In his gentle way, Fr. Thomas Berg essentially tells Catholic pundit hawks & doves that they are shallow and ought to step back to think. think. think. God bless 'im. Nothing quite gets me cringing these days as another column purporting to give us a Catholic view on the war. It doesn't matter whether I agree or disagree with the political stance; it's rare to find a columnist who has engaged the important issues, and quite often they seem to blur the vocations of theology and politics, not understanding the different responsibilities of each --which does the Church and the world a disservice. It makes the Church seem not to have answers and deprives the world of the opportunity to purify its conscience in these matters, which is the Church's great contribution to public life according to Deus Caritas Est. Father summarizes the fundamental questions before us (note to pundits: Is the Pope's latest call for peace binding as foreign policy on Bush, Blair and Olmert? isn't one of them):
- What is our real situation? In this case, can radical Islam be pacified? Are we on the cusp of WWIII? Is Abomnjihad a dangerous threat or a relatively harmless nutcake given to overstated Islamic bluster?
- Who should we trust to tell us what our real situation is?
Since the outbreak of the war in Iraq, when asked our opinion on the matter — whether the war was justifiable, whether Iraq was the right move, or a distraction from the real war on terror — in our more honest moments, most of us had to say we just don’t know given the unprecedented complexities of the issues involved. And a command of those complexities is not going to come from reading the latest best-selling book on militant Islam. So the question facing most of us is: How are we going to evaluate where the truth lies? To whom shall we turn for that objective assessment of how things really are? The president? Congress? Academia? The Vatican? The U.N.? Some combination of all of these?
Sing it, Father. I might add, who is in the position to know what our real situation is? How do they know?
- In the light of the answers to those questions, what should we do? He goes on to show why the answers provided thusfar are inadequate --or at least inadequately reasoned.
Within Catholic circles, for instance, I have been hearing for five years that we need to “re-think” the natural-law tradition of “just war theory” to accommodate and countenance the new threats posed by organized terrorism. It is now high time for moral theologians to step forward, present their wares and offer the Church a rigorously thought out and carefully rearticulated theory.
Amen. Where the war is concerned, I am embarrassed by the moral assertions in lieu of moral argument coming from Christians (when they write qua Christians) of all stripes (I have similar difficulties when Catholics write about the death penalty).
