MUST READING ... FROM THIS WEEK'S COMMONWEAL

I am eager to learn how Richard Neuhaus and George Weigel respond to this important essay.  I have posted just the opening paragraphs of the essay below.  For the whole essay, click on this URL:

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php?id_article=1032

Commonweal, December 3, 2004

THE WAR IN IRAQ:

HOW CATHOLIC CONSERVATIVES GOT IT WRONG

Peter Dula

H. Richard Niebuhr once wrote that the first question of ethics is not “What should I do?” but “What is going on?” The Baghdad version of that principle might be, “What the hell is going on?” It is a question that comes to me when I wake up to a car bomb or fall asleep to the sound of mortar fire. I was asking it when a Kurdish colleague took me to see the memorial at Halabja, where Saddam gassed five thousand villagers. I asked it again last March when 223 Shi’a pilgrims died in Karbala. And again when, in the late afternoon of August 1, there were two loud thuds and the hotel shook and I saw the plumes of smoke rising over the buildings north of my balcony, buildings occupied by people I work with. I was asking it the next morning when I discovered that two more car bombs had exploded next to a Christian seminary, killing ten, leaving professors and students shaking and looking in vain for loved ones, and burnt car parts spotting the lawn.

Perhaps my confusion and fear were something like what Tolstoy’s Count Bezukhov was feeling in War and Peace when he surveyed the carnage at the battlefield of Borodino. I don’t know. Maybe it is more like the terror felt by a nine-year-old Iraqi friend who for weeks spent the nights crouched by her window, waiting for the U.S. soldiers to come again, heavy metal blasting from their Humvees, blowing up doors to drag her brothers from their beds and take them off to Abu Ghraib.

Bezukhov at Borodino is on my mind because it is the image that introduces an essay, “Moral Clarity in a Time of War,” published in January 2003, in what the mainstream media like to call “the obscure but influential” journal First Things. Of course, in the theological community, both Protestant and Catholic, First Things is hardly obscure. Its founder and editor in chief is Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, author of The Naked Public Square (1984) and dozens of other books. Neuhaus, a former Lutheran pastor, is a Catholic convert, a vigorous champion and personal friend of John Paul II, and a powerful figure in neoconservative circles. He moves easily within the increasingly pietistic Republican Party, and is even credited with helping to teach President George W. Bush how to “speak Catholic.”

“Moral Clarity in a Time of War” was written by Catholic theologian George Weigel, a member of the editorial board of First Things (along with fellow neoconservative Catholics Michael Novak and Mary Ann Glendon)-and perhaps best known for his biography of Pope John Paul II (Witness to Hope). Weigel’s essay declared that “the fog of war” must not be allowed to “suggest that warfare takes place beyond the reach of moral reason.” Weigel argued that the sort of preemptive war Bush was threatening against Iraq could be justified by traditional just-war standards. Those who thought otherwise were derided as milquetoasts or as unwilling to rise to the defense of freedom and democracy in a dangerous world.

War and Peace is full of examples of moral clarity about war. Sometimes it is a delirium-induced clarity that comes after the battle, but most often the clarity is in the run-up to war, precisely the sort of clarity Weigel provided in his essay, and that the First Things editors articulated in an earlier essay “In a Time of War” (December 2001). It was a clarity provided by arguably two of the most influential conservative Catholics in the United States, intellectuals who have the ear of influential American bishops and the Vatican. If they have been wrong, especially if they have been theologically wrong about the justice of this war, it should matter to those who share Weigel and Neuhaus’s belief that religion should play a major role in the public square.

Nothing is easier than moral clarity before a war. It is now, when any day in Baghdad can make one feel like Bezukhov at Borodino, that moral clarity is hard. Weigel, I presume, still believes what he wrote in January 2003: “the proper role of religious leaders and public intellectuals is to do everything possible to clarify the moral issues at stake in a time of war.” I agree. Weigel has spent much of his career doing just that. He has written on the role of the churches in the collapse of communism, and at great length on the just-war tradition in Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (1987). Like much of his writing, Tranquillitas Ordinis is highly polemical, alleging that liberal Catholic theologians and ethicists, under the influence of an “anti-anti-Communist” ideology and a naive pacifism, abandoned a proper understanding of the just-war tradition. Writing in Commonweal (“The Heritage Abandoned?” September 11, 1987), Peter Steinfels, an advocate of the just-war tradition, welcomed Weigel’s attempt to reinvigorate the Catholic debate about the moral necessity of using force. Steinfels also judged “disingenuous” Weigel’s claims to political disinterestedness. “The reader who approaches Tranquillitas Ordinis suspecting a strong political spin on its theological argument will not be mistaken,” he wrote. “Weigel is doing precisely what he accuses, with some justification, many peace activists of doing: using Catholic teaching to support specific prudential judgments that rest not on the teaching alone but on ‘political’ readings of fact and history.”

[End of excerpt.  Again:  Fore the whole essay, click on the URL above.]