Does peace have a prayer? (editors' note).

At the prayers of the faithful, I had planned to voice a prayer for the people of Afghanistan, especially for the millions of refugees. But before I could do so, somebody else did it much more eloquently than I would have. On October 7, our parish was also praying for the victims of the September 11 attacks and, most of all, for peace. As it turned out, at almost exactly the same time U.S. forces dropped their first bombs on the impoverished country of Afghanistan.

Just a couple days earlier I had taken down the small American flag we had been flying by our front door. When my 11-year-old son asked why, I told him that it looked like our country was going to war and that I didn't want to support that. He seemed genuinely shocked at this news and quite discouraged when he said, "But I have really been praying for peace--a lot."

I have been discouraged, too, because in their desperate attempt to strike back at the terrorists, our nation's leaders have once again decided to continue the cycle of violence and most likely will end up further feeding the hate that motivated the awful crimes of September 11. The decision to go to war, popular though it has been with most Americans, represents, I believe, a terrible failure of imagination. And, unfortunately, such failure of imagination also seems to have befallen our church's leaders, with several of them rushing in to bless this war and to publicly declare it a "just war."

Not so fast, argue the two theologians we invited for a conversation this month about the moral and faith implications of the war in Afghanistan. In their interview with us ("Is this just war?" pages 1216), both Lisa Sowle Cahill, a social ethicist at Boston College, and Father Michael Baxter, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame, urge American Catholics to be far more skeptical and critical of the war our nation is currently waging. "There are plenty of other people out there who are willing to say that the war is justified," notes Cahill. Rather than prematurely assuring our government and military leaders that their war is just, she believes that Catholics today "should be using just-war criteria to raise questions about military actions, to mount criticism, to urge caution."

Perhaps no one has put it more eloquently than Martin Luther King Jr., whom Pax Christi USA quotes in its statement on the war: "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.... Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate ... adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."