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Article Excerpt
* Some Methodists have a website (www.theymustrepent.corn) and are collecting signatures to have two fellow Methodists, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, kicked out of the church for their part in the Iraq war. Such action is necessary, they say, "because the President claims his decision to go to war was guided by prayer." It doesn't say here what happens if George W. repents and promises to pray no more.
* Who should decide about when and where to go to war? After discussing the criteria of just war, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, "The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good" ([section] 2309). That's not good enough, writes Father Drew Christiansen in America, a Jesuit magazine. "In light of the war in Iraq, it appears that the Catechism needs updating. The revision should take into account recent church teaching and the example of the pope, bishops, and faithful in opposing war. It should acknowledge the fallibility and the failures of political leaders. Above all, it should affirm the fight and responsibility of the public to set a limit in public opinion to the warmaking of elected political elites." A great idea. Like, you know, maybe we could have elections in which candidates debate their differences about the war and other, like, really important things, and then maybe the winner, like, gets to be president. Hey, it might be worth giving it a try.
* L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, regularly reports on terrorist acts around the world but assiduously avoids mentioning that they are almost all associated with radical Islam. There are several reasons for this: the Holy See wants to resist any suggestion that we are engaged in a war of religions; as the chief institutional representative of world Christianity, it has a unique role in developing any future dialogue with Islam; and it is keenly aware of the precarious position of Christians in Muslim countries. These are all honorable reasons. But a more candid view is offered in a lead editorial in La Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit-edited magazine that is also vetted by the Vatican secretariat of state. The editorial speaks straightforwardly about "terrorism of Islamic origin." "There is a tragic conceptual connection beginning in New York on September 11, 2001, and reaching Beslan, in North Ossetia, on September 1, 2004." The editors then list the dozens of incidents, with their many hundreds of deaths, perpetrated by "terrorism of Islamic origin." "In reality, Islamic terrorism has not changed the goals that it has pursued since its origin [up to] the work of Osama bin Laden: to fight the Jews and the 'crusaders' (the Christians, seen as inveterate enemies of Islam); to fight against the Western world--and the United States in the first instance---that seeks to dominate the Islamic peoples and rob them of their riches, and which, moreover, because of its atheism and corruption, constitutes a grave threat to the Islamic faith; to vindicate the offenses and damages that Western colonialism has inflicted upon the dignity of the Islamic peoples and upon their culture and economic development; to strip of power the governments of majority Islamic countries that are allied with the West and have permitted the American military to trample upon the holy ground of Muslim countries and have served as logistic and military bases to fight against other Muslim countries and deprive them of their oil, the great resource that Allah has given to the 'believers,' denying it to the 'infidels.'" "The most serious change that has taken place in terrorism," say the editors, "is the loss of even the most minimal sense of humanity," which, one notes, is integral to the strategy of throwing the whole world into a state of terror. La Civilta Cattolica does not offer a blanket endorsement of responses to terrorism by the U.S. and its allies. The suggestion is that the war in Iraq has inadvertently contributed to increased terrorism. The editorial is noteworthy not for saying much that is new but for underscoring a reality about which the Vatican is usually and so manifestly reticent: the terrorism afflicting the world is, historically and at present, Islamic in origin. Arguments about whether this is a distortion of Islam and whether warfare might one day be replaced by dialogue are interesting and important. But wisdom begins with giving a name to the reality by which we are confronted: Islamic terrorism.
* "The War in Iraq: How Catholic Conservatives Got It Wrong" is a long, almost ten-page, article in Commonweal by Peter Dula, who was sent for ten months to Iraq to write "advocacy reports" for the pacifist Mennonite Central Committee. Dula is a graduate student in theology and a gifted writer. The essay is a critique of FT, with particular reference to what George Weigel and I have and have not said about the Iraq war in these pages. Dula's position is unambiguous: "Iraq is a catastrophe--on all accounts (except perhaps for Dick Cheney's)." Dula believes that FT has been too confident of U.S. policy and too partisan in supporting the administration. Most sharply, he accuses us of being "mute," of failing to pay sufficient attention to what is happening in Iraq. In our December 2004 issue ("Internationalisms"), I tried to explain our approach to the Iraq war and to U.S. foreign policy more generally. Dula read that reflection just before his essay went to press, but it apparently did not change his mind. "All in all," he writes, "I think the critique I make of Weigel and Neuhaus in this essay still stands." Dula originally submitted the Commonweal essay to FT, and we gave it careful consideration. Had it engaged arguments counter to his "catastrophe" thesis, I expect we would have published it. In any event, it makes for an interesting read and I am glad it found an appropriate home at Commonweal.
* In April of last year we published Joseph Bottum's "The End of the Pius Wars," and that essay serves as an introduction to a remarkable new book edited by Botturn and Rabbi David Dalin, The Pius War." Responses to the Critics of Pius XII (Lexington, 282 pp., $29.95). (I don't know why "wars" became "war" in the singular, but never mind.) The Pius War will likely remain the definitive answer to the slew of malicious and misleading books that have in recent decades assailed Pius XII for his "silence," or worse, during the period of Hitler and the Holocaust. Turning the tables, Rabbi Dalin makes a persuasive case that Pius should be honored as a "righteous gentile" in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Of inestimable value, and the product of years of laborious effort, is an annotated bibliography by William Doino, Jr. It is almost two hundred pages in length and will become an indispensable reference for all responsible writers on Plus XII, the Holy See, and the Hitler era. The Pius War includes a brilliant critique of John Carroll's Constantine's Sword by Robert Louis Wilken. The attack on Pius, Wilken notes, is about ever so much more than Plus: "At the end of the day, in spite of the enormous effort to lay bare the sins of the Church over two millennia, Constantine's Sword is not really a book about Christian theology of the Jews. Its subject is Christian theology tout court, and its polemic springs from the currently fashionable 'ideology of religious pluralism'--what might be termed horror at strong opinions. Carroll wants a Christianity that celebrates a 'Jesus whose saving act is only one disclosure of the divine love available to all,' and calls for a pluralism of 'belief and worship, of religion and no religion, that honors God by defining God as beyond every human effort to express God.' What we have, then, is a rather conventional cultural critique of Christianity. The Jews are the victims par...
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