Worth Fighting For? by David Swanson is a great article about a book by a former soldier, Rory Fanning, who walked across the United States to raise money for the Pat Tillman Foundation after leaving the Army Rangers as a Conscientious Objector. There is reason to think Pat Tillman turned against the war and had planned on using his fame as a platform to speak out against it upon his return, and so naturally there is reason to suspect that his death was not an accident. Of course, we can’t be surprised to hear this:
“Fanning recounts a conversation with a military chaplain. Fanning made the case that the whole war was unjust. The chaplain made the case that God wanted him to do it anyway. “
Speaking of the New Oxford Review, and given the latest portentous and even apocalyptic events in Iraq, I’d like to mention the folks at NOR as being on my list of “real Catholic heroes of the Iraq War.” For years they condemned the war in no uncertain terms, even though I’m sure it alienated many of their very conservative and pro-military readers. Here’s a sample:
“Let’s be honest — and, yes, we realize that many conservative Catholics don’t want to know the unvarnished truth: It turns out that our soldiers died and suffered to set up a training ground for Islamic terrorists in Iraq. Bush has it backwards: The U.S. is creating many more terrorists in Iraq than it is eradicating.”
You’ll have to pay a couple bucks to read the whole article but I highly recommend it. Better yet, get a subscription.
For me personally their website was very influential because once I became acquainted with some of their powerful writings against the war, I began to explore their vast online archives on all things Catholic. They, along with others, helped to bring me back, with “a twitch upon the thread.”
“The real evils in war are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power, and such like; and it is generally to punish these things, when force is required to inflict the punishment, that, in obedience to God or some lawful authority, good men undertake wars.” Saint Augustine, City of God
“Torturing people is a mortal sin. It is a very serious sin,” said Pope Francis on June 26, 2014, on the UN’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.
Manning wrote a great editorial the other day about the machinery that purposely keeps Americans in a fog about the truth when it comes to the wars the government is waging.
We intelligence analysts, and the officers to whom we reported, had access to a comprehensive overview of the war that few others had. How could top-level decision makers say that the American public, or even Congress, supported the conflict when they didn’t have half the story?
Among the many daily reports I received via email while working in Iraq in 2009 and 2010 was an internal public affairs briefing that listed recently published news articles about the American mission in Iraq. One of my regular tasks was to provide, for the public affairs summary read by the command in eastern Baghdad, a single-sentence description of each issue covered, complementing our analysis with local intelligence.
The more I made these daily comparisons between the news back in the States and the military and diplomatic reports available to me as an analyst, the more aware I became of the disparity. In contrast to the solid, nuanced briefings we created on the ground, the news available to the public was flooded with foggy speculation and simplifications.
One clue to this disjunction lay in the public affairs reports. Near the top of each briefing was the number of embedded journalists attached to American military units in a combat zone. Throughout my deployment, I never saw that tally go above 12. In other words, in all of Iraq, which contained 31 million people and 117,000 United States troops, no more than a dozen American journalists were covering military operations.
The process of limiting press access to a conflict begins when a reporter applies for embed status. All reporters are carefully vetted by military public affairs officials. This system is far from unbiased. Unsurprisingly, reporters who have established relationships with the military are more likely to be granted access.
Less well known is that journalists whom military contractors rate as likely to produce “favorable” coverage, based on their past reporting, also get preference. This outsourced “favorability” rating assigned to each applicant is used to screen out those judged likely to produce critical coverage.
What does that mean for Just War theorists? I mean, to be in a position to assess a situation and see if a theory is applicable, don’t you first have to have some accurate understanding of what is actually going on? I guess we Catholics are just supposed to obediently outsource this thinking to the “experts” in our society who have the authority to decide these matters from behind their closed doors and fortified walls of “classified information.”
The following was written by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.
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Friends,
I hope you will be able to find the time to view this short documentary, In Solitary Episcopal Witness, on Bishop John Botean’s 2003 Pastoral Letter morally denouncing the War on Iraq as gravely evil. Bishop Botean, being a summa cumlaude graduate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America, being an award-winning musician and being multi-lingual is as cognitively capable as any other Catholic bishop or priest. Yet, it is he alone who on March 7, AD 2003, less than two weeks before the government of the United States launched its invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, wrote a Pastoral Letter to the people of his diocese which was publicly read from every pulpit in every Romanian Catholic Church in the U.S. on Sunday, March 9, 2003.
In it Bishop Botean communicated to the people in his pastoral care that participation in the coming U.S. War against the people of Iraq would be participating in an unjust war, that is, in an intrinsically grave evil, by all the traditional moral standards of the Catholic Church. No other sitting Catholic Bishop of a diocese in the United States told his people before, or even during this decade long war, that this was by the standards of Jesus and Catholic moral theology an unjust war, and that therefore the killing and maiming done by those directly participating in it at any level was participation in unjustified homicide, which is always and under all circumstances gravely intrinsically evil and never morally permissible.
This mini-documentary, In Solitary Episcopal Witness, on Bishop John Botean and the source of his decision to publicly morally condemn the War on Iraq, is so titled as an allusion to Gordon Zahn’s seminal biography on Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, which is titled In Solitary Witness. The title was chosen not only because Bishop Botean is the only Catholic Bishop, who is the Ordinary of a diocese in the U.S., who so spoke about U.S. Catholic participation in the War in Iraq, but also, because like the decision of Blessed Franz Jagerstatter to reject Hitler’s call to arms, Bishop Botean’s Pastoral Letter on this matter did not find much support from many quarters from which vigorous support would have normally been expected. I suspect part of the reason for this is that in our gong-booming, cymbal-clashing, hyper-partisan politicized secular and religious society, Bishop Botean’s Pastoral Letter morally denouncing the War against Iraq finds little to nothing of its source, purpose, motivation or end in the world of governmental politics. Hence, liberal Catholic and Christian professional and amateur politicos and mass media pundits, and conservative Catholic and Christian politicos and mass media pundits—minus a few exceptions here and there—relegated this unique episcopal document in the history of the American Catholic Church to the “not-in-our-interests bin.”
Maybe this thirty-minute documentary can help make a bit clearer the whys and wherefores of Bishop Botean’s Pastoral Letter. And, maybe with such awareness it might be transferred to the “urgently-in-our-interests bin.”
There is much, much to ponder, personally and as Church, in this short video-documentary on the writing of a Pastoral Letter. I hope you will ponder it, share it and dialogue on it in light of the millions of human beings killed and maimed in Iraq since the day this Pastoral Letter was read from all the pulpits of one diocese in the United States. I hope you will do this because in the end this Pastoral and video are not exclusively, or even primarily, about a war or war. They are about the salvation of souls, the redemption of all humanity, by the only means by which the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels taught that humanity could be redeemed: love, love as He, who is the visible image of the invisible God, loved us.
Many conservative Catholics, even some who are politicians, understand the full implications of the “crime against peace” which is the subject of my previous post.
Here’s what Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina had to say last year. According to Wikipedia and The American Conservative, Jones is a Baptist convert to Roman Catholicism.
“Congress will not hold anyone to blame, Lyndon Johnson’s probably rotting in hell right now because of the Vietnam War, and he probably needs to move over for Dick Cheney,”
Here’s a video clip (starting at the 32 minute mark). It’s worth listening for about 4 minutes to get the whole context for this quote.
What prompted me to write this post was David Stockman’s great article yesterday which describes how Representative Jones survived an effort by the Neocons to defeat him Tuesday in the Republican primary.
It has been said that the Iraq War sent many people on a journey. I know that was true for me as it was true for Walter Jones. Out of evil God can bring forth good.
In 2006, I attended a protest against Condoleezza Rice’s appearance as a commencement speaker at Boston College at the height of the Iraq War. BC, allegedly a Catholic college, honored her even though Pope John Paul II (now Saint John Paul II) and the Vatican he headed had explicitly condemned the invasion and war she helped to plan. Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran said it would be a “crime against peace.”
“This crime against the peace was a brand new charge, never before seen in international law. American prosecutors, led by Justice Jackson, had a more sweeping view of justice in mind. They saw the supreme crime at Nuremberg not in any specific act of Nazi mass killing, nor in the construction of the death camps like Auschwitz. For American prosecutors, the supreme crime was a completely new criminal charge: waging aggressive war, or the crime against peace.”
“The first weapon of war is the lie. The first casualty of war is the truth. These two universally known and historically validated facts are truths that Christian Just War theory, Christian Just Warists, and Christian Just War Churches are adamantly and chronically culpably blind to. And this, despite the verifiable fact that this head-inthe-sand moral posture has resulted in and is resulting in Christians destroying tens of millions of human beings and inflicting intolerable human suffering on tens of millions of others by their ostrich-based Just War morality. Morally culpable self-deception is refusing to look because I know I won’t see what I want to see.” Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
This ten-minute video talk is the fourth part in a series of Lenten reflections by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.
