EDITORIAL
Conservatives dissent, but with a spin
Conservative commentator George
Weigel recently opined that the Roman Catholic just war tradition of moral
analysis “lives more vigorously … at the higher levels of the
Pentagon than … in certain offices at the United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops.”
It’s an interesting argument, but to employ a military
euphemism, Weigel seems guilty of faulty targeting. The U.S. bishops have put
out one well-reasoned, cautious statement expressing reservations about a
possible attack in Iraq, but there has been no antiwar campaign from their
headquarters in Washington. The real outcry in the Catholic world is coming
from across the Atlantic Ocean, and more precisely from the subject of
Weigel’s 1999 biography Witness to Hope -- Pope John Paul II.
If Weigel should be picking on anyone, it’s the pope.
On Christmas Day, the pope pleaded with world leaders to
“extinguish the ominous smoldering of a conflict which, with the joint
efforts of all, can be avoided.” On New Years Day, John Paul asserted that
“peace is possible and a duty,” and called for “loyal and
constructive cooperation in accordance with the principles of international
law.” In his Jan. 13 address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the
Vatican, the pope was more direct. “What are we to say of the threat of a
war that could strike the people of Iraq … a people already sorely tried
by more than 12 years of embargo?” he said. “War is never just
another means … for settling differences between nations.”
Key Vatican officials have been even more blunt. Archbishop Renato
Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, has warned
the United States against acting as a “universal policeman.” The
Jesuit-edited journal La Civiltà Cattolica, which is reviewed by
the Vatican’s Secretariat of State prior to publication, asserted Jan. 18
that the real motive for U.S. interest in Iraq is oil, and warned of a
misplaced American “messianic vocation” to spread democracy.
So why doesn’t Weigel fight the real enemy?
For the obvious reason that a certain class of conservative
commentators in today’s American Catholic church make their living by
interpreting the mind of John Paul, and it is inconvenient when his thinking
cuts against the geopolitical agenda of the Bush administration. It’s far
easier to criticize the apparatchiks of the U.S. bishops’
conference, the same anonymous functionaries responsible, in the view of
right-wing critics, for documents embracing gay children and rejecting efforts
to convert Jews.
As for the pope, the challenge is to spin away inconvenient
utterances. Thus when American Catholic pundit Michael Novak arrives in Rome in
early February to try to convince the Vatican of the morality of
“preventive war,” he will no doubt quote John Paul II approvingly,
even if his aim is to draw different conclusions about the use of force in
Iraq. American Ambassador to the Holy See James Nicholson, former head of the
Republican National Committee and a West Point graduate, is sponsoring
Novak’s mission.
Of course, the question of whether the United States should strike
Iraq is not an article of the Nicene Creed, and there is plenty of room for
divergent opinions. But the Bush-friendly line being toed by Weigel and Novak,
in open contrast to what we’re hearing from Rome, reminds us that there is
a “culture of dissent” on the right in American Catholicism too.
Usually it arises when John Paul challenges America’s prerogatives in
commerce or war.
There is nothing wrong with believing that a pope and his top
aides can err in their political or social judgments. In its recent doctrinal
note, “On Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in
Political Life,” the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith makes this
point. It reaffirms “the legitimate freedom of Catholic citizens to choose
among the various political opinions that are compatible with faith and the
natural moral law, and to select, according to their own criteria, what best
corresponds to the needs of the common good.”
But when Catholics, especially those in the public eye, draw
conclusions at odds with the Holy Father, sincerity would seem to require
naming this for what it is -- dissent from non-infallible papal statements --
rather than some linguistic sleight-of-hand that makes contradiction seem like
coherence.
National Catholic Reporter, January 31,
2003
|
