The Pastoral Letters

A cynic might say, "What you have here are very different national Churches, so that the Pastoral Letters, or the letters on nuclear weapons that came out from different churches, reflect very much a national tone." The American letter was very different from the French, somewhat different from the German, and so on.

That's right. To me, that speaks less to a cynical view than to the honesty of the process, that there was not some ready-made product being cranked out somewhere. The debates that went on about the ethics of nuclear policy, not surprisingly to me, reflected the debates that go on about the empirical dimensions of the policy. So, for example, the U.S. letter has a very strong position against, [that is,] preventing nuclear war, because, the U.S. bishops felt a very special responsibility for living in the United States, [because] this is one of the places that could engage the world in a nuclear war. Europeans say, "By all means, we share that view; but we want to make sure that you understand that we're against all war." Therefore, a stress on the nuclear question to us is both welcome on the one hand and troublesome on the other. It's simply an ecclesiastical version of the decoupling argument. That is to say, there's a phrase in the U.S. bishops' letter: "We do not intend, by this letter, to make the world safe for conventional war." That was an attempt to crystallize what we had heard from the Europeans.

So, there are differences of emphases. The U.S. letter, for example, has a fundamental theme of trying to place nuclear weapons in a special category of consideration and, in a sense, to separate nuclear weapons from other forms of weaponry. I think there's a value in that. There's a passage in the letter that says, "We seek to build a political, psychological, strategic, and moral barrier against resort to nuclear weapons." Now, as part of that, the U.S. bishops took a position, which they indicated others could disagree with, but they took a position of no first use of nuclear weapons. None of the European letters (at least the French and the German) were prepared to take that position, because they had doubts about the wisdom of it.

What would you say is the most important contribution of the Letter on War and Peace that the American bishops wrote?

The most important thing in my mind is that the letter is part of a wider process. I would not attribute it just to the letter, but my own work has been involved in ethics and strategic studies for twenty years now, and one the things that clearly has happened is a shift in the way we talk about nuclear strategy. One of the shifts is the emergence of the moral argument at the center of the strategic debate. In other words, if you look at the literature on ethics and strategy today, there is almost no anthology that comes our on nuclear weapons that doesn't have a section in it on ethics and strategy. When I started studying these questions twenty years ago, that simply didn't happen. There were people writing on ethics, and there were people writing on strategy, but it was very hard to bring those groups together. It was not that the people writing on strategy didn't have moral concerns, it's just that they never systematically addressed them. Today, in the 1980s, you get people whose major work is in nuclear strategy, who themselves set their minds to writing things on ethics and strategy.

So, there is a process of bringing the moral argument into a much more central place in the national debate. The bishops' letter was not the only reason for that happening, but for a variety of reasons, the bishops' letter became the focal of that intersection of ethics and strategy. I think the primary function of the letter is a catalytic function, that is to say, it crystallizes an agenda of issues to be discussed on ethics and nuclear strategy, and it invites lots of people into that discussion.

Why do you think it was the Catholic Church and not some other religious group that took the lead on this?

To some degree, it was a question of timing. If the Catholic bishops had said exactly the same thing in 1973 that they said in 1983, it would have been regarded as a significant shift for the bishops, but it would not have become a national debate. It became a national debate because there was a certain moment in the early eighties when people were taking an new look at the nuclear question and were very interested in bringing precisely new perspectives to bear upon it. So that was one thing.

Secondly, the institutional structure of Catholicism gives you an ability to project an issue onto the national scene. When you talk about 300 bishops spread across the country, the Catholic Church is now the largest single religious body in the United States, and it's a large religious body that's always had a strong tradition about public policy. So there's that.

Thirdly, you had a systematically cultivated moral tradition about the use of force. When you went to look at a problem in the 1980s, it was not at all surprising to go back to the fourth century to get ideas. That gives you a certain historical perspective, and it's not easy [for others] to say, "These people have come as newcomers to the discussion." Now, as I said at the beginning of the program, you can have a long moral tradition, but if you don't join it with a certain kind of empirical analysis, the moral tradition doesn't get into the center of the debate. The willingness to engage specific aspects of the nuclear question was another reason why the letter took off, because it was willing to talk about very specific choices that were before the country.

Next page: The Debate on Strategy