.

Lest the above sound overly modest, I should say that I think over the years I have had a few decent ideas about peace and war. In the late sixties and seventies I came from a Catholic Worker orientation to ask some critical questions about American foreign and military policy. I also learned from my mentor Monsignor John Egan to always keep an eye on politics, including the politics of the Church and the politics of ideas, including theological ideas about war and peace. Assessment of Catholic politics led me to write a well-forgotten 1981 article in America arguing that Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's new committee would never finish its assignment to write a pastoral letter on nuclear weapons. But later, in profound admiration for the bishops and their staff, I noticed some things in that letter that others missed, important points I will make much of in this essay.

Since then, inspired in part by the almost unnoticed 1993 follow- up pastoral letter on peace, and by the powerful statements of Pope John Paul II, I have taken heart from the evidence that our Church is moving beyond the long, deadlocked, and at times personal debate about nonviolence and just war. Instead I believe, and theologians and pastors increasingly confirm, that both positions establish responsibility for positive, constructive peacemaking. To make that argument I can draw on that 1993 pastoral letter, remarkable statements by popes, the research of distinguished theologians and the remarkable work and witness of peace researchers and activists across the globe.

Most recently the paralysis of American politics in the midst of multiple wars has compelled basic moral reflection, centered on propositions based on the twentieth century experience of war and preparation for war:

• ● War, even if necessary, is always bad, "a defeat for humanity," as John Paul II said;

• ● Peace must become a verb, something people desire and pursue, something people choose as an alternative to war;

• ● War, for Americans, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is always a matter of shared political and moral responsibility: these were not "Bush's wars," but ours.

In the last few years I have shared widespread frustration with the limits of our civic conversations about war and peace. Paralysis of political imagination is evident in the absence of serious policy proposals backing the altogether reasonable argument for a "responsible transition" in Iraq, in widespread acquiescence in an escalation of combat in Afghanistan, and in the moral and political uncertainty of even our most courageous and committed peacemakers in the face of terrorism and counter-terrorism.³

In addition, as an American Catholic, I have been forced to deal with the enormous shift in American Catholic culture. The architects of that almost unanimously endorsed 1983 peace pastoral, the late Cardinal Bernardin and our most respected ethicist, Rev. Bryan Hehir, were mediating figures at the center...