WAR, PEACE, AND THE CHURCH’SnTEACHING by Thomas MolnarnThe amazing thing about the nuclear debate and thenCathohc bishops’ participation in it is that the accumulatednwisdom and experience of mankind, as well as thenChurch’s pronouncements on peace and war, are so completelynignored. This is quite a natural phenomenon on thenpart of so many lay debaters: it belongs also to mankind’snexperience that in every age there are men who believe thatntheirs is a privileged moment of division in history: betweenna long but essentially unenlightened past and a bright andnrational future in which mankind will embrace full happinessnand harmony. The falsely wise man, whom I prefer toncall a “Utopian” and whom Mgr. Knox used to call ann”enthusiast,” believes that the times have somehow thick-nThomas Molnar is on the faculty at the City University ofnNew York and is a visiting professor of religious studies atnYale University.n221 CHRONICLES OF CULTUREnnnened during his own lifespan, and that history has undergonenan ontological transformation. He himself—a Hegel,na Marx, a Nietzsche—stands on the threshold of annew era into which it is given to him exclusively to peer,nprophet-like.nIt follows from such premises that the Utopian regardsnevents during his own lifetime as particularly dramatic,ngood or bad, but sufficiently so to start all men, or at least annelite, to think on different lines from the traditional course.nSuch a dramatic event, according to the false prophets, isntoday the military use of nuclear power, a gigantic misusenof human talents and abilities which will, however, introducenthe redemption of history from the greatest plaguenof all, war.nWar, the killing of men, is based not only on distrust, butnalso on the assumption that its destructiveness has alwaysnbeen limited by the imperfection of available weapons.nNow, however, says the Utopian, war has become qualitativelyndifferent from what it used to be: global, devastatingnpotentially the whole planet, murdering all men in onensingle apocalyptic blow. The whole matter must be rethought,nantiwar movements must be started everywhere,nhostility to nuclear wars, offensive or defensive, must bentaught in schools, parades of little children must be used,nalong with propaganda posters, to soften the statesmen’snhearts. By the same relentless propaganda, all men must benmade conscious that now is the time to end all wars, thatnthere is not a day to lose. A Harvard Law School professor,none Roger Fisher, who crisscrosses the planet teaching thentechniques of “conflict-solving” (if anything, by his primitivenarguments he sows the seeds of new ones), suggestednthat the heads of State of the two superpowers should bencompelled to kill an escort before pushing the button of thennuclear holocaust.nNow what is so strange in this whole thing is not thenpseudo-prophets’ alarm over new hardware: there werenthose who saw a threat to civilization when the crossbownwas invented, or gunpowder, the rapid-fire machine gun, orntoxic gases. Of course, potentially damaging inventionsnshould always be opposed—but not with apocalyptic arguments,nnot with a thesis that mankind’s fate is in thenbalance, that history may now turn from evil to goodness.nEven reputable philosophers have succumbed to this falsenvision: Immanuel Kant drew up a project-blueprint fornpermanent peace. The strangeness and novelty inhere innthe fact that we find bishops, entire episcopates, joining thenfalse prophets and adopting their faulty reasoning—as if thenChurch’s teaching were not available in order to put mattersnin perspective, to fight evil but without the naive, ideologicalnview that it can be uprooted by wishful thinking and annall-too-human manipulation.nAn entire sociological study would be needed to explainnwhy the American bishops have turned, roughly in onendecade, from one conformity to another—from a naivenbelief in “old” America: the America of businessmen, hardn