Priests letter condemns
military
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
NCR Staff Rome
For the site of their alternative Jubilee, Italys
conscientious objectors chose the tiny northern village of Barbiana, so obscure
that it doesnt show up on most maps. Yet the spot looms large in the
countrys mental geography because of its association with a priest who
was, in many ways, the Italian equivalent of the Berrigan brothers: Don Lorenzo
Milani.
Like the famous U.S. peace activists Philip and Jesuit Fr. Daniel
Berrigan, Milani, who died in 1967, was a fierce critic of the countrys
political and military establishment and a thorn in the side of church
authorities. Born into a high-profile Florentine family in 1923 (his full name
was Lorenzo Carlo Domenico Milani Comparetti) and ordained in 1947, Milani was
made pastor of the tiny parish in Barbiana in 1954 in an attempt by the bishop
to lower his profile. Milani had become controversial for founding a
popular school to teach young people to question authority, and for
only grudgingly accepting the Catholic hierarchys demand to back the
conservative Christian Democrats in the 1948 election against Italian
communists.
Instead of slipping into obscurity after his exile, Milani
continued to teach and organize from Barbiana. It was here that he wrote his
famous Letter to the Military Chaplains, defending the right of
Italians to refuse military service. The letter was prompted by a statement of
the Catholic military chaplains of Italys Tuscany region, who, on Feb.
12, 1965, called conscientious objection foreign to the commandments of
Christian love and a type of cowardice.
Milani was charged with inciting treason for advocating refusal to
be enlisted, but was acquitted in 1966. Milani did not live to see Italy adopt
a law permitting conscientious objection. It was passed in 1972.
Excerpts from Milanis Letter to Military
Chaplains of February 1965:
I dont want to discuss the idea of country
in itself. But if you have the right to divide the world into Italians and
strangers, then I say to you, in this sense, I do not have a country. Instead I
claim the right to divide the world into the disinherited and oppressed on one
side, the privileged and oppressors on the other. The former are my countrymen,
the latter my strangers. And if you have the right, without being corrected by
the curia, to teach that Italians and strangers may licitly and even heroically
butcher one another, then I claim the right to say that the poor can and must
combat the rich. At least in the choice of means I am better than you. The arms
that you approve are horrible machines for killing, mutilating and destroying,
for creating widows and orphans. The only weapons I approve are noble and
bloodless: the strike and the ballot.
In this letter I dont want to refer to the gospel. It
is entirely too easy to demonstrate that Jesus was against all violence and
that not even for his own person did he accept the idea of legitimate
defense...
If we recognize that the story of our army is entirely woven
from offenses to other countries, you have to clarify for us in these cases
whether our soldiers should have obeyed or should have objected, based on what
their consciences told them. Next you have to explain who offends our country
and its honor more: those who object or those who, obeying, render our country
odious to the rest of the civilized world?
But enough with abstract and generic ideas. Let us descend
to the level of the practical. Tell us exactly what you teach the soldiers.
Obedience at any cost? What if the order is to bomb civilians, or to commit an
act of reprisal against an unarmed village, or the summary execution of
resisters, or the use of atomic weapons or bacteriological or chemical weapons,
or torture, or the execution of hostages, or killing a few of your own soldiers
in order to keep the rest in line, or launching an obvious war of aggression,
or squashing a popular uprising, or the repression of popular assemblies?
Obviously these acts and many more are the daily bread of
every war. When these things have happened right before your eyes, you have
either lied or kept silent. Or do you want us to believe that you have
sometimes spoken the truth to the faces of your superiors, risking
prison or even death? The fact that you are still alive and rising in the
system is a sign that you have not objected to anything. In fact, you have
demonstrated in your communication that you do not have the most elementary
notion of the concept of conscientious objection.
Wait before you hurl insults at those who object. Perhaps
tomorrow you will discover that they are prophets. Certainly the place of the
prophets is always prison, but that does not mean it is good to be the ones who
put them there.
If you were to say to us that you chose the mission of
military chaplain to help the wounded and the dying, we could respect your
idea. Even Gandhi did the same as a youth. The more mature Gandhi, however,
strongly condemned his juvenile error. Have you read his life?
But if you say to us that the refusal to defend oneself and
ones property according to the example and the commandment of the Lord is
foreign to the Christian commandment of love, then you do not
understand the Spirit of which you are made. What language are you speaking?
How are we supposed to understand you if you use words without weighing them?
If you do not wish to honor the suffering of the objectors, at least keep
silent!
We pray for those unhappy ones who, without fault, poisoned
by the propaganda of hate, sacrifice themselves for the mistaken idea of
country. They trample, without even realizing it, every noble human
ideal.
Excerpts are from Lobbedienza non è piu una
virtù (Obedience Is No Longer a Virtue)(Stampa Alternativa, 1998).
Translation by NCR.
National Catholic Reporter, December 8,
2000
|