February 1993
American Purpose
Issue 2, Volume 7

Publication Date: February 1, 1993
Posted: Monday, February 2, 1993

Ten years ago this coming May, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral letter entitled "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response." During its preparation, while it was being debated by the bishops, and after it was issued, TCOP (as the letter came to be known) was a highly controversial, and widely controverted, document. Now, the bishops' conference has appointed an Ad Hoc Committee on the Tenth Anniversary of "The Challenge of Peace," charged with preparing a new reflection on the imperatives of peacemaking in a post-Cold War world. The Ad Hoc Committee invited me to testify at one of its meetings last month, and what follows is the written testimony I submitted on that occasion. I offer it to a wider public in the hope that it might help provoke the kind of serious moral debate that the Ad Hoc Committee seeks to foster.—G.W.


In This Issue :

The Challenge of Peace Ten Years after "The Challenge of Peace"
In the fall of 1989, David Hollenbach, S.J., the prominent Catholic social ethicist who had vigorously defended the theological and political acuity of "The Challenge of Peace" in the early 1980s, noted that the document seemed "already dated." Father Hollenbach attributed TCOP's rather brief shelf-life to the extraordinary pace of events in world politics since May 1983; he referred in particular to the rapid and previously "impossible to imagine" transformation of the Cold War under the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev—a transformation that soon led, as we now know, to the collapse of European communism and indeed of Mr. Gorbachev's state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. [More]

A Cautionary Tale
I too have been amazed at the astonishing pace of historical change over the past decade; and I agree that this change requires us to undertake a careful moral reflection on the new world situation and on the responsibilities of the United States in the post-Cold War world. But I do not agree that TCOP now seems "dated" simply because of the drama of recent history: the problem is, and was, more serious and more fundamental than that. TCOP seems "dated" because it was, in certain crucial respects, a flawed document at the level of moral analysis.  [More]

A Moral Horizon for U.S. Foreign Policy in the 21st Century
As richly textured human and historical realities, "centuries" do not always follow the conventions of our system of dating. The eighteenth century ran for some one hundred and twenty-six years, from the beginning of the great wars between France and England (of which the American Revolution was an episode) until Waterloo. The "nineteenth century" really got under way in 1815 with the defeat of Napoleon; it ended in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I. The guns of August 1914 opened the twentieth century, which ended in August 1991 with the conclusion of the Great Fifty-Five Years' War against totalitarianism.  [More]

Five Issues
Were the NCCB to make a powerful moral argument on behalf of responsible internationalism, linking the defense of the "national interest" to a broader sense of national purpose in the pursuit of a world order in which legal and political instruments increasingly replace war or its threat as the ordinary means of conflict-resolution, the Church and the country would be well served, indeed. In fact, I would urge that any future document be focused primarily on these foundational questions. But if there is time and inclination, there are—needless to say!—a host of other issues to be explored. I list the five that follow because I think the NCCB, as a body of religious pastors and moral teachers, could say something distinctive about these questions.  [More]

A Community of Prayer
With the end of the Cold War, humankind seemed poised to take what Pope John Paul II proposed in 1981: "a major step forward in civilization and wisdom." The moral realism of the Catholic tradition, rooted in the Church's incarnational humanism, is a powerful instrument for discerning the "oughts" deeply embedded in those political decisions that drive us further along the path toward "civilization and wisdom"—or that push us back toward the barbarism of a Hobbesian world in which all are at war with all. The responsibilities of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops are not the same as the responsibilities of the United States government, and the United States Catholic Conference is not a parallel Department of State. But the NCCB and USCC are (or should be) the bearers of a rich tradition of moral wisdom that is especially pertinent to the kind of new strategic reflection required of our public officials today. Identifying the key points at which our tradition can illuminate the government's strategic task has been the purpose of this testimony.  [More]

Endnotes
Click here to view the endnotes. [More]