Catholic Doctrine and Nuclear Dogmatics

Abstract

Martin Luther once wrote, If I preach the Gospel fully and completely, and in every particular, only excepting the besetting issue of the age, I might as well not preach it at all. Some idea like this may have been what led the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to prepare their pastoral letter on nuclear weapons.1 The fear of nuclear holocaust has, for millions of people, indeed become the besetting issue of the age. The nuclear rhetoric of the Reagan Administration has stirred controversy at home and abroad. The Physicians for Social Responsibility and similar organizations have explained in wellpublicized conferences precisely what the medical consequences of a nuclear attack might be. Thousands of Americans, in town meetings and referenda, have voted for a nuclear freeze. Hundreds of thousands have marched in New York and many European cities. The bishops must have been asked repeatedly what position the Roman Catholic Church takes on all this.2 Furthermore, the bishops may have realized that, for the sake of consistency, their outspoken opposition to abortion as the unjust taking of human life had to be matched by a defense of the innocents who would die in a nuclear exchange. The time being ripe, the bishops appointed a committee to prepare a pastoral letter on modern war, thereby initiating a slow, painstaking process during which the committee held fourteen meetings and met with strategic weapons experts, ethicists, and officials of the U.S. government. Pastoral letters such as this are published only occasionally and are disseminated to both laity and clergy. Their importance is derived in part