A Challenge That Cannot Be Met
by Paul J. Griffiths

It is a quarter of a century since the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the US issued The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response. That pastoral letter offered, among other things, an application of just war doctrine to the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons that could render our planet lifelessly radioactive. It was composed in a world whose international politics had been largely ordered for the preceding forty years around the opposition between the USSR and the USA, an opposition that had by 1983 come to seem eternal and beyond the possibility of change.

The letter certainly envisaged no change in this ordering. And yet, in the two and a half decades since the letter's promulgation, that opposition effectively ceased to exist: the Berlin wall fell; the USSR disintegrated; new states emerged in Eastern Europe; Germany, astonishingly, was reunified; the European Union grew and emerged as a political and economic force of the same order as the USA; new and violent conflicts broke out at the edges of what had been the Soviet Empire, in Central Asia and Eastern Europe; apartheid ended in South Africa; sub-Saharan Africa became increasingly violent and chaotic; radical Islamic movements began to make their presence violently felt; China, after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, became capitalist without becoming democratic; and the victory of US-style, post-Fordist, democratic capitalism over Russian- or Chinese- or Korean-style charismatic state socialism, while apparently complete, issued in a new and violent expansionism aimed at burning off cultural nuance in the name of the free flow of capital. The two nuclear giants bestriding the earth threatening destruction with nuclear firebolts became a single hydra-headed bearer of the gifts of democratic capitalism, ceaselessly at war with those who refuse those gifts. The chiaroscuro of the new world-order, in endlessly subtle shades of currency-green, is shot through with bolts of blood red

These political changes, radical as they are, mean that The Challenge of Peace reads like a document from a different world. It is not that nuclear weapons have gone away: there are almost as many as there were in 1983. Neither is it that the letter's argument that just war theory changes its complexion in a world where the principal weapons of war can bring all life to an end has been shown to be wrong: that argument is in my judgment profoundly right. But it is that the document's diagnosis and prognosis is antique, as detached from the geopolitical realities we face as would be an analysis of the European scene as though the Holy Roman Empire still existed. This is not a criticism of the work the bishops did in the early 1980s. But observing it has a number of lessons to teach, among which I'll identify two.

The first is that the Church is in the same position as everyone else with respect to geopolitical prognosis. That position is one of almost-total ignorance: there is no such thing as expertise in this. Deep-dyed Sovietologists and Kremlinologists almost to a person failed to predict the break-up of the Soviet Union; Islamologists and obsessive observers of the Islamic world failed to predict the emergence of al-Qaeda, the results of the failed Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the increasing use of murderous self-martyrdom as an instrument of political pressure, and so on and so on. The prognostic parts of The Challenge of Peace are not worth the paper they were written on, and they share this worthlessness with the prognostications of political and academic experts. Learning this lesson well provides a guide for thought, which, paraphrasing David Hume, may be put thus: the extent to which a document contains geopolitical prognostication is the extent to which it should be consigned to the flames.

That first lesson is skeptical, and it is important. The second lesson is quite the opposite: it is a lesson about certainty. We Catholics, because of our understanding of the brokenness of the world that cannot be repaired by us, can be quite certain that the awe-inspiringly dreadful situation (the threat of universal and certain destruction as a standard instrument of foreign policy) addressed by the 1983 letter cannot improve—not, at least, until the parousia and the final establishment of the peacable kingdom, whose coming is not in our power. The human world is, as it always has been, one of blood and death, of constant war in which the poorest and least powerful suffer most directly and without cease. The prediction that this will continue is certainly true. All that changes is the texture of the arrangements that make it possible and nurture it. The blood of those violently killed saturates the earth: with every step we take it bubbles up around our feet. There is no end to it, no pause in it; there is only more of the same, of evisceration by knife, of dismemberment by explosion, of choking by the rope, of poison-produced agony.

The challenge of peace is not one we can meet. But it is one we can respond to with the only tools at our disposal: lament; prayer; fasting; and action to oppose the violent shedding of blood with the certain knowledge that such bloodshed will continue unabated no matter what we do. These responses are, in the language of the letter, fundamental moral choices. But unless they are framed by the joint skepticism and certainty I've recommended, and in that way separated from the hopelessly self-deceiving thought that we can make things better, even these responses will become sub-Christian, instrumental interventions that will contribute to the flow of blood.