Conscience Emergent

Extract

It is not often in this country that the official or semi-official Catholic line on controversial questions receives the close attention devoted to it in Mr Walter Stein’s formidable article in the November Blackfriars. Its subject (the reader will recall) was nuclear weapons and the morality of their possession and use. There-may-well-exist-possible-lawful-targets; We-should-leave-it-to-our-governments-and-experts: H-bombs-are-just-the-counters-of-diplomacy; Possessing-them–is–only–an–occasion–of–sin–which–a–good–intention–could–render-remote; Do-not-we-need-an-up-to-date-ethics-of-bluffing ?

Any-how-was-Hiroshima-so-very-different-from-Dresden? All these recent instances of casuistry (when the need was for witness) inside and outside of the Council, on the part of prelates, theologians and editors, were patiently examined by Mr Stein; and he had no difficulty in showing their ‘appalling irrelevance’ in face of the ‘massively murderous commitments here and now’, the existence of which all the Catholic nuclear apologists admit though boggling at the idea that Christians should do anything practical about the situation beyond favouring disarmament by general consent. It is all very criminal and crazy (say our official Catholic representatives in effect) but there is nothing that a Christian can do about it beyond what any atheist or communist can do and is indeed doing already.

If that is the situation at least for us in Britain and U.S.A., the question arises urgently: why the boggling? Why have Catholics become so helplessly habituated to what our critic calls a falsely-prudent ‘legalist lifemanship’, a ‘diet of casuistic pusillanimities’? One tempting explanation might be a kind of irresponsibility; a serious layman might imagine he saw in the clergy (high or low) an inability to face realities, an almost charming immaturity as of schoolboys who do not grow up, for whom loyalties mean more than truth or justice.