Nuclear Deterrence Morality: Atlantic Community Bishops in Tension

Abstract

CATHOLIC IT is NOT. Kaleidoscopic would be a more apt description of the state of official Catholic teaching on the morality of nuclear deterrence as it is being formulated among the bishops in Europe and North America for the guidance of their respective peoples, who have long been associated in the political and military structures of the Atlantic community. For a comparison of the official statements of the concerned episcopal conferences in the U.S.A., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands reveals a posture which is variegated and constantly changing. Since, however, this proliferation of magisterial initiatives is directly due to the renewed emphasis placed on episcopal collegiality by the Second Vatican Council, it would be most appropriate perhaps to describe the current state of church teaching on nuclear deterrence as conciliar and in that sense Catholic, if not catholic. The largely unnoticed tension presently being experienced between the national hierarchies of the nations of the Atlantic community is a result of the dynamics of a decentralized magisterium, which was one of the principal insights and achievements of Vatican II. It thus represents one of the first fruits of the Council in response to the central moral challenge of the era: nuclear deterrence and/or war. Since the potential fruitfulness of the present tension between the various hierarchies will depend to some extent on the ability of each national episcopal conference to understand and respond to the initiatives of all the others, it may be of service to offer here a catalogue of the official magisterial statements which will have appeared by midJune 1982. Following the survey of the present state of episcopal teaching on the topic, some brief explanatory hypotheses will be proposed as a possible contribution to mutual understanding among the episcopal bodies.