CrossCurrents A Catholic Reflects on Faith in Our Times

CrossCurrents A Catholic Reflects on Faith in Our Times

Bernard F. Swain, Ph.D. www.CrossCurrents.us

When Will WE Ever Learn?

With age should come growth, and with growth, maturity. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work that way. Old memories can become timely and helpful – but only if we pay attention to them and learn from them. Sometimes, I fear we never learn from our past.

President Bush announced last week that U.S. troops will remain in Iraq as long as he remains President. That means, come 2008, our soldiers will still be there and Mr. Bush will pass the war-buck to his successor.

Bear with me, dear reader, for this news triggers a complicated recollection within me. I hope you’ll find my re-telling instructive.

I cringe to admit it, but 40 years ago this month I was packing for my freshman year of college. I still recall that amid the natural excitement was a general and growing anxiety (within my family but also among Americans in general and American Catholics in particular) about the war.

The voters had returned the President to office two years before, but the U.S. mission overseas was not going well. His party, long dominant in Congress, was worried about the mid-term election coming in November; they feared losing control of the House. It now appeared that troops would not be coming home anytime soon, despite the rising death toll and the growing sense that civil war might be unavoidable. Two years later a new president would be elected with a mandate to end the war – but it would drag on for seven long years after that.

By the time it finally ended I had earned my degree, finished a master’s degree, entered the work world, gotten married, gone back to school, and completed the course work for my doctorate!

During all those years in school I struggled to fit together my country’s war policy with my family’s Catholic faith. For the first couple of years in college, my views were based mainly on conventional politics: I was a Kennedy liberal, and then a Johnson liberal.

My home and parish life were both very Catholic, but it was a brand of Catholicism that stayed silent on the issue of war and peace (aside from a vague sense that the Church itself had sponsored the Crusades). Likewise with my Jesuit high school, which drilled us on distinguishing “direct venereal pleasure” from “indirect venereal pleasure” but said nothing about war and peace even as the first 125,000 troops landed in Vietnam starting my senior year.

Ironically it was my political science studies in college that finally connected me to my own faith tradition.

Reading political philosophers like Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke, I discovered notions like “general will” and “social contract” and “divine right.” Amid such abstractions I latched onto concrete concerns: troop levels were still going up in Vietnam, 20% of my classmates were in ROTC, and by our graduation seventeen alumni had already died in the war. No wonder war and military service and the draft and conscientious objection occupied my thinking.

Because so much antiwar protest focused on the morality of the Vietnam war, I soon found myself researching the “just war” theory. To my surprise, I found myself reading a 15^th century Spanish Dominican (De Vitoria), a 13^th century Italian Dominican (Aquinas), and a 5^th century African bishop (Augustine). I soon found, in fact, that the core thinking about “just war” had been, for more than 1500 years, a Catholic core.

This discovery had two effects. First, it radicalized my politics. Convinced the war in Vietnam fell short of traditional “just war” standards, I rapidly abandoned “liberal” perspectives and developed a more critical, sometimes even cynical review of U.S. government and policy. In short, I joined the counter-culture. When the Chicago Police rioted against demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in August, 1968, I was through with conventional party politics.

Second, the discovery of a “Catholic core” on war ethics refocused my faith. I had always been active in my parish (as altar server, lector, commentator, CYO President) but until then my faith remained a routine component of a conventional life. Now I began to see faith as a distinct way of viewing the world, as an alternative value system that called all the conventional wisdom of the status quo into question. I began to regard Catholic tradition as a source of wisdom that I needed to make sense of my world of my life.

As a senior, I organized a hunger fast to protest U.S. war policy, and felt enormously gratified when our college president (Raymond Swords, SJ) took the podium at the city’s largest antiwar rally to proclaim that, as scholar and Catholic and priest, he felt conscience-bound to denounce the war as unjust precisely for its failure to meet the standards for a just war set by Catholic social doctrine!

The moral of my story is this: by then I was 21, and this socially-conscious focus on my faith was both new and somewhat accidental. Twenty years of Catholic upbringing and education had not prepared my faith to shape my personal responses to the political and social controversies over time.

This begs the question: why had no one ever told me that this is what faith is supposed to do? Why had I not heard of the rich tradition of Catholic social wisdom – not only on war and peace, but on economic justice and violence and third world development and immigration and nuclear weapons and human rights? Why had faith been explained only as a private benefit, leaving out its impact on the world beyond me?

Why had all my formation (the Baltimore Catechism, the CCD, the high school and college religion classes) left out the social wisdom of the church? And if I had only learned this wisdom because I stumbled on it at random, what about other Catholics? Were they too left in the dark, to fend off the confusing and controversial events today without the benefits of faith’s wisdom? Were most Catholics living with half a faith?

Today these questions plague me still. We seem to be repeating ourselves.

Once again we have a war gone bad, another President passing the bring-the-troops-home buck to his successor, another election fought over ending the war. How many Catholics know enough about their own faith to make sense of this? Not many, judging by my own experience: whenever I speak on the “Just War” teachings of the Church, people routinely ask, “Why didn’t anyone ever tell us about this?”

At my college baccalaureate, with many alumni already dead and hundreds of classmates facing combat duty, we all sang Pete Seeger’s famous song about the loss of innocence, love, youth, and life in the face of war, “Where have All the Flowers Gone?” The chorus line is, of course, the haunting question about those who send young boys to die in needless war, “When well they ever learn?”

Now, a generation later and facing another seemingly endless war, I wonder again: When Will WE Ever Learn?

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com

Dr. Swain’s opinions do not represent the views of this parish or any other official body.

Bernie Swain has devoted more than 30 years to adult spiritual formation in dioceses in the US, Canada, and France. Since 1991 he has maintained a private practice as trainer, teacher, and consultant to leaders in parishes and other religious organizations. He holds degrees in theology and political science from Holy Cross, Harvard, The University of Paris, and The University of Chicago.

His writings include Liberating Leadership (Harper & Row, 1986) and more than 200 articles in periodicals such as The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, The Miami Herald, The Catholic Free Press, The Pilot, Harvard Theological Review, and Liturgy.

A lifelong layperson, he lives in Boston with his wife and three children. Visit his website at:

http://www.CrossCurrents.us

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