Catholics and the bomb
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington It appears that Congress is going to stop Mr Reagan from selling his fancy radar planes to the Saudis. This should not be taken as a sign of softening American truculence but only a continuation of our self-defeating preference for Israeli over Arab. We remain in a rip-snorting mood as evidenced by the recent arrest of 14 visiting American clergymen by Canadian authorities. The reverend gentlemen were carrying guns in violation of the firearm statutes, giving the impression that the name of the God they worship is not Jesus but Mars. Nevertheless, there is a palpable and growing undertow of consternation not only about the neutron bomb but all the bombs — the electron bomb, the positron bomb, the bombitron bomb — an anxiety that we possess more than a sufficiency of every damned type of bomb.
That anxiety has no easy time making itself heard. The mass media are resolutely pro-bomb and so are publications like the New Republic that lay claim to being liberal and different. The Democratic Party, which opened the door to this arms bacchanal, is unwilling to articulate the most tentative misgivings about the direction towards which we are spinning. This was underlined this week by the arms carnival put on every year in Washington, with the biggest war implements manufacturers offering balloons, bathing beauties, and all the same kind of hoop-la that was fomented in the old days when they introduced a new model car.
Nevertheless, there are stirrings, and not just among the ninnies from the World Council of Churches, who drop to their knees not to pray but to perform an act of anal osculation on the person of some Third World tyrant. A few weeks ago, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Amarillo, Texas, broke silence to say: 'Let's stop this madness and turn our attention and our energies to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, to the production of food, fibre, clothing, shelter and transportation. We beg our Administration to stop accelerating the arms race. We beg our Military to use common sense . . . we urge individuals involved in the production and stockpiling of nuclear bombs to consider what they are doing, to resign from such activities, and to seek employment in peaceful pursuits.' No small thing that last exhortation, for Leroy Matthiesen's diocese includes the Pantex plant, which happens to be the final assembly factory for all American nuclear weapons.
The bishop's remarks got no attention from the media. To watch the television news here is to believe that the only opposition to present policies is from isolated screwballs like Bishop Matthiesen and those West German youths smitten by a virus that turns them either into terrorists or howling pacifists. However, close readers of the New York Times learned a few days ago that Matthiesen was not a lone eccentric. Page 37 carried a modest-sized headline declaring that 'Texas Catholic Bishops Reject Neutron Bomb.' The ensuing article said that all 12 Bishops in the State, which has about 2.4 million Catholics, had signed a statement supporting their brother in Amarillo.
Nor was that all. Archbishop John Roach of Minneapolis-St Paul (Minnesota), President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement ex pressing misgivings about the bomb. The President of the National Federation of Priests' Councils said that the decision to manufacture neutron bombs 'brings the human family to the brink of destruction.' In Seattle, Washington, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen has joined with the leaders of seven other Christian churches in a non-violent demonstration against the arrival of the Trident submarines. Hunthausen said that though he had not yet decided to refuse to pay his federal income tax, 'if there is no change in the trend toward nuclear war, I have to say that I will have no other choice.'
The Archbishop is being joined by Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists, but what seems to be happening in the Roman Catholic Church is quite remarkable. At a time when the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago is being publicly accused of diverting church money to a woman who is whispered to have been his girl friend, when there is a shortage of priests, when the decades of top heavy investment in pompous architecture seem ready to topple over and wreck the Church's economic structure, at this grey moment it seems to have found itself morally. Ever so slowly it is striking people that the American Catholic Church stands for something, that if it says it is pro-life and against abortion, it is also pro-life and against war. It is distancing itself from the sleeze-bag, jack-leg, born-again preachers who teach the purse-lipped, mean-hearted gospel of narrow spirit and doubled fist.
Not that you don't still have your frumpy-dump bishops who can be counted on to lead the American Legion parade and bless the boys as they march up the gangplanks on to the troop ships. But, as Bishop Matthiesen says, 'At the meetings of the bishops, I've seen a noticeable change in the stand of the hierarchy. The old-timers — there are less and less of those. I guess you can almost describe them as the hawkish type of bishop. But you get more and more of these bishops who speak out very strongly. You're going to see very strong stands on this taken by the US hierarchy. If you read the statements issued by the Pope, they've been very strong. They just call the bomb intrinsically evil.'
This is not the American Roman Catholic Church of yore or of the Vietnam era. Not only the bishops and priests but the most docile and conservative of the Pope's divisions have also swung into positions which should be giving Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig, a Roman Catholic himself, cause for thought. Not long ago the US Leadership Conference of Women Religious unanimously approved a resolution condemning the neutron bomb and the MX missile. Said Sister Cordelia Moran of Indiana: 'The only opposition to this statement initially was that it wasn't strong enough, so it was reworked.'
As if the bomb were not enough, El Salvador is dividing the most active and energetic Catholic clergy and religious from the Administration. Correctly or not, they see the American policy in that country to which they have sent so many of their own people as the crucifixion of social justice. To many priests in the United States, the Upheaval in that bloody tropical land is a true expression of Catholic Christianity.
While the State Department does its daily rat-tat-tat-tat on Castro and the Reds destroying the legitimate government of El Salvador, you can see advertisements like the following in the Catholic press: 'A martyr's message of hope — now available for the first time in English, six homilies of Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, who was shot and killed while preaching his last homily. This book holds the key to understanding the new Christianity growing in Latin America. The Archbishop summed up the hope and faith of his people. He condemned violence, proclaimed justice and was slain.' Ronald Reagan is too nice a guy to be a convincing Henry II, but Oscar Romero is evolving into the Thomas a Becket of the New World so that pretty soon now somebody had better get down on his knees and say: 'I'm sorry,' and while that person is at it, he had best apologise for the murders of the two nuns and the lay missionary in El Salvador, on 2 December 1980, gone but not forgotten in a number of people's prayers and politics.
In this most Christian of large nations, it is estimated that something in the vicinity of 50 million people are more or less practising Catholics. The importance of the numbers can be exaggerated since they do not think alike and certainly are long past not thinking at all when a priest tells them to do this or that. They do not march en bloc but they can be convinced by their clergy, whom they continue to respect if not always agree with.
Mainline American Protestantism did itself serious, though apparently not permanent, injury in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Proceeding from a noble stand against war and racism, too many of its most visible figures fell under the thrall of change and innovation — to use a couple of their yummiest words — for their own sakes. Nude liturgies, lesbian marriages and heaven knows what other garbage turned them into screaming dip-sticks in the eyes of their own congregants and opened the way for the present evangelical preeminence.
In the American Catholic Church there was change, also, but it wasn't so silly. The Younger priests coming to power now were deeply affected by those momentous years yet, happily, the institution they served escaped the disgrace which overtook churches like the Presbyterian andthe Episcopalian. In an hour when neither political party nor the mass media will entertain discussion of a different way in foreign policy, the American Roman Catholic Church, with its honeycomb of organisations and publications, is slipping into place to give leadership and form to the undertow of anxiety building up and seeking expression.
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