Some Thoughts About War

As I've mentioned before in a couple of other blogs, I'm helping facilitate another JustFaith group here at St. Bridget, a huge one of some 21 of us, half from a neighboring parish. The program doesn't try to cover every Catholic social justice topic, but it covers a lot of them over 30 weeks, with books, videos, guest speakers, and field trips (called "Border Crossings," because they take us into unfamiliar territory...).

We are just beginning our section on war/peace/nonviolence. One of the resources that we read from is Cloud of Witnesses -- I did a short review of it on Amazon.com. It's a collection of short biographies of people who lived a commitment to justice -- most of them not well-known to the average person, but all of them quite remarkable. It gives me hope, actually.

The person whose story we have assigned for this coming week is Rev. George Zabelka, a US Army Air Force chaplain during World War II for the 509th Composite Group. In other words, he was the priest for those who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The link provides an interview he gave to Fr. Charles McCarthy, entitled A Military Chaplain Repents. An excerpt:

Zabelka: Yes, I knew civilians were being destroyed, and knew it perhaps in a way others didn’t. Yet I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians to men who were doing it.

Q: Why not?

Zabelka: Because I was "brainwashed"! It never entered my mind to publicly protest the consequences of these massive air raids. I was told it was necessary; told openly by the military and told implicitly by my Church’s leadership. To the best of my knowledge no American cardinals or bishops were opposing these mass air raids. Silence in such matters, especially by a public body like the American bishops, is a stamp of approval.

The whole structure of the secular, religious, and military society told me clearly that it was all right to "let the Japs have it." God was on the side of my country. The Japanese were the enemy, and I was absolutely certain of my country’s and Church’s teaching about enemies; no erudite theological text was necessary to tell me. The day-in-day-out operation of the state and the Church between 1940 and 1945 spoke more clearly about Christian attitudes towards enemies and war than St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas ever could.

I was certain that this mass destruction was right, certain to the point that the question of its morality never seriously entered my mind. I was "brainwashed" not by force or torture but by my Church’s silence and wholehearted cooperation in thousands of little ways with the country’s war machine. Why, after I finished chaplaincy school at Harvard I had my military chalice officially blessed by the then Bishop Cushing of Boston. How much more clearly could the message be given? Indeed, I was "brainwashed"!

Q: So you feel that because you did not protest the morality of the bombing of other cities with their civilian populations, that somehow you are morally responsible for the dropping of the atomic bomb?

Zabelka: The facts are that seventy-five thousand people were burned to death in one evening of fire bombing over Tokyo. Hundreds of thousands were destroyed in Dresden, Hamburg, and Coventry by aerial bombing. The fact that forty-five thousand human beings were killed by one bomb over Nagasaki was new only to the extent that it was one bomb that did it.

To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and a priest as I see it. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened in and to a world and a Christian Church that had asked for it – that had prepared the moral consciousness of humanity to do and to justify the unthinkable. I am sure there are Church documents around someplace bemoaning civilian deaths in modern war, and I am sure those in power in the church will drag them out to show that it was giving moral leadership during World War II to its membership.

Well, I was there, and I’ll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere in the Church in relation to mass bombing of enemy civilians was totally indifferent, silent, and corrupt at best – at worst it was religiously supportive of these activities by blessing those who did them.

I say all this not to pass judgment on others, for I do not know their souls then or now. I say all this as one who was part of the so-called Christian leadership of the time. So you see, that is why I am not going to the day of judgment looking for justice in this matter. Mercy is my salvation.

I appreciated at the time our Catholic Church's opposition to the war in Iraq; but it was hardly a huge outcry. I can't see that it made much impression on the average person in the pew. I have to wonder... did the Church, at least in the U.S., "pull its punches" because much of the country was hungry for revenge? Certainly, even under "just war theory," going to war in Iraq couldn't be justified. There's nothing in our teaching that provides a rationale for "pre-emptive war."

And there's been very little said at all by the Church about the war in Afganistan -- at least not that I've noticed, and I try to keep my ear to the ground. I attended a CRS "webcast" a couple of months ago, which concluded that people would suffer more if the US pulled out, which is probably very true. CRS also recommended that any assistance to the people be directed through non-military channels, such as itself and other NGOs, because the military tended to use assistance to support individuals and groups for its own advantage rather than to really respond to the needs of the country as a whole. Maybe there's not much else to say... but I somehow feel that Jesus would have said more.