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Each year as August rolls around, the debate over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki rolls back around with it, and all the more so this year given the release of a major film, “Oppenheimer,” telling the complicated story of one of the main architects of that weapon. (Full disclosure: I don’t go to movies much and haven’t seen it.)
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Deacon Kyle Eller |
It’s telling that, as a society, we’re still debating the ethics of events that happened nearly 80 years ago, long before most of us were even born. In a way, it’s even more puzzling that people still debate about it within the church, given that the church’s magisterium has taught clearly and forcefully about it.
Among other statements, the fathers of the Second Vatican Council (cited in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2314) said, “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.”
The reason for this teaching is as clear as day. Targeting non-combatants in war is not only immoral, it’s a form of murder.
Yet, almost as if we’ve had something stuck in our teeth for 80 years, we can’t help ourselves poking and prodding at it — neither the society that largely accepts these bombings as what it calls a “necessary evil” nor members of the church that rightly condemns them as intrinsic evils. It keeps bothering us.
The terms “necessary evil” and “intrinsic evil” really get at the heart of why it still bothers us, I think, as they form a good stand-in for two irreconcilable ways of seeing the world morally.
The world looks at things through the lens of utilitarianism and consequentialism, big words that basically mean judging the morality of actions by our intentions and our best estimate of whether likely outcomes are better or worse than the alternatives. So when it comes to the bombings, the main argument you’ll hear in favor of them is that while the death and destruction were, of course, terrible, the loss of life in a full scale invasion would have been even worse.
In contrast to this, the Catholic view of morality is that we may never do evil that good may result, and there are things, like deliberately killing the innocent, that are so completely contrary to the law of God that nothing − no good intentions, no dire circumstances — can ever justify them. The view upheld by the church would respond to the consequentialist that even if we could know with certainty that those bombs saved lives in the long run, you still can’t deliberately bomb non-combatants.
One of the reasons this debate from 1945 keeps haunting us is that it we keep having it in new forms.
The debate over abortion echoes some of these themes, where the church again insists one cannot kill an innocent as a means to some good end, no matter how difficult the circumstances, and we must therefore find other, better ways to walk with mothers in need.
Early in this century, as the Global War on Terror unfolded in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, we had the debate again, this time centering on the intrinsic evil of torture. Consequentialists, their imaginations full of ticking time bombs fed more by TV shows than the actual work of interrogators, insisted we had to do “whatever is necessary” to get information out of people we believed were terrorists. Thus we embraced practices our country has signed treaties opposing, and still to this day it can be used as an applause line by certain political candidates. Meanwhile, the church continues to proclaim that you cannot ever justly torture a defenseless prisoner.
The same thing is now playing itself out in a direct way with euthanasia and assisted suicide, but in truth, it bubbles under the surface of a lot of our debates. I suspect a lot more Catholics would take Catholic social doctrine more seriously when it comes to things like the economy, care for creation, and immigration, were they not afraid that doing so might have bad consequences — that our economy might grow more slowly, that profits might be smaller, that we might have to live more simply and thoughtfully, and so on.
Perhaps we see this in our personal lives too. Is not a fear of unknown consequences a reason many resist being open to life in marriage? Is not a fear of loneliness a reason people struggle to accept the teaching of Jesus on divorce and remarriage?
What all this suggests to me is that at heart it’s a problem of faith. In other words, it suggests to me that we’re often tempted to doubt that God has really revealed himself and really commands us in ways that demand our obedience, such that we should have the courage to follow him even if it seems to lead to suffering.
Or perhaps we believe God has revealed these things, but we doubt his providence, doubt that he’s really present and will take care of us when we’re faithful to what he asks of us. When Jesus says to us in the Sermon on the Mount, “Make it your first care to find the kingdom of God, and his approval, and all these things shall be yours without the asking,” maybe we find it hard to trust in that promise.
And with that in mind, maybe the fact that this debate keeps cropping up in all these different circumstances is, in God’s providence, meant for us as an invitation to deeper faith and deeper trust in him.
Deacon Kyle Eller is editor of The Northern Cross. Reach him at [email protected].