MR Michael O’Connor has played an eminent role as an informed social commentator on Australian defence policy, and raises a number of important points in his response (CL 6/4/03) to my earlier article (CL 23/3/03).
As I argued in some detail in my recent paper, ‘War on Iraq: Is It Just?’, in the final analysis a moral judgment about the justice of the war is a conscience decision by each one, and we need to allow room for conscientious differences of view.
However it would be very curious if on such a critical issue, involving the deaths of many people, the Church and its leaders did not offer some guidance on the moral issues involved. Indeed, the Pope, Vatican officials and bishops’ conferences around the world have formed a very strong consensus against the war, using the criteria of the just war tradition especially.
Because their views rely not just on moral principles but on empirical and historical data as well, they could conceivably be mistaken, hence the importance of individuals making their own conscientious judgments.
Mr O’Connor writes that it is ‘not the function of Catholic bishops to rule on whether a war is just or not’, and quotes the Catechism (2309) that: ‘The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good’.
Mr O’Connor infers that ‘This clearly places the responsibility for judgment and decision upon the government’, with bishops expressing an ‘essentially lay opinion, based upon a lack of adequate information and professional analysis’.
In my view, the Catechism is here misleading (in English translation anyway), for it implies that the Church is ceding its moral authority to politicians. What it should say is that the political decision to wage war rests with public authorities, but the Church still has a duty to evaluate the moral argument for war.
After all, would anyone seriously argue that the Church had no right to oppose the unjust wars of Hitler and Mussolini? Indeed, it is sometimes argued that the Church failed by not opposing them strongly enough.
In addition, I would suggest that the moral decisions about war-making involve interpretations of the natural law where the Church has a special duty to speak.
Moreover, our experience of the Vietnam War should alert a democracy like ours to be very suspicious of the reasons political leaders adduce for war. In our time, such reasons need to be overwhelmingly transparent and accepted by the community. This is currently very far from the case. The Church has a duty to say so.
I take Mr O’Connor’s point that my expression that the Church cannot ‘bless’ this war could be taken the wrong way. I meant it as the Church declaring that the war on Iraq did not meet the conditions for a just war, as the bishops and the Vatican have repeatedly stated.
As for the role of Michael Novak and others, I have given some detail in my pamphlet. Some of them are intimately associated with the so-called ‘neo-conservative’ group in the Bush administration, and in fact the US Ambassador to the Vatican brought in Michael Novak to argue the US case with Vatican officials.
Some of these US Catholic writers have a long history of contesting the views of the US bishops’ conference on economic and foreign policy, as they are quite entitled to do, of course.
I would think they see their role as exercising a check on the social and political views of their bishops. They are certainly key voices in the battle for Catholic opinion in the interests of the conservative side of US politics.
This being so, I don’t see why it is unfair or implies improper motives to see their role as a ‘spoiling’ one.
I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify these points.
FR BRUCE DUNCAN CSsR
Kew, Vic
