Thursday, 06 August 2009
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Dropping the bomb
In response to Travis's post today remembering Hiroshima, here is a story.
Father George Zabelka was the Catholic chaplain to the Catholic pilot who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. Ater many years and much work with ecumenical councils, Father Zabelka reflected on his part in the war.
For the first three centuries, the three centuries closest to Christ, the Church was a pacifist Church. With Constantine the church accepted the pagan Roman ethic of a just war and slowly began to involve its membership in mass slaughter, first for the state and later for the faith.Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants, whatever other differences they may have had on theological esoterica, all agreed that Jesus’ clear and unambiguous teaching on the rejection of violence and on love of enemies was not to be taken seriously. And so each of the major branches of Christianity by different theological methods modified our Lord’s teaching in these matters until all three were able to do what Jesus rejected, that is, take an eye for an eye, slaughter, maim, torture.
It seems a "sign" to me that seventeen hundred years of Christian terror and slaughter should arrive at August 9, 1945 when Catholics dropped the A-Bomb on top of the largest and first Catholic city in Japan. One would have thought that I, as a Catholic priest, would have spoken out against the atomic bombing of nuns. (Three orders of Catholic sisters were destroyed in Nagasaki that day.) One would have thought that I would have suggested that as a minimal standard of Catholic morality, Catholics shouldn’t bomb Catholic children. I didn’t.
I, like that Catholic pilot of the Nagasaki plane, was heir to a Christianity that had for seventeen hundred years engaged in revenge, murder, torture, the pursuit of power and prerogative and violence, all in the name of our Lord.
I walked through the ruins of Nagasaki right after the war and visited the place where once stood the Urakami Cathedral. I picked up a piece of a censer from the rubble. When I look at it today I pray God forgives us for how we have distorted Christ’s teaching and destroyed His world by the distortion of that teaching. I was the Catholic chaplain who was there when this grotesque process, which began with Constantine, reached its lowest point – so far.
Elsewhere, Father Zabelkas came with strong words for ecumenical councils, warning that
It is about time for the Church and its leadership in all denominations to get down on its knees and repent of this misrepresentation of Christ’s words.
Communion with Christ cannot be established on disobedience to His clearest teachings. Jesus authorized none of His followers to substitute violence for love; not me, not you, not Jimmy Carter, not the pope, not a Vatican council, nor even an ecumenical council.
Sadly, I am afraid that the church has gained too much power, and will never willingly follow its lord in letting it go.
-NDSR
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Comments (38)
::sighs::
It's posts like this that give me that niggling reminder that I am not yet at peace with my former Christian self, and that are painful in their acknowledgment that maybe you CAN have both.
It's not that I think that you have to be Christian to attain salvation, or that I miss being one, so much as that I wish I could pull myself between birth and twenty aside and say, "There's a better way to go about this, okay?" And I don't ever know if I will be okay with Christianity, not because I have a problem with all Christians, but because I realize that I rejected what was a fundamentally warped interpretation of the belief system in the first place.
Wow. That is incredibly powerful to think about.
Nick Don, your site wants me to find a foreign bride. Frankly, that's weird on several levels.
In other news, go here. I think you would like it - especially the part on the Left Behind series, since you don't strike me as particularly premillenial dispensationalist in personal theology.
Because we all know that not a single Catholic or Christian died in Pearl Harbor
It's real easy to sit here and point fingers at people and say what they did wrong, but I never see you offer any alternative solutions.
Whoa.
@radicalramblings - You cannot condemn someone for pointing out what is clearly wrong even if they don't tell you what is right. Especially in the case with something as clearly and horrifically wrong as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were the only attacks with nuclear weapons in history thus far and the world has managed not to screw up quite that badly since. I think the alternative is the one we're living right now.
@striemmy - You mean the one that certainly isn't killing any innocent women and children in Iraq? Got it.
@radicalramblings - I meant the one that isn't indiscriminately killing hundreds of thousands of people in one fell swoop and turning the blast zone into a nuclear waste facility for the remaining half life of the materials used in the bomb. I didn't say this was the right way. I merely said this is a better alternative to hitching an atom bomb up on a plane, flying it over there, and bombing everyone with a turban on back to the stone age.
@striemmy - I know. Because it is far better to indiscriminately kill a few generations of people, slowly, over time, ensuring that everyone who doesn't die hates us and perpetuates the war for the next few thousand years. That's bound to cost less in terms of human life, over the long run. Makes perfect sense.
@radicalramblings - I get where you're going with this but you're totally discounting the affect that time has on a situation. The total civilian body count for Iraq still clocks in at just under 102,000 and that's over the course of almost a decade now. Nagasaki, which happened instantaneously, still has that figure beat by 10,000 and that's not counting the tens of thousands that died after the initial blast. If you took the death toll for every war in human history it probably doesn't look so bad because it's over the entire course of human history. If you took that same number and it was the death toll for a detonation of the largest nuclear explosive device on the planet, not counting after blast casualties, I'm sure that number would seem a great deal more horrific.
So, yes, I'm saying that that scenario is still better than whiping out that many lives instantaneously. People die and people are born every day and the numbers are all pretty mundane. However, I'm fairly certain that at no other time in human history have so many people been taken out of existence in an instant then by the cause of atom bomb.
Once again, I'm not saying either of them are right. I'm saying that in the case of a species such as ours that is cyclical and renews it's population by way of procreation over time, that war over time is less devastating than an A-bomb. And so far, the world agrees with me. There are sitll wars being fought. Do you see any other A-bombs being dropped?
But if we're going to walk this path, then I'll bring your own words and concepts to the fore.
"It's real easy to sit here and point fingers
at people and say what they did wrong, but I never see you offer any
alternative solutions."
The good but hopelessly deluded priest leaves out the facts that America would never have entered the war if Japan hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor and the decision to enter the war was a political, not religious decision. Roosevelt and most Americans wanted nothing to do with foreign wars.
A couple of points of inconsistency.
1) American is not a Christian nation until someone wants to degrade it.
2) Protestants have little use for the beliefs of Catholics in general priests in particular until they can find one wacko that supports their opinion.
This post is intellectually dishonest in the most horrid of fashions.
@SirNickDon - I'm not sure what intellectual dishonest you're seeing.
We destroyed more with conventional bombing than with nukes.
Using the Bomb saved a million American lives it is estimated. The number of Japanese lives saved was incalculable. The Bomb forced the Japanese surrender and removed the need for a full scale invasion.
@fallingraindrop - Yeah, a thorough-going just-war analysis would condemn saturation bombing and fire bombing as well. More diedin both the fire-bombing of Dresden and of Tokyo than in both atomic detonations combined. I'm definitely not arguing that only nuclear bombing is problematic for Christians. Even proponents of just-war have to evaluate most every engagement in WWII as falling short of the criteria.
Both classical just-war advocates (the official Roman Catholic position) and pacifists hold to the line that it's unacceptable to sacrifice even a handful for civilian lives to save soldiers' lives in the long-run. Even just-war policy calls for sacrifice and faith.
Even if the atomic bomb was a pragmatic move (and it may or may not have been), it falls well outside established lines for Roman Catholic support, and I would argue scripturally for Christian support in general. Christians are not called to pragmatism, but to follow Jesus.
@fallingraindrop - That's the second time you've accidentally commented from your other account. Be careful.
That's a very cool story about your education. If I had anything like those kind of resources, I would raise my children the same way. I'm already suspicious of public education, and that sounds like a perfect alternative.
I think you make a good point about WWII transcending the concerns of just-war policy. I've been saying for a while now that while WWII fails by just-war criteria, it makes for a good modern crusade. I find it heavily ironic that liberal democracies like America religiously condemn the Christian Crusade to defend Christendom and liberate Jerusalem but lionize the secular crusade to defend democracy and liberate the Jews. An interesting secular religion we've developed.
Again, I'm not saying whether the decision to drop the bomb was wrong or right, but I'm certain it's incompatible with the ministry of the church, and Christians who are consistent with the way of Christ should not be supportive of it.
@SirNickDon - This is MY account! We've had exchanges before on pacificism. I've been trying to be a good grrrlll and stay away. But the way you wrap your obscene philosophies and ideas around Christianity is unbearable. If I post you, please have the descency to reply back to me at my account!
This is a solid post
I have read stories of Catholics and others who became bright and shining lights among men. George Zabelka is one of them. If Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life, why don't we act like it?
I very much like your post here. I've never read much of what Zabelka said after the bombing of Nagasaki. Very interesting.
@SirNickDon - Again, I'm not saying whether the decision to drop the bomb was wrong or right, but I'm certain it's incompatible with the ministry of the church, and Christians who are consistent with the way of Christ should not be supportive of it.
Well, you should be able to say whether dropping the bomb was right or wrong. You have morals don't you? Our beliefs and ethic determine right and wrong. If you say you can't determine whether the dropping the bomb was right or wrong then you have no ethics.
Your lack of ethics is reflected in your totally impotent response to the limits of pacificism. Your final bottom line was "let God decide."
That sort of retreat from responsibility is what gives Christianity such a bad name in the modern world. Whenever a tough choice confronts us those with your outlook simply say, "Let us leave it in the hands of God."
We have too much potency as human beings created in God's image and there is simply too much knowledge and wisdom derived from human history to claim impotence.
@fallingraindrop - Don't underestimate the complexities of ethical decision-making. Remember how they teach ethics courses at universities. They explain that there are two basic schools of thought - deontology and utilitarianism - then they present a moral dilemma to test which side you fall into. So a group of spelunkers are exiting a cave, but the first one through is too hefty and gets stuck. Then the group realizes the water in the cave is rising rapidly, and they're all going to drown if they can't get fatty through the hole, but he'll be okay because his head is outside the cave and his body is plugging it up.
Then they realize they have a dry match and dynamite, and just enough time to blow the entrance. If they do that, it'll kill fatty, but the rest of them will live. Otherwise fatty will survive but all the rest of the group will drown. So the deontologists say, "You can never commit an act of evil that a good result might accrue," but the utilitarians argue, "You have to do the greatest good for the greatest number, blow fatty out of the cave." And that's how we teach ethics.
Sometimes it's a situation of a train about to run over five people tied to a track, but you have the ability to throw a fat person onto the track to save the other five. Do you do it?
(I'm not sure why we're always killing the overweight in our moral dilemmas, but that's how it goes I guess.)
So, sure, I can see arguments for and against dropping the bomb. I have my perspective on it while someone from another school of philosophy has his, and I'm by no means certain which one of us is objectively right, if that language can even be fairly used. But I am certain that Christians are not called to either deontology or utilitarianism, but to follow Christ, and for us "ethics" is actually ecclesiology, where we become a cross-shaped people, learning what it is to be ethical by imitating the master rather than by any cost-benefit analysis of given situations.
Atomic weapons - right or wrong - are not for the church. We just need to get on with the business of loving our enemies and offering them food and drink in Jesus' name.
@SirNickDon - Don't underestimate the complexities of ethical decision-making. Remember how they teach ethics courses at universities.
I think what the university does is an injustice. Absolute principles make arriving at a bottom line decision much easier to arrive at.
There is no need for complexity.
@fallingraindrop - Do you work from a single-absolute system, such as situation ethics? If not, what do you do when two absolutes come into conflict? It's complex thinking required in the face of a complex situation?
@SirNickDon - If not, what do you do when two absolutes come into conflict?
In reality, how can two absolutes come into conflict? Could you please provide some examples? This sounds extravagantly interesting.
@fallingraindrop - Most Christian thinkers follow Augustine in taking truth-telling to be a moral absolute. Augustine was very insistent about the point, and considered it a sin to lie even to save a life, yet today, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust, most Christians would say that saving a life is an absolute that carries more weight than truth-telling.
@SirNickDon - most Christians would say that saving a life is an absolute that carries more weight than truth-telling.
But what most Christians would say is not an absolute. Absolutes come from God.
@fallingraindrop - So which of the two is not an absolute command?