Are the bishops' pastoral letters passe?

Major institutional statements of Catholic teaching on the moral dimensions of political and social issues have taken one of three forms. Two are papal encyclicals and documents from councils, notably Vatican II. Pastoral letters of national conferences of bishops are the third form. These have sometimes developed into big statements, drawing attention beyond the Catholic community and sometimes beyond national borders. The pastoral letter is an art form perhaps developed most highly in the United States. It is also a phenomenon, and a process, which is currently under heavy stress, with a clouded future. We risk a great loss.

To understand what is at stake we must begin with the experience of producing the 1983 pastoral letter by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response. Notre Dame's Father Theodore Hesburgh called it "the finest document ever to emerge from the U.S. hierarchy." One may agree, or disagree. It certainly was the most prominent, probably more than any other pastoral letter in any country. I was involved as principal consultant. Both the substance of the document and the process that produced it are worth recalling.

The Challenge of Peace was both universal and American in substance. It was reflective of the universal church, in that it built on two millennia of Christian and especially Catholic tradition: Scripture, church scholars like Augustine and Aquinas, papal and conciliar documents, including statements of John XXIII, John Paul II, and the Second Vatican Council, and recent writings by many analysts. It drew especially on the just-war tradition which strictly limits the legitimate reasons for going to war, and the kinds of actions that can licitly be taken during war. But it paid much respect to the principles of nonviolence that would lead to acts of conscientious objection; it repeated Vatican II's affirmation, in The Church in the Modern World, of conscientious objection as a legitimate option for individuals. This, incidentally, is a very American option, though not exclusively so. Many governments do not permit it.

The letter applied general principles from the tradition to the particular local conditions of the United States during the cold war. Applying general principles to reasoning about local conditions is precisely what national bishops' conferences are supposed to do. Here, the bishops applied Catholic moral principles to American political and strategic realities, and to the configuration of moral discourse in the United States in the 1980s. The pastoral letter made a careful distinction between general nondisputable principles (like the need to distinguish between civilians - who can never be targeted deliberately - and possibly legitimate military targets, and the need to keep any damage, both to military personnel and to civilians, proportionate to the good supposed to be achieved), and it conditioned judgments about how those principles would seem to apply to specific choices about strategy or weapons. The letter was also very American in encouraging study, prayer, and dialogue rather than laying down binding statements such as "You cannot licitly work in a nuclear weapons factory." Although it applied very tight conditions to the continued possession and possible use of nuclear weapons, it did not absolutely forbid either. Partly this was of course a practical judgment about the character of national as well as international politics. But it also reflected a particularly American commitment to freedom of conscience: the principle that moral teaching must be persuasive, not coercive. Indeed, one bishop member said at a meeting of the drafting committee, "Humanae vitae, issued by the pope after rejecting the recommendations of his own commission, destroyed all teaching authority on the topic. We mustn't let that happen here."

It was also a very American document in its process, which began with requests for such a letter from a wide spectrum of bishops, and a resolution of the bishops' conference to move forward. The letter was produced after uniquely wide consultation covering the full political spectrum, government officials and private experts on military-political matters, ethicists, theologians, and citizens. This consultation was also very ecumenical, ranging far beyond just Catholics. The committee was actively and publicly lobbied from all sides. In addition to incorporating statements from Catholic tradition and authorities, it cited Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and many other individuals. The drafting committee followed a collegial process; clerics and nonclerics on the staff (including a sister) were treated as intellectual and moral equals by the bishops. But the bishop members would be the ones who signed it, so in that sense we quite properly could not be fully equal. The bishop members took their responsibility incredibly seriously. Those who had little expertise on the issues rapidly acquired it.

So too, in time, did most of the bishops in the country. They had to do so because the process was so public, and the document itself was so controversial. It went through three drafts, plus what became a televised extravaganza of the 1983 annual bishops' meeting in Chicago, to produce the final letter. The drafts responded carefully to the various comments; they moved repeatedly - but within sharp limits - between conservative and dovish positions. People made sure they understood what they were doing. (Perhaps with some help; at one crucial point in the great meeting at the Chicago Hilton, I thought I felt the Holy Spirit move across that ballroom.) And in the end it was approved by a vote of 238 to 9. It was, I believe, a testament to pluralism, and to the understanding of democracy embodied in John Courtney Murray's contributions to The Church in the Modern World. It was achieved through a process by which all subsequent bishops' statements would be judged, and which I thought at the time might prove even more important than the document itself.

There were some glitches. I'll report one briefly. The Vatican took little official notice of the enterprise until it had been under way for over two years. Then, in January 1983, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin (chair of the committee) and Archbishop John Roach (the elected head of the conference) were summoned to Rome for consultations. Rome had waited a long time to come into a process that had proceeded effectively without it. The Americans met with the major Vatican officials and the pope. They were presented with a variety of questions and reservations, but none that the Americans felt were fundamental. On returning, Bernardin and Roach wrote a memo for the committee saying what points in the document needed clarification or modification, but we all thought the modifications did not threaten the integrity of the document, or the process. Bernardin said orally that the Vatican feared that conscientious objection, and hence nonviolence, would be treated as an option for the state (not just for individuals), but that he knew the committee did not intend that and could make it clear. We all sensed also an undertone of displeasure at the degree to which the American bishops were taking on a teaching function that Vatican officials would have preferred to keep in Rome.

Then, in March, came a rather imperious memorandum from Monsignor Jean Schotte, secretary of the Vatican Justice and Peace Commission, detailing a long list of reservations allegedly discussed at the Rome meeting. The substance of the memo was not so bad, expressing many opinions but not as a magisterial statement. But, said Bernardin, "its tone is more negative than I experienced in Rome," and if it should become public "sentences could be taken out of context and used mischievously." That would destroy all our efforts to write a document that would both include specifics and achieve a consensus - end of project. And Schotte indicated that in due time the Vatican would send the memo to every American bishop - meaning, of course, that it would become public.

The committee members were dismayed, and furious. Blessed Joseph Bernardin (I use the qualifier deliberately; I believe he was, and is, blessed) said, "In terms of myself, I'd be happy to say 'Go to Hell.' But we can't. We have to preserve the document." And it was Bernardin's brilliant stroke that saved it. He said that he would himself distribute the Schotte memo to all the bishops, the Bernardin and Roach report to us on the Rome meeting, and a committee commentary on the Schotte memo, showing that we were in fundamental agreement with its principles. He did so, and the storm blew away. But it came close to a total wipeout of the process and of the document.

So what is the contemporary relevance of this narrative? I believe it raises two questions.

First, does the substance of the document itself have any relevance for contemporary international relations, after the cold war? Here are a few highlights. The letter did not call for unilateral disarmament, nor did it explicitly prohibit any use of nuclear weapons for deterrence. But it drew on The Church in the Modern World's statement that, "Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man itself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation." In light of the probable escalation of any use of nuclear weapons to undiscriminating and utterly disproportionate consequences, the U.S. bishops declared, "We do not perceive any situation in which the deliberate initiation of nuclear warfare, on however restricted a scale, can be morally justified. Nonnuclear attacks by another state must be resisted by other than nuclear means." They also leaned heavily on a very careful statement by John Paul II in 1982: "In current conditions, 'deterrence' [actually, in the French original, "une dissuasion," not any and all deterrence] based on balance, certainly not as an end in itself but as a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament, may still be judged morally acceptable." Note all the qualifiers, which I emphasize with italics.

In a subsequent pastoral letter in 1993, The Harvest of Justice is Sown in Peace, the U.S. bishops declared, "The eventual elimination of nuclear weapons is more than a moral ideal; it should be a policy goal." Now, well into the post-cold war era, when the threat of an attack on the West by the Soviet Union is lifted but weaker states are imitating the nuclear powers by developing nuclear weapons of their own, is it time to think again about demanding the negotiated elimination of all such weapons? Perhaps that is still utopian. But by the bishops' own reasoning, they should as a body be exploring it. And they aren't.

Which leads to the second question: Is there likely ever again to be anything like the U.S. bishops' "big letter"? It would take a lot of bishops who were ready to address the question, and to exercise some real independence in doing so. Yet the temperamental and theological makeup of the hierarchy in the United States has changed greatly. In 1985 (note, only two years after The Challenge of Peace), the Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops asked for a study of the theological and juridical status of national episcopal conferences. That study worked its way through the Vatican and emerged as the July 1998 apostolic letter from Rome on "The Theological and Juridical Nature of Episcopal Conferences." That document declares that national conferences are not to take over the authority of the individual bishop in his diocese, since his authority is by "divine institution." Yet in general, individual bishops are becoming increasingly reluctant to exercise much independence from anyone; perhaps some even are selected with the expectation they will not; and they risk penalties when they do. Furthermore, doctrinal declarations of a national conference not unanimously agreed to may henceforth be issued only if the Vatican gives its approval. One dissenting bishop is enough to stop it. This is, of course, a much higher standard than was applied to documents from the Second Vatican Council. (And remember that The Challenge of Peace garnered "only" 96 percent of the vote.) No national conference pastoral letter that really says anything can expect to achieve unanimity. If both individual bishops and national conferences are tranquilized, who then is left? We need the Holy Spirit.

Bruce Martin Russett is Dean Acheson Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Yale University.