On the Right

When President Johnson thought to name the last Sunday in July a National Day of Prayer for Peace and Reconciliation, he probably did not expect such a reaction as he got from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen of Rochester. This eloquent and spiritual man took the occasion to recall a haunting passage from the only previous such proclamation in American history, Abraham Lincoln’s during the Civil War. And then to draw a conclusion inimical to President Johnson’s policies, a conclusion inimical, in the judgment of many of us, to the ends the Bishop so ardently seeks. Which is—and it was a political bombshell—that we pull out of Vietnam. But there were the preliminaries. To begin with, as a master dialectician, the Bishop could not forbear the opportunity to bring delicately to the President’s attention the paradox of his proclamation: “Is there not something amiss,” he asked, “in our government when the President asks us to pray and the Supreme Court tells us where we may not pray— namely in our schools?” And then he quoted from Abraham Lincoln, whose analysis of why it was that America was being tortured by a civil war could only strike the contemporary secularist as positively fanatical. Lincoln had said that: “It is a duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that these nations only are blessed.” Then Lincoln asked whether “the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?” And Lincoln’s prescription: “Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us—it behooves us, then, to humble ourselves, before the Offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.” Applying Lincoln’s analysis to our own situation, Bishop Sheen first carefully affirmed his separation from his separated political brethren: “‘Completely disassociating myself – from all those who would carry placards instead of a Cross, who would pretend fear of a China doll in order that a great Bear. might make war against us; disassociating myself further from all of those who forget that true peace demands a higher price of self-renunciation than many a war, may I speak only as a Christian and humbly ask the President to announce: ‘In the Name of God who bade us love our neighbor with our whole heart and soul and mind for the sake of reconciliation, I shall withdraw all our forces immediately from South Vietnam.’ ” Such holy rhetoric is exhilarating, and no doubt all who heard the Bishop’s words were moved by them. But does not reconciliation call for the humbling of ourselves only? Surely it does not call for humbling others—“humbling” in this sense meaning the casting of them. into servitude. If it were only American pride that were involved in Vietnam, one could more easily respond enthusiastically to the Bishop’s exhortations. But there are twelve million people in South Vietnam, and that figure would be greatly reduced the day after the country was turned over to the Vietcong. How can we incur God’s blessings by withdrawing our soldiers, tucking them neatly home, leaving our brethren to vassalage at the hands of men whose philosophy is based on the repudiation of any sense of Christian restraint? There are those who, reading the Bishop’s words, will feel not that his central point—that we must be humbled—is wrong, but that it calls on us to redouble our efforts in Vietnam in order to lay the basis for a just reconciliation. The Bishop dissociates himself “from all of those who forget that true peace demands — a higher price of self-renunciation than many a war.” Isn’t this one such war?