Category Archives: Militarism and Christianity

Moral Charade

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The following was written by Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy:

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The Institutional Churches’ Moral Charade Regarding Gospel Nonviolence Marches On!

“Dear military Ordinaries and military chaplains: As you carry out your mission to form the consciences of the members of the armed forces, I encourage you to spare no effort to enable the norms of international humanitarian law to be accepted in the hearts of those entrusted to your pastoral care,” 

“The Second Vatican Council calls those in military service ‘custodians of the security and freedom of their people.’ The servants of Christ in the military world are also the first to be at the service of men and women and of their fundamental rights,” said Pope Francis in the Apostolic Palace Oct. 31, 2019, as he met with military chaplains from around the world as they participated in a formation course on international humanitarian law hosted by the Vatican.

This same Pope Francis in an address to the International Theological Commission on January 15, 2014 said,

“The definitive revelation of God in Jesus Christ makes every recourse to violence in God’s name ultimately impossible. It is precisely because of [Christ’s] refusal of violence, because of his having overcome evil with good, with the blood of his Cross, that Jesus has reconciled men to God and each other”  

 On August 19, 2013, he said,

“The true force of the Christian is the force of truth and of love, which means rejecting all violence. Faith and violence are incompatible! Faith and violence are incompatible! But faith and strength go together. The Christian is not violent, but he strong. And with what strength? That of meekness, the force of meekness, the force of love.” – Pope Francis, (8/19/13)

Commentary:

How about instead of the Pope telling the military bishops and priests that they should work diligently to assure that “the norms of international humanitarian law to be accepted in the hearts of those entrusted to your pastoral care,” they be told by that they should spare no effort in assuring that the norms of the Sermon on the Mount, the norm of Jesus in the Gospels,, e.g., “love your enemies,” “put up your sword,” “love one another as I have loved you ,” accepted into the hearts of those entrusted to your pastoral care.

Pray tell what are the “norms of international humanitarian law” in regards to the mass slaughter of human beings in war. “Humanitarian laws of war” is an oxymoron. (Oxymoron is derived from the Greek ‘oxumoron’ meaning “pointedly foolish.”) The “norms of international humanitarian law” are as porous, as slippery, as wide open to indefinite interpretation as the norms of Catholic Just War Theory. They are the Deceiver’s tool to get people to believe that war can be conducted humanely, just as Christian Just War Theory is the Deceiver’s PR tool to get Christians to believe they can be good and faithful disciples of Jesus as they go forth to slaughter people named by politicians “the enemy.” The norms of international humanitarian laws of war are something Jesus never taught or could never teach because war intrinsically requires violence and enmity— even if done according to the norms of international humanitarian laws. And, violence and enmity are forever outside of what a person committed to obedience to Jesus, to Jesus’ “new commandment, love as Jesus loves,” could ever morally participate in.

How about a Vatican formation course for military bishops and priests on the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies?

How is a person a servant of Christ in the military and to military personnel unless he is telling the truth that Jesus taught to at least the Christians involved in the military world, that is, in the world where people spend their life’s time learning to kill and killing other human beings on the command of others or ordering such killing. The truth of Jesus, as Pope Francis once proclaimed, is “Faith and violence are incompatible! Faith and violence are incompatible…The definitive revelation of God in Jesus Christ makes every recourse to violence in God’s name ultimately impossible. ” So why didn’t the Pope say to the Catholic military bishops and priests of the world gather before him:

“Dear military Ordinaries and military chaplains: As you carry out your mission to form the consciences of the members of the armed forces, I encourage you to spare no effort in teaching that “Faith and violence are incompatible! The definitive revelation of God in Jesus Christ makes every recourse to violence in God’s name ultimately impossible; ” teaching it so thoroughly that this truth of God and Jesus be accepted in the hearts of those entrusted to your pastoral care.” 

 I do not know why the Pope refused to speak this clear truth of Jesus, which he full well knows, to the military bishops and priests. But what I do know is that if he refuses to vigorously proclaim this teaching of Jesus to the very people who are ignoring it, disobeying it, defying it and calling their bracketing out of it faithful Christin discipleship, to whom is he going to proclaim this teaching with vigor and authority? Dorothy Day?

Omnicidal Tendencies

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Jeremy Scahill interviews Liz McAlister, one of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 and wife of the late Phil Berrigan, on The Intercept podcast titled “Omnicidal Tendencies.” You can listen here: https://theintercept.com/2019/10/23/omnicidal-tendencies-the-nuclear-presidency-of-donald-trump/

On a whim, I Googled Jeremy Scahill, whom I’ve admired for years, and it turns out he was raised by two Catholic activists and spent a year living at Jonah House, founded by Phil and Liz. Here is some more information on that:

“The Blackwater scandal of American (and other) mercenaries in Iraq and elsewhere popped up on my radar as yet another dark chapter in this national nightmare surrounding Iraq. Yet I didn’t explore it as much as I would have liked (or should have) until channel-surfing the other night I came across a Bill Moyers’ interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of an impressive book of investigative reporting on Blackwater. The interview and parsing of the media counter-attack by Blackwater CEO Erik Prince was illuminating, and chilling. And Scahill’s dedication, work and presentation were beyond impressive, to me.
I was not aware, however, that Scahill and Prince are both Catholic, until last night I read an Oct 12 profile of Scahill in NCR. Scahill was raised in a Catholic Worker home, and went to live at Jonah House with the Berrigans in Baltimore for a year in the 1990’s. 
It had a profound impact on me, he told NCR. I think that being alive in the times that we live in means to be a resister…For me, media is a nonviolent weapon in that struggle.”

Catholic antipodes
By David Gibson
October 21, 2007
Commonweal
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/catholic-antipodes

First Day of Trial

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Outside the courthouse for the first day of the trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares activists. We interviewed three of them on the podcast back in August: Martha Hennessy, Carmen Trotta and Clare Grady.

Below are some speeches they gave last night at the eve of the trial. Both of these videos have been taken from the Kings Bay Plowshares Facebook page and were posted by Steve Dear.

“The Good Communist”

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From James W. Douglass’s book, The Nonviolent Coming of God:

“To understand Jesus parable we have to begin, then, by realizing that the man in the ditch had a deep hatred and suspicion, nourished by his history and culture, for the man who out of compassion resurrected him. Samaritans were hated enemies. Jesus is saying in his parable that the kingdom of God is like being saved from death by a hated enemy. The kingdom of God breaks into our lives in a form that we may not expect, in a form that we may in fact loath and want to destroy.

We can recall that in the chapter of Luke’s gospel just before the Parable of the Good Samaritan, James and John wanted Jesus’ approval to call down on a hostile Samaritan village “fire from heaven to burn them up” (Luke 9:54). But Jesus had rebuked them. Thus, in Jesus’ parable, the disciples’ object of hatred and destruction becomes a source of salvation.

When we understand it in Jesus’ context, the Parable of the Good Samaritan initially moves us to thank God that we, at least, are not lying in a ditch where we have to be saved from death by our enemy. But that is exactly what our situation is: We can only b saved from death by our enemy, and only if we believe in that enemy and are willing to be saved by him. Our enemy has been not a Samaritan, but a Communist. We are in the ditch of nuclear death, and during a now forgotten period of our recent history, Mikhail Gorbachev was the Good Communist attempting to rescue us from that death.

In July 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev made a public commitment to halt all nuclear tests from August 6, 1985 – January 1, 1986, even if the United States continued an active nuclear test program — as in fact we did. After the time expired Gorbachev extended the Soviet Union’s nuclear test moratorium three times, to a total of eighteen months. In each case the United States continued its underground tests. Gorbachev repeatedly made the further commitment never to test a nuclear weapon again, if the United States would cease testing. In other words, the Soviet Union unilaterally stopped its testing of new weapons and allowed the United States an eighteen month advantage and twenty-five unanswered tests, with the explicit goal of signing a comprehensive test ban treaty. In affect, Gorbachev was initiating an end to the nuclear arms race. The United States government was not, however, willing to reciprocate. As a result, the U.S.S.R. announced its resumption of testing in February 1987. Our steady drift toward annihilation continues.

The Unites States treaty with the Soviets to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear forces from Europe was, as a response to Gorbachev’s diplomacy, a disappointing step. Only about four percent of the world’s nuclear weapons were affected by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. President Bush’s September 27, 1991 proposal to Gorbachev for the elimination of all multiple-warhead land-based missiles would retain a huge United States advantage over the Soviets at sea as a result of the more numerous, more accurate Trident warheads. The “modernization” of other nuclear weapons critical to a United States first-strike policy would be allowed to continue under the Bush proposal. In spite of the Good Communist’s efforts to help, we have refused the leave the ditch.

As the president of a disintegrating empire, beset on all sides by growing freedom movements, Mikhail Gorbachev has on at least six occasions used tanks and lethal force against civilian dissenters, resulting in some 200 deaths…Jesus’ parable assumes that the Samaritan — or in our case, the Communist — has a history and capability of violence which rightly (and righteously) preconditions our attitude towards him. Neither the Samaritan nor the Communist is a saint. On the contrary, the point of the parable is in fact the shocking reality, in our eyes, of a well-proven enemy with a violent history acting in a redemptive way toward us — and if we refuse that redemptive action, the impossibility of our being saved from our own situation. Because the rejected Good Samaritan/Communist will then revert to our worst expectations of him as our enemy and will in turn use our violence to cover his own, as in Gorbachev’s repression of Lithuania in January 1991, simultaneous with President Bush’s triggering of the Persian Gulf War.”

Fr. Aleksandr Boris

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The following is an excerpt from James W. Douglass’s book “The Nonviolent Coming of God“:

“We have seen [the power of nonviolence] happen during the ‘Second Russian Revolution,’ August 19-20, 1991, in response to the attempted Soviet coup. The coup was overcome by hundreds of thousands of unarmed citizens. Some, as in resisters were martyred by the tanks. Hundreds, then thousands of other citizens encircled the Russian Parliament Building in Moscow as a civilian defense force shielding Boris Yeltsin and other elected leaders from an imminent military assault. All afternoon and evening on the second day of the coup, loudspeakers blared warnings to the people that tanks were rolling toward the building and planes filled with paratroopers were preparing for an airborne assault. Yet the people kept coming. In fact a further three-pronged assault was currently being mounted against them. It was to include K.G.B. agents who had infiltrated the crowd within the building, helicopters bearing shock troops, and elite units prepared to rush into the building from twenty-four subterranean entry points whose existence was unknown to Yeltsin supporters. A Tiananmen Square in Moscow was averted only by the moral force of the resistance and the noncooperation of soldiers who refused to murder their Russian brothers and sisters.

One exemplar of the moral force which prevailed over the coup was Father Aleksandr Boris, an Orthodox priest and member of the Moscow City Council. Father Boris prayed with the civilian defenders, baptized them for their nonviolent mission, then confronted their opponents in an equally prayerful way. He went from tank to tank, distributing 2,000 Bibles to the soldiers who were expected to assault the Parliament. Only one soldier refused a Bible. Father Borisov then gave another 2,000 Bibles to the people on the barricades. Finally he took part in a key meeting with Patriarch Alexis of the Russian Orthodox Church who then made a proclamation that any soldiers who fired on civilians would be excommunicated.

It was this moral force, embodied in the lives of thousands of willing martyrs (‘witnesses’) to the truth, which rendered the Soviet coup impotent.”

No Flag on National Shrine

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“Dear Pope Francis, Archbishop Gregory, and Monsignor Rossi, 

As members of the Catholic community, we implore you to stop displaying the United States flag on the bell tower of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. 

With such an enormous display on the front of the Shrine, visitors could easily assume an equivalence between church and nation. While Catholics are called to actively engage in civic life as citizens, we know that our primary allegiance is to bring about God’s Kin-dom here on earth. There are times, in fact, when our allegiance to Catholicism is in direct opposition to our allegiance to nation, such as when we must protest the taking of innocent life, whether the unborn child, the condemned prisoner, or the victim of United States military bombing missions.

Sadly, our nation’s flag has become a symbol of militarism and American exceptionalism around the world, values that our Catholic faith tradition acknowledges are antithetical to Jesus’ teachings. Since the Shrine attracts visitors from many countries, displaying it suggests that they are not one with their American brother and sister Catholics, but rather “others” in a foreign land. The Shrine needs to be a welcoming refuge, a place of safety and deep belonging for all Catholics.

For these reasons, we ask you to remove the flag permanently from the bell tower. Thank you for your prayerful consideration.”

Click here to sign the petition.