A few days ago, the Washington Post ran this review, by Jonathan Yardley, of A.C. Grayling's "Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombings of Civilians in Germany and Japan." The review opens with this:
In the summer of 1943, the Bomber Command of Britain's Royal Air Force began what it chose to call Operation Gomorrah, "five major and several minor" aerial attacks on the German city of Hamburg, "with the aim of wiping Hamburg from the map of Europe." Most of the bombs it dropped were incendiaries, "small bombs filled with highly flammable chemicals, among them magnesium, phosphorus and petroleum jelly." The result was "the first ever firestorm created by bombing, and it caused terrible destruction and loss of life," almost entirely among civilians. At least 45,000 human corpses were found in the ruins, and more than 30,000 buildings were destroyed. A.C. Grayling writes:
"In the cellars, otherwise unscathed people suffocated to death. Police reports and eyewitness accounts later confirmed many of the horror stories told 'of demented Hamburgers carrying bodies of deceased relatives in their suitcases -- a man with the corpse of his wife and daughter, a woman with the mummified body of her daughter, or other women with the heads of their dead children.' "
At about this time, Winston Churchill watched "a film showing RAF bombers in action over the Ruhr." According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?" Quite to the contrary was the view of Bomber Command, in particular its commander, Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, who "wanted to make a tremendous show" (the words are his own) in Hamburg and got what he wanted. But the question remains: Was the indiscriminate bombing of civilians -- in Hamburg, in Dresden, in Tokyo, in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki -- justifiable militarily, or was it "in whole or in part morally wrong"?
According to Yardley,
[Grayling] insists, correctly, that "acts of injustice can be perpetrated in the course of a just war, and if the injustices committed are themselves very great, their commission can threaten the overall justice of the war in which they took place." St. Thomas Aquinas argued that "on three conditions, war can be justified." These are "first, that there is a just cause of war, second, that it is begun on proper authority, and third, that it is waged with the right intention, meaning that it aims at 'the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil.' " Obviously World War II satisfied all of these conditions. But what about two others formulated by modern just-war theorists: "that to be just a war must have a reasonable chance of success, and that the means used to conduct it must be proportional to the ends sought."
It is on this final condition that bombing of civilians comes a cropper. Leave aside all the other objections to such bombing, moral and otherwise -- and there are plenty of them -- the simple fact is that it is disproportionately cruel, destructive and wanton. The ends sought -- defeat of Germany and Japan -- were in sight before the bombings of 1944 and 1945, and even the bombing of Hamburg in 1943 was out of proportion to the gains it allegedly brought to the Allied cause, if in fact there were any. The "horrific firestorm" it produced may have been small compared to the atrocities of Auschwitz, but it was horrific all the same. Grayling is right to insist that by acknowledging that we do not "have clean hands ourselves," we would be in a far stronger position to condemn "the people who plunged the world into war and carried out gross crimes under its cover." As matters stand now, we are at the very least open to the charge of hypocrisy.
I could be wrong, but I would not have thought that St. Thomas's view was that "acts of injustice can be perpetrated in the course of a just war[.]" Rather, I would have thought that his view was that some acts -- acts that are not intrinsically immoral -- which might ordinarily, all things considered, be unjustifiable are justifiable (i.e, are not "acts of injustice") in the context of a just war. Am I wrong?
The Supreme Court declined to review a decision by a California court requiring Cardinal Mahoney to produce documents relating to certain priests accused of sexual abuse. Cardinal Mahoney had argued, among other things, that requiring the production of these documents would be an unjustifiable incursion into the priestly-formation process. So, here is a question, one that might be particularly interesting given the Cardinal's recent (and widely noted) statements relating to Catholics' moral obligations toward vulnerable immigrants, notwithstanding immigration laws: If Cardinal Mahoney believes the arguments he was making about these documents, then should he refuse to turn them over, and face contempt sanctions? (To be clear: I am saying nothing about the merits of Cardinal Mahoney's religious or constitutional claims, or about whether he should defy discovery orders. I'm only asking, *if* he believes that an order requiring discovery would violate the freedom of religion and interfere with priestly formation, *then* should he comply?)
Great question, Patrick -- tell us more. Some of us amateur theologians tend to make it up as we go along, forgetting that very few of the questions we ask have not been considered in one form or another in the last 2006 years.
-- Mark
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
I've only just begun to study the fascinating postings on authority, etc., but one question occurs to me right away. Don't the Church's own careful distinctions as to the kind of adherence she asks of the faithful matter to analysis? An alternative taxonomy, helpful in itself, has been developed in the conversation here, but I'm not clear on how it tracks or declines to track what the Church herself has taught on these precise questions. The Church's distinctions may prove to be inadequate to our purposes here, but in a tradition that knows how to "define and declare," pronouncements of other kinds should be treated as what they claim to be. Perhaps there are straw men in operation here and there? For example, the Church claims the authority to teach unerringly what is contained in the deposit of faith. But does she claim to teach with equal certainty what is not explicit in the deposit of faith but is known (only) thanks to the natural law?
So, the good news: This conference, "Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship," looks very interesting and entertaining. Bad news: Mirror of Justice blogistas are nowhere in sight on the line-up. Very disappointing. MOJ is, among law blogs, distinct. With all due respect to the organizers, a "bloggership" conference that does not take account of our enterprise is, well, lacking.
Professor John Cavadini, the chair of Notre Dame's Department of Theology, has published an "open letter" in response to Fr. John Jenkins's "Closing Statement on Academic Freedom and Catholic Character" (here). I am posting this not so much to re-start our conversation about the appropriateness at Catholic universities of performances of the "Vagina Monologues," but because Professor Cavadini has some very interesting things to say about the nature of a Catholic university, and the relationship between such a university and the Church (as opposed to a disembodied "Catholic intellectual tradition"). It strikes me that his thoughts are relevant to the wonderful discussion we've been having, the last few days, about authority and the vocation of a Catholic scholar.
Here is a bit from Professor Cavadini's letter:
. . . Ex Corde Ecclesiae . . . speaks of a relationship not in the first place between the Catholic university and the Catholic intellectual tradition, but between the Catholic university and the Church. And, whether we recognize it or not, this relationship to the Church - to the real, incarnate Body of Christ, the Church as it is with all its blemishes and not the abstract, idealized Church in our minds - is the lifeblood and only guarantee of our identity as a Catholic university. There is no Catholic identity apart from affiliation with the Church. Appeal to "the Catholic intellectual tradition" apart from some explicit relationship to the Church risks reducing the tradition itself to an abstraction. And again, I do not mean an imaginary Church we sometimes might wish existed, but the concrete, visible communion of "hierarchic and charismatic gifts," "at once holy and always in need of purification," in which "each bishop represents his own church and all of [the bishops] together with the Pope represent the whole Church …" (Lumen Gentium 1.4,8; 3.23).
Now, no one would deny that the relationship between University and Church is not a challenging relationship with many attendant difficulties. And there is certainly room for argument about what are the specific, appropriate forms and shapes that the University's relationship with the Church should take. But this relationship, which necessarily involves some measure of accountability, should never be dismissed as an irrelevance[.] . . .
The ancient Gnostic heresy developed an elitist intellectual tradition which eschewed connection to the "fleshly" church of the bishop and devalued or spiritualized the sacraments. Are we in danger of developing a gnosticized version of the "Catholic intellectual tradition," one which floats free of any norming connection and so free of any concrete claim to Catholic identity? Are we - meaning all of us, and not just the President, for this is not just his problem - disowning the problem, rather than facing it honestly as a problem, as a project, as a challenge, as a struggle and yes, as a commitment? There is no commitment if it is not explicitly stated. . . .
