NEWS STORY: Bishops Mark Peace Pastoral Anniversary Looking at Contemporary Challenges

c. 2003 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ As U.S. Catholic bishops prepared to begin their annual meeting, prelates and experts gathered Sunday (Nov. 9) to debate war as a necessary option in modern society while stressing the vital role of peaceful alternatives. The seminar, a kickoff event for Monday’s formal opening of the U.S. Conference […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ As U.S. Catholic bishops prepared to begin their annual meeting, prelates and experts gathered Sunday (Nov. 9) to debate war as a necessary option in modern society while stressing the vital role of peaceful alternatives.

The seminar, a kickoff event for Monday’s formal opening of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, evaluated U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, touching on the Iraq conflict and the United Nations’ role in moderating international security debates.


Before moving to discussions of recent international conflicts, four panelists, moderated by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, coadjutor of the Archdiocese of Dublin, discussed “The Challenge of Peace,” the U.S. bishops’ landmark 1983 pastoral letter.

Although the Cold War is over, the 20-year-old document continues to deliver a vital message of peace to a society still torn by international conflict, the panel said.

Sister Mary Evelyn Jegen, a professor at Trinity College here, said the peaceful approach to conflict encouraged in the document still applies, especially as economic and business relationships between countries grow.

“The moral response of interdependence is a way of life that develops a culture of peace,” she said.

The Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, currently the head of Catholic Charities and a key author of “The Challenge of Peace,” was asked to speak about the weakness of the document.

Hehir said the pastoral focused too much on the threat of nuclear war and other Cold War era concerns, and is not fully applicable to modern society.

But John Steinbruner, professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, argued that society is still experiencing a Cold War, and the document still applies.


Although the paralyzing fear of nuclear weapons has been replaced with fear of bioterrorism and “dirty bombs,” “we have not transcended the mass threat of catastrophic violence,” he said.

Fear of biological weapons, which could decimate a people much more quickly and completely than a nuclear bomb, is the driving force behind this Cold War, he said. Modern science is yet unable to prevent mass chaos and destruction, and research for preventing a biological attack is “embryonic at best,” he said.

The panelists also took up the issue of preventing nuclear attacks through nonproliferation treaties.

Steinbruner said the United States is in direct violation of many conditions laid out in the most recent treaty. U.S. demands on other countries to dismantle nuclear weapons or to halt weapons-building programs are severely undermined by its practices of flouting the rules.

“We are not going to get away with this without some sort of (retribution),” he said.

Jegen agreed the United States has “no moral authority” to push for nuclear nonproliferation, particularly because the United States used atomic bombs in World War II.

But Michael Novak, a scholar in religion, philosophy and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute, said fears of nuclear war have been pushed to the back burner in an era where bioterrorism and surprise attacks send Americans in droves to hardware stores for duct tape.


“The meaning of `imminent’ has changed,” he said. “It used to be that it took months and years to accumulate an army. Now we need to think about how to defend yourself from surprise.”

Novak said terrorist organizations that can wreak havoc with few attackers in surprise assaults have instilled fears of “asymmetric warfare _ they can win even though they can’t match us power for power.”

Steinbruner said the United States must be cautious in how it reacts to terrorist attacks to avoid self-destruction.

“Our reaction is not international collaboration,” he said. “It is to gain in national self-assertion and that is self-destructive behavior.”

But the United Nations, charged with helping to keep peace on an international level, is not capable of dealing with modern-day terrorism and the serious international implications of attacks like Sept. 11, Hehir said. This saps the legitimacy of the organization, he said.

When a major threat arises, the United States become the prosecuting attorney, the jury and the judge, Hehir said, and undermines the United Nations’ power.


“You can’t start a conversation by declaring your partner irrelevant, then asking him to do what you want to do,” he said.

But Novak argued every country is trying to shape foreign policy in its own self-interest. He cited France and Germany, who agreed that Iraq was in material breach of U.N. arms-control sanctions but still refused to support the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. Novak said he believed the countries set a roadblock for U.S. plans for war because they didn’t want to lose the oil contracts they held with Iraq.

DEA END GABRIEL

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