South Texas Catholic (Corpus Christi, Tex.), Vol. 19, No. 44, Ed. 1 Friday, May 4, 1984 Page: 1 of 16
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Vol. XIX, No. 44
Serving the 310,750 Catholics in the Diocese of Corpus Christ!
May 4,1984
A year later:
By Jerry Filteau and
Liz Armstrong
NC News Service
WASHINGTON —With a 238-9 vote
May 3, 1983, the ITS. Catholic bishops
endorsed a 42,000-word pastoral Liter
whose challenge reverberated around
the world.
A powerful and controversial docu-
ment titled The Challenge of Peace:
God’s Promise and Our Response, the
letter addressed one of the most difficult
problems confronting humanity today:
the morality of nuclear deterrence,
As the first year of the pastoral comes
to an end, it is clear that it has affected
U.S. Catholicism.
No other action by the American
hierarchy has been given so much atten-
tion or generated so much discussion,
not only within the U.S. Catholic com-
munity but among other Americans.
The debate over the pastoral also has
spread around the world, particularly to
Europe, considered one of the most like-
ly theaters for a nuclear conflagration.
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of
Chicago, who chaired the committee
that drafted it, received some 8,000 let-
ters on the pastoral shortly after its com-
pletion. Groups inside and outside
America are still inviting him to discuss
the document, he said in an interview,
“It has sensitized the Catholic
population, as well as society generally,
to the moral dimension of various war
and peace issues,” the cardinal said.
“That was basically our intent.”
Those “sensitized” to the issue in-
clude members of the Reagan ad-
ministration, he suggested.
“Their rhetoric has moderated,” he
told reporters at the Whitt House April
18 following a meeting between the
bishops, President Reagan and other
administration officials. Nonetheless, he
added, the bishops would like to see the
administration take firmer steps toward
arms control.
The debate still taking place over the
pastoral and the bishops’ ability to ad-
dress such an issue is comparable in re-
cent Catholic history only to that which
followed Humana* Vita*, the 1968 en-
cyclical by Pope Paul VI in which he
reaffirmed Church teaching against ar-
tificial means of birth control.
In addition, not since the Second
Vatican Council has so much attention
been devoted to implementing a Church
document in the United States.
Just as in the Aake of Vatican II, with
its myriad parish study groups,
seminars, speeches and books, the year
since the bishops’ pastoral has brought
parish and diocesan study days, lec-
tures, workshops and seminars all over
the country devoted to understanding
the pastoral. Catholic educators have in-
corporated it into curricula from grade
schools to postgraduate courses in
universities.
Millions of copies of the pastoral itself
were printed—most of them by diocesan
newspapers sent directly into Catholic
bishop’s peace pastoral still debated
The Challenge
of Peace:
God’s Promise
and Our
Response
A Pastoral Letter on
War and Peace
May 8, 1983
National Conference of Catholic Bishops
homes. In addition, within the first year
combined direct sales of the text by
Origins, the NC News Service
documentary service, and the Office of
Publishing Services of the U.S. Catholic
Conference, went over 300,000.
One would have to go back to 1966,
when The Documents of Vatican II
sold some 500,000 copies here and
abroad in its first year of publication, to
find any Church documents that reach-
ed a comparable general readership in
the United States.
Catholic newspapers and magazines
have devoted uncounted pages of print,
and sometimes whole issues, to com-
mentary and analysis on the pastoral.
Books about it have already appeared.
Audio-visual program resources for stu-
dying the pastoral have proliferated.
The Xavier Society for the Blind in New
York is making the text available in
Braille and on cassette.
Diverse Catholic organizations have
made implementation of the peace
pastoral a major part of their agenda.
Among these have been the Leadership
Conference of Women Religious, the
Conference of Major Superiors of Men,
numerous individual Religious orders,
the National Federation of Priests’
Councils, the National Catholic Educa-
tional Association.
In addition, leaders of other major
Christian churches have urged their
people to study the Catholic document
and use it as a resource in forming their
own consciences on issues of war and
peace. As a focus of interfaith interest,
the pastoral is unrivaled among Catholic
documents since Vatican II.
“They (other denominations) know
about it; they’re concerned about the
issues that confront us as a society,”
said Cardinal Bernardin.
Another demonstration of widespread
interest in the pastoral is its translation
in the past year into Spanish, French,
Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Portuguese and
Swedish.
But with all those signs of widespread
interest, the bottom-line questions re-
main: What impact has the pastoral had
or is it likely to have on American
Catholic thinking and action?
Msgr. John Egan, director of
ecumenism and human relations for the
Archdiocese of Chicago and one of the
leading national figures in Catholic
social action for decades, said the
pastoral will have notable effects “down
the pike” on Catholic political attitudes.
But he doubted that it would have any
discernible impact on this fall’s national
elections.
One of the effects of the pastoral has
been the encouragement it has given to
Catholics in the peace movement, pro-
viding them a new sense of identity with
and support from the institutional
Church.
But David O’Brien, history professor
at Holy Cross College in Worcester,
Mass., and a specialist in the history of
American Catholic social reform, sees
that as a two-edged sword.
Unless there is “an effective diocesan
approach” to implementing the
pastoral, O’Brien said, the way
Catholics learn about and understand
the pastoral “will be left to the peace
people.” This kind of approach is “very
vulnerable to right-wing attack,” he
said.
Cardinal Bernardin, discussing
criticism of the pastoral from both
liberal and conservative camps, said, “I
counsel them not to read into the
pastoral what’s not there, whether
they’re on the left or right.”
Similarly, he said he regards as “in-
evitable” efforts by either right or left-
wing groups to use the pastoral for their
own causes. The response is to “keep
drawing attention to what the document
really says,” he advised.
O’Brien, noting th.t Cardinal Ber-
nardin has sought to link abortion,
peace and other issues in a “seamless
garment” of respect-for-life concerns,
said that the broader framework of the
pastoral is to seek a “turnaround” in
the “public moral perceptions” that
underlie political attitudes and deci-
sions.
This approach is different from that of
the anti-abortion activists who seem to
“despair” of such a broader coalition of
moral concerns, O’Brien said, and from
that of pacifists who move to an either-or
position of accepting public policy or
becoming a conscientious objector.
Harry Fagan, associate director of the
New York archdiocesan Pastoral Life
Conference, who has spoken on the
pastoral frequently at clergy conferences
around the country, said that more im-
portant than the specific conclusions of
the pastoral itself is the pastoral’s
dimension of transforming Catholic
moral thinking.
It was the new style of episcopal
teaching, of challenging people to think
and form their own consciences in light
of the Church’s moral teaching and
traditions, that was the major success of
the pastoral, Fagan said.
In talks to priests, Fagan said, he
always emphasizes that the war and
peace pastoral can be approached the
wrong way.
If one begins by debating its conclu-
sion* on the political level, he said, the
pastoral becomes “a source of
divisiveness.” But if one approaches the
pastoral as a challenge to understand the
traditions of theology and spirituality
that the Catholic Church brings to bear
on those questions, then the document
becomes a source of dialogue and “an
opportunity to develop,” he said.
Perhaps the pastoral's greatest
achievement, he suggested, is that it has
brought into focus the extent to which
the Catholic Church’s moral values run
counter to those of American culture in
general.
“The Church is the only major credi-
ble institution in the country that is real-
ly countercultural, * * he said—not only
on nuclear weapons, but on a range of
issues from abortion to capital punish-
ment to sexual morality to the rights of
the poor.
By calling on Catholics to form adult
consciences on those values and bring
those values into their political life, the
pastoral is an exercise in “Christian
civics,” Fagan said, and in that/.sense"
“there is a lot more at stake” for the
future of American Catholicism^ than
questions of nuclear deterrence policy.
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Bilton, William G. South Texas Catholic (Corpus Christi, Tex.), Vol. 19, No. 44, Ed. 1 Friday, May 4, 1984, newspaper, May 4, 1984; Corpus Christi, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth840372/m1/1/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .