Letter from Washington

The U.S. Catholic bishops came to town in mid-November, did their ecclesiastical darnedest to make “deterrence” a dirty word, resisted voting on the second draft of the proposed pastoral letter (the one they had before them), called for a rewrite, and departed for their home dioceses with the comforting knowledge that local media would take over from the Washington press corps the job of keeping inflated their mischievous ruminations on nuclear war. A quiet dispute still smolders here among political pundits as to whether the Administration was wise to attempt to rebut the bishops through Judge William Clark’s brief defending nuclear deterrence—which, howsoever tightly reasoned, violated the mundane wisdom of Machiavelli that when a disturbance arises in the state, it is usually better to temporize with it lest, by counteracting, you only magnify its force.

Everything that can be reported on the bishops and the bomb has been reported except, possibly, the following. First, little wonder that the majority of the bishops approved the “thrust” of the pastoral. Even Catholics in the Administration—including William Clark, George Shultz, Edward Rowny (head of the U.S. arms-reduction talks in Geneva), and John Lehman (Secretary of the Navy)—would do that. The first fifty-odd pages of the letter were virtually unexceptionable as enlightened and updated just-war theology. It was the last ten pages, or fewer, that were the rub, i.e., those wherein the bishops compared the relative merits of weapons systems and technical specifics thereof. It was in that territory that they evinced no special competence or authority.

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The U.S. Catholic bishops came to town in mid-November, did their ecclesiastical darnedest to make “deterrence” a dirty word, resisted voting on the second draft of the proposed pastoral letter (the one they had before them), called for a rewrite, and departed for their home dioceses with the comforting knowledge that local media would take over from the Washington press corps the job of keeping inflated their mischievous ruminations on nuclear war. A quiet dispute still smolders here among political pundits as to whether the Administration was wise to attempt to rebut the bishops through Judge William Clark’s brief defending nuclear deterrence—which, howsoever tightly reasoned, violated the mundane wisdom of Machiavelli that when a disturbance arises in the state, it is usually better to temporize with it lest, by counteracting, you only magnify its force.

Everything that can be reported on the bishops and the bomb has been reported except, possibly, the following. First, little wonder that the majority of the bishops approved the “thrust” of the pastoral. Even Catholics in the Administration—including William Clark, George Shultz, Edward Rowny (head of the U.S. arms-reduction talks in Geneva), and John Lehman (Secretary of the Navy)—would do that. The first fifty-odd pages of the letter were virtually unexceptionable as enlightened and updated just-war theology. It was the last ten pages, or fewer, that were the rub, i.e., those wherein the bishops compared the relative merits of weapons systems and technical specifics thereof. It was in that territory that they evinced no special competence or authority.