The Bishops' Decision

If you look at the mobilization of the physicians, in part what was going on was a recognition by some physicians that war-fighting notions made no sense in medical terms. And hence, you saw physicians going out and talking about the radiation effects of even a nuclear limited war. What is the counterpart in the Church? Was it important at all that we were talking about the end of human life as we know it -- which I guess has always been in the province of the Church?

There were different senses, I think. There's a whole body of literature on the German Church and its seeming inability to pose the right questions in the thirties for their own people. A number of bishops were taken by the notion that the nuclear reality posed at least an analogy to that, and that therefore, the worst thing that could happen would be simply a record of silence, a failure to address the issue. So that was one driving force.

Secondly, one of the things that John Paul II has pointed the Church to be particularly concerned with is a theme rather than an issue, and it is the theme of the relationship of contemporary technology, politics, and ethics. He is not against technology, not against science, but he's very concerned that technology has such a drive and such a logic that it controls us rather than us controlling it. Nuclear weapons are a prime example of that question. So there was that theme.

Thirdly, the bishops, like many of these other groups in the general public, were taken by this sense, in the early eighties, this intersection of seeming to have little prospect of serious arms control, and at the same time, a major buildup going on by both the Soviets and us. You had a sense that the dynamics were all moving in the wrong direction and that it was time to at least enter the discussion and try to call people's attention to it.

So you had different themes moving different people but among the bishops, there were those themes. There was one very specific theme that was probably proper only to the bishops, and that was that they had been very involved in the opposition to abortion for ten years. It's a highly political issue, a highly conflictive issue. They see it as a defense of human life. A number people at various times had said to them, "If you are fully committed to defending human life, what do you say about this macro-threat to human life?" That had a telling effect on a number of them. A number of them said, "We've got to match our position on abortion with a position on nuclear war."

What was the process like of implementing the decision to look at this problem? Obviously, one has to get back to the empirical level. Is there expert testimony on what the issues are? Presentations by the administration, presentations by scientists, and so on? How did that process occur?

One of the reasons that the letter attracted attention was that once the bishops decided to do it, they were willing to step outside their ordinary means of procedure and do this with a special emphasis. It just so happened that it was at the same bishops' meeting that they voted to write the letter on nuclear policy and the letter on the economy. So they launched two letters at the same meeting in November of 1980. But they stepped outside their normal process in the sense of saying that our standing committees, which are chosen for lots of different reasons, don't have enough specific focus. So they established an extraordinary committee, and in the nuclear question it was chaired by Cardinal Bernardine. Then they put on that committee four other bishops.

The bishops were very carefully chosen; one of them was a man who is now Cardinal O'Conner in New York, who had spent thirty years in the U.S. military. He had been Chief of Chaplains in the Navy. He held a doctorate in International Relations from Georgetown and had had a long experience in looking at the theoretical as well as the practical implications of living with these weapons. The second bishop was Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, the Auxiliary Bishop of Detroit, who had been one of the leaders, among the bishops, in raising the war and peace issue for many years.

You mentioned Vietnam. In fact, the American Catholic Bishops were very, very marginal to the Vietnam debate, and many of them felt that they were marginal to it, and recognized that in hindsight. Gumbleton was not. He had been one of the few Catholic bishops who had been in the middle of the Vietnam debate. So then he was put on the committee.

Then, the two other bishops put on it were only put on it because they hadn't been involved with a definite position. One of them was the Bishop of Norwich, Connecticut, who had the Groton submarine base right in his diocese. It was a pastoral issue for his people who were there and serving on the submarines, and for others who were not. And then the final bishop was Bishop Fultzer, who had been a moral theologian by training.

That was the committee. There was a small staff attached to the committee, and I was the staff director, and there were two other staff people. And then you began a process of immersing the bishops in the debate. For about eighteen months, they heard expert testimony. In other words, we tried to bring in a spectrum of witnesses who took a variety of positions on the nuclear question. Bishops would meet in all-day sessions, bring in four or five of these witnesses at a time. We had former secretaries of defense, we had retired military personnel, we had scientists, and analysts and physicians and people who were in the peace movement, and moralists, and theologians.

We did have a full day of meetings with the [Reagan] administration, where we met with Secretary Weinberger, with Mr. Rostow, who at that time was Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. We were supposed to meet with Secretary Haig, but he was out of the country and we met with Mr. Eagleburger. So there was a formal meeting with the administration. That was followed by two other meetings with the administration at the staff level.

Then, of course, we published these drafts, which is what really attracted the attention. We would publish a draft and invite commentary on it, and literally get thousands of pages of commentary from universities, from citizens, from groups. We went through three drafts during the course of three years. So that was the process.

One of the things that I probably ought to mention is that there is a new committee now looking at the state of the question three years later. Again, it's chaired by Cardinal Bernardine. Its function is not to write a pastoral letter but a report three years afterwards on how some of the conditions that the bishops set down in '83 have been met and not met. That report will be submitted to the bishops next November.

Do you think the letter had any impact?

I think it's had different kinds of impact. You have to measure it at different levels. If you look at the direction of U.S. government policy, I don't think you can claim that the specific recommendations the bishops made have been followed in any particular way.

It has had a major impact in the intellectual arena in how these problems are defined and discussed, and that's a particularly important area in nuclear policy. So, for example, the letter is used in major universities across the country, required reading in courses, it's part of seminars. The reason that's particularly important is that the nuclear question is almost always an intellectual question before it's a political question. That is to say, very few people get elected because they know a lot about the nuclear question. Pople who do get elected tend to inherit a definition of the nuclear question that is abroad at the time. So if you're involved with the places where the definition of the question is given, that that's a particularly important area.

Thirdly, the letter had a certain ecumenical impact. A number of the major Protestant churches in the country have made their own statements, but a number of them also sort of adopted the Catholic statement as a statement. And then finally, there is the question of what you might call, the local level of the life of the Church -- in Catholic schools, in high schools, and in parishes -- and there it's mixed. The parishes are the most difficult places to get to on an issue like this. The school system is not.

As a result of the letter and its conditional support of deterrence, is it now a cause of concern for a Catholic if they work in a weapons lab, or in a manufacturing plant?

It's hard to say. The letter does not say that deterrence, and the policy of deterrence, and that which supports deterrence, is wrong. It does not say that. It says that there is conditional acceptance, meaning that there is not a condemnation of the deterrent, but that there are strict conditions placed on the future direction of deterrence policy. Now that's at the level of policy. If you ask about a personal question, is someone, for example, serving in the military at a given place, or working in a weapons installation? I think there is material in the letter by which a person can think about what they're doing. I don't think it is predetermined that someone who does think about it would feel they have to leave their position. I don't think that. But I do think it's possible that an individual might come to that conclusion based on the themes in the letter.

So, I don't think there is one answer that comes at the personal level out of the letter. There is room for different choices, different depending on what people are doing and how they see things. That's almost inevitable. When you offer a moral judgment on something as large as this, you could never presume that you would be able to deal with the specifics of a person's life in an individual case.

Looking at the strategic debate, and the Pastoral Letter as a response to that, when you look at the divisions that were occurring within the strategic community, one of the results of that debate was a loss of legitimacy for what we had been doing, for various reasons. The Reagan administration's response to that has been the "Star Wars" program, which asserted that it would be U.S. policy to move away from Mutual Assured Destruction and toward a defensive system in space. Do you think the administration was, in a sense, responding to your letter and trying to regain the mantle of moral legitimacy, not just from the Church, but generally in people's eyes, and in important communities that had been engaged by the nuclear debate?

I can't document that. I don't know. I know that there is a fairly widespread impression that the bishops' letter and other forces of the early eighties pushed the debate in a direction where it was felt necessary to respond with a of proposal to try and take the high ground back, in terms of the administration policy. I can't say that people in the administration thought of it that way; I've seen that kind of analysis offered by people outside.

I think that there was a general sense that the criticism of existing U.S. policy, and U.S. policy on arms control and negotiation, was eroding support for a citizen consensus behind U.S. policy. There was some sense of a need to speak to that. The SDI was a very drastic proposal, a shift in policy, and at least opened up a whole new round of debate which we are still in now. I don't think the proposal of the SDI simply solves the question of the empirical dimensions of the strategic debate, or the moral dimensions. But it did put on the table an initiative which others had to respond to, rather than simply having the administration responding to questions that others put to it.

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