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The range and volume of pronouncements by the U.S. bishops on social issues have increased enormously in recent years. The bishops or their spokesmen have issued at least 200 statements since 1966, when the hierarchy reorganized itself into two bodies: the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, a strictly ecclesiastical body, and the U.S. Catholic Conference, the civic and service agency of the bishops. Depending on the issue, the bishops may sound like sanitized Moral Majoritarians or Kennedy Democrats. Besides familiar stands (for tuition tax credits to help private-school parents; against mercy killing, sleazy TV shows and the religious vacuum in public schools), the bishops have taken distinctly liberal stances on welfare, crime, prisons, housing, national health insurance, world food policy, South Africa and the Panama Canal treaty (the bishops were strongly influenced by calls of support from Archbishop Marcos McGrath of Panama City). The bishops have backed both Israel's right to exist and Palestinians' "right to a state."
Next year the bishops will take up a topic that is potentially as divisive as abortion or nuclear weaponry. A committee led by Milwaukee's Archbishop Weakland is conducting a thoroughgoing moral evaluation of capitalism. The bishops have already advocated the redistribution of economic wealth in the U.S., and have blamed Third World poverty on an exploitive U.S. economic policy and multinational corporations. Conservative critics find this an appallingly simplistic view of economic realities, amounting at best to a kind of global sentimentality and at worst to a repetition of left-wing propaganda platitudes. Last week, without specifically mentioning Reaganomics, a bishops' panel denounced "current policies which attempt to solve America's economic ills at the expense of the poor and unemployed."
As the bishops argue their case against nuclear arms in the months ahead, they will contend that this stance is consistent with the tradition of church teaching on war. Until the Bomb, Christianity's approach to war had remained fundamentally unchanged for centuries. The earliest Christians refused all military service because they thought Jesus' love-thy-neighbor teachings mandated pacifism, and because Rome required idolatrous vows. Christianity became an established religion in the 4th century and soon embraced St. Augustine's "just war" theory, expanded in later centuries by Thomas Aquinas and other theologians.
The traditional conditions for a morally justifiable war, which are generally accepted by non-Catholics as well as Catholics, are that it be declared by a legitimate authority, for a righteous cause, with good intention, as a last resort, and waged with limited means. The two criteria for conduct of a just war that are especially pertinent to today's nuclear debate are "discrimination" (no direct killing of innocent civilians) and "proportion" (a war's devastation must not exceed the evil it seeks to overcome). Nuclear pacifists argue that these two factors necessarily rule out atomic warfare.
In 1954 Pope Pius XII cautiously approved the use of atomic, bacteriological