Religious Perspectives on the Nuclear Weapons Debate: Excerpts from the Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on War and Peace,Proposed Third Draft ∗

Abstract

In 1980, the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) established an ad hoc committee to prepare a pastoral letter on the topic of war and peace. The bishops’ intention was to develop a policy statement that responded to “the need for a theology of peace in the nuclear age.”

Between July 1981 and July 1982, the committee held fourteen meetings, at which it heard formal witnesses who had been selected to represent a spectrum of technical and theological views. Witnesses included officials such as Harold Brown, fames Schlesinger, and Herbert Scoville, theologians and ethicists such as Francis Winters, S.J., Ralph Potter, and Paul Ramsey, and specialists in arms control or conflict resolution, such as Gene Sharp and Roger Fisher. The committee also met with members of the current Administration, including the Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger.

Bruce Martin Russett, a political science professor at Yale University, was engaged as principal consultant for the letter. The committee staff were J. Bryan Hehir, Director of the Office of International Justice and Peace, U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC), and Edward Doherty, USCC advisor for political-military affairs.

The text of the third draft, issued in April 1983 and approved by the bishops, on 3 May 1983, focuses on the morality of the use of nuclear weapons in a first strike, the threat to use them, and their use as a deterrent to war, but it also includes discussions of the “just war” theory, nonviolence, and peacemaking. Viewed in the context of the traditional modes of accommodation between religion and the state, and in the light of contemporary disharmony between more fundamentalist sects and modern science, the document affords an interesting point for discussion of the moral bases of the uses of technology. More than simply a dogmatic statement of one religious organization, the pastoral letter represents a vigorous new current in moral discretion and responsibility.—Ed.