The Bishops Must Be Consistent : In keeping with its pro-life stance, the Catholic Church must also reject the ‘just war’ theory.

I write as a Catholic who has come to believe that taking of human life in all its forms, including war and capital punishment as well as abortion, is incompatible with the spirit and the teachings of Jesus Christ. This seems like a radical position, and indeed it is. But they didn’t crucify Jesus for being a moderate.

I believe, furthermore, that the crisis in the pro-life movement brought on by zealots who consider life so sacred that they’re willing to kill for it presents the American Catholic hierarchy with a golden opportunity to offer Christian witness.

Well and good that New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor has declared repeatedly: “If anyone has an urge to kill an abortionist, let him kill me instead.” Well and good that Alabama Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb suspended Father David Trosch, the priest who justifies the killing of abortionists. But something more, much more, is called for. If the bishops really intend to speak with moral authority, they must be consistent. They must renounce “just war” thinking and all its murderous corollaries. For this is the source of the zealots’ supposed authority to kill.

Lipscomb pronounced Trosch “as wrong as he can be” in using Catholic teaching to justify the killing of abortionists. I truly wish that were so, but, sadly enough, it’s the archbishop who is as wrong he can be, not the recalcitrant priest. Trosch has a solid, if bloody, tradition behind him, which, at its worst--and it’s usually been at its worst--has countenanced burning heretics at the stake and blessing the swords of those who slaughtered Muslims in Christ’s name.

A major endeavor, in fact, of moral theologians from the day that Constantine replaced the eagle with the cross on the standards of the legions but left the legionnaires their lances, swords and shields has been an attempt to extricate Christianity from the more awkward implications of Jesus’ notorious insistence on loving one’s enemies and his severe condemnation of the use of force. And once the theologians started allowing exceptions to Jesus’ law of love, no matter how circumscribed, there was no holding back the blood lust that rages in human nature. The ritualistic invoking of the “just war” theory was enough from then on to sanctify any horror. To take what is perhaps the most absurd and notorious example, French and German bishops sent young men off to slaughter one another in two world wars with the assurance that God was on their side.

When Martin Luther King Jr. remonstrated with black activists who wanted to use force that it would be wrong to do so, they responded that the United States was killing Vietnamese in the name of freedom, so what would be wrong with their killing a few of their white oppressors, if only to get their attention? The terrible logic of their argument struck home.

What King did then, the American Catholic hierarchy should ponder in their hearts. He made the fateful decision to come out against the war in Vietnam, a decision that alienated many of his supporters in high places, intensifying as it did the hostility against him.

As it happens, the American hierarchy professes to have a consistent pro-life policy, one called the “seamless garment.” In accordance with this doctrine, the bishops have duly called for the abolition of capital punishment. The only problem is that nobody knows about it. And why should they? There was no episcopal outcry in January when a man in Texas was executed when there was substantial doubt that he did what he was convicted of doing. It took the Vatican to protest.

Nor does it help that the bishops start to mumble and head for the exits every time a military crisis arises--coming out with a disapproval of the Vietnam War that was too little and too late, waffling over Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War, and remaining mute when Clinton chose to “send a message” to Saddam Hussein with the murderous rhetoric of cruise missiles.

The episcopal style, by choice, it seems, does not lend itself to shouting from the housetops no matter what Jesus might have commanded. The bishops don’t want the church dismissed as a sect. The bishops worry about their credibility and pay people like Hill & Knowlton millions to tell them what to do.

Jesus never worried about his credibility. If he had, of course, he might never have been crucified. But then we wouldn’t have any Christianity, would we? Or bishops.