All things flee thee for thou fleest Me
(Rev.) Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
It has been this author’s experience for over seventy-eight years of Catholic Christian life and for over fifty years of teaching that any rigorous critique of the moral validity of Christian Just War Theory (CJWT), is not only not respected in the Churches but is actually systematically pushed out of the ordinary catechetical and pastoral ministries of the Churches. All informed discussion of the possibly fundamental moral illegitimacy of CJWT is almost universally ignored in the catechesis of the Churches from pre-school to adult continuing education. Those Christians who hold economic, political, catechetical and coercive power in the Churches calculatingly and continuously brush off the concerns addressed in this book as unworthy of moral consideration. Marginalization by trivialization is the standing order of the day in most Churches where the incompatibility between following Jesus and engaging in war is the issue. It has been this author’s experience for over seventy-eight years of Catholic Christian life and for over fifty years of teaching that any rigorous critique of the moral validity of Christian Just War Theory (CJWT), is not only not respected in the Churches but is actually systematically pushed out of the ordinary catechetical and pastoral ministries of the Churches. All informed discussion of the possibly fundamental moral illegitimacy of CJWT is almost universally ignored in the catechesis of the Churches from pre-school to adult continuing education. Those Christians who hold economic, political, catechetical and coercive power in the Churches calculatingly and continuously brush off the concerns addressed in this book as unworthy of moral consideration. Marginalization by trivialization is the standing order of the day in most Churches where the incompatibility between following Jesus and engaging in war is the issue.However, you my reader, unlike the vast majority of Christians who have ever lived, can read. You can read what Jesus says and does. You can read what every micro-act of violence in war causes within its victim and its executioner. You can read about what war really is and how wars are really started, as opposed to the illusions and lies that the political and religious propagandists for war calculatingly offer up as truth for mass consumption. You can then ask yourself in the chamber of your own conscience—where you are alone before God—if what these Christian Just War Theories demand and permit in thought, word and deed, are compatible with what Jesus morally permits, indeed with what He imperatively commands, for those who call Him “Lord.” The secondary purpose of this book is to supply you with an acute and relentless critique of CJWT and its dreadful implications and consequences for Christians, their Churches and for all humanity. Its primary purpose is to invalidate forever CJWT as a theological and moral option in a Christian’s life and in the life of the Churches. Just War Theories have existed for over 2000 years. They did not, however, contaminate Christianity until more than three hundred years after Jesus’ Resurrection. Ambrose and Augustine first brought them into the Church. In fairness it must be acknowledged that by the time these two politically powerful bishops released the perpetually-mutating moral virus of CJWT into the Christian community, the Church had, by its choices in favor of acquiring wealth and political power, lost just about all of the spiritual immune system that had protected it for three centuries from the moral pathogen of “righteous” homicidal violence. Over the last 1700 years no effective method has been found to restore the Church’s spiritual immune system against the diseases of “holy homicide” and “ justified Christian homicidal enmity.” If anything, the Church’s immune system against this spiritual pandemic has, by this Third Millennium, completely collapsed. Today, no form of state homicidal violence and no amount of state homicidal violence is beyond the Church’s ability to tolerate, to justify and to allow its membership to execute. The essays in this book are concerned with Christian Just War Theories, not with just war theories in general. These essays are ordered with a logic that is the fruit of teaching this subject for over fifty years. While each essay is understandable in itself, accepting the order in which they are presented should enhance the reader’s understanding of each individually as well as understanding the integral unity of each to all. While none of these reflections is more difficult to read than the editorial page of a newspaper, all should be read with a pencil in hand. The old dictum, Studium sine stilo somnium est, “To study without a pencil is sleep,” is à propos here, because the content of each reflection will ultimately be mirrored in the content of all other reflections.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
Christian Just War Theory: The Logic of Deceit, Third Edition
(Rev.) Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
It has been this author’s experience for over seventy-eight years of Catholic Christian life and for over fifty years of teaching that any rigorous critique of the moral validity of Christian Just War Theory (CJWT), is not only not respected in the Churches but is actually systematically pushed out of the ordinary catechetical and pastoral ministries of the Churches. All informed discussion of the possibly fundamental moral illegitimacy of CJWT is almost universally ignored in the catechesis of the Churches from pre-school to adult continuing education. Those Christians who hold economic, political, catechetical and coercive power in the Churches calculatingly and continuously brush off the concerns addressed in this book as unworthy of moral consideration. Marginalization by trivialization is the standing order of the day in most Churches where the incompatibility between following Jesus and engaging in war is the issue. However, you my reader, unlike the vast majority of Christians who have ever lived, can read. You can read what Jesus says and does. You can read what every micro-act of violence in war causes within its victim and its executioner. You can read about what war really is and how wars are really started, as opposed to the illusions and lies that the political and religious propagandists for war calculatingly offer up as truth for mass consumption. You can then ask yourself in the chamber of your own conscience—where you are alone before God—if what these Christian Just War Theories demand and permit in thought, word and deed, are compatible with what Jesus morally permits, indeed with what He imperatively commands, for those who call Him “Lord.” The secondary purpose of this book is to supply you with an acute and relentless critique of CJWT and its dreadful implications and consequences for Christians, their Churches and for all humanity. Its primary purpose is to invalidate forever CJWT as a theological and moral option in a Christian’s life and in the life of the Churches. Just War Theories have existed for over 2000 years. They did not, however, contaminate Christianity until more than three hundred years after Jesus’ Resurrection. Ambrose and Augustine first brought them into the Church. In fairness it must be acknowledged that by the time these two politically powerful bishops released the perpetually-mutating moral virus of CJWT into the Christian community, the Church had, by its choices in favor of acquiring wealth and political power, lost just about all of the spiritual immune system that had protected it for three centuries from the moral pathogen of “righteous” homicidal violence. Over the last 1700 years no effective method has been found to restore the Church’s spiritual immune system against the diseases of “holy homicide” and “ justified Christian homicidal enmity.” If anything, the Church’s immune system against this spiritual pandemic has, by this Third Millennium, completely collapsed. Today, no form of state homicidal violence and no amount of state homicidal violence is beyond the Church’s ability to tolerate, to justify and to allow its membership to execute. The essays in this book are concerned with Christian Just War Theories, not with just war theories in general. These essays are ordered with a logic that is the fruit of teaching this subject for over fifty years. While each essay is understandable in itself, accepting the order in which they are presented should enhance the reader’s understanding of each individually as well as understanding the integral unity of each to all. While none of these reflections is more difficult to read than the editorial page of a newspaper, all should be read with a pencil in hand. The old dictum, Studium sine stilo somnium est, “To study without a pencil is sleep,” is à propos here, because the content of each reflection will ultimately be mirrored in the content of all other reflections.
Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love
(Rev.) Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
This booklet contains personally assimilable and livable meditations on specific dimensions of Christ’s Nonviolent Love as he endures each of the 14 stations of the cross, emerging finally at 15th station, the Resurrection, having conquered evil and death.
In addition to a new cover, a color mosaic for each station has been added to accentuate the substance of each of the meditations. It is hoped that these meditations will help nourish the understanding that the Christian cannot desire freedom from the cross of Nonviolent Love because the Christian has been specifically chosen to reveal the power of the cross Christlike Love.
Nonviolent Love belongs to the mystery of the Redeemer and redemption. The test is whether one shares in that mystery…Christ has shown that nonviolence is strength. The effectiveness of nonviolence is ultimately the open tomb.
Fr. Bernard Häring,
The Healing Power of Peace & Nonviolence
The War in Iraq and the Requirement of Moral Certainty
(Rev.) Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
Recognizing that Catholic Just War Theory as well as Catholic Moral Theology have a certain amount of practical elasticity built into them, nevertheless, this can be stretched to the moral breaking point. That point has been passed long, long ago in relation to this War on Iraq. The past four years of dead silence as death madly rampages through Iraq is false witness on a grand scale by the U.S. Catholic Episcopacy. False witness to what? False witness to the Gospel and to the most fundamental and well-established tenents of the Catholic moral tradition. Emotionally a person could experience this War as morally repugnant, but this is not what I am speaking about. I am speaking about the public dismissal, the undermining and the bracketing out of incontestable norms of Catholic moral truth. Silence is a moral choice. Silence that implies to the average person moral acceptability is an even more serious moral decision. Silence by the official moral teachers in a diocese or Church where ordinary folks need and depend on these men for the proper orientation of their souls toward God in order to travel along the authentic path (Way) to salvation is a most serious form of pastoral neglect, especially where the destruction and mutilation of human life is involved.
My judgment is that the U.S. Catholic Episcopacy can “get away” with their calculated silence because most Catholics have not been taught, regardless of their level of education, e.g., Catholic University graduates, the spiritual seriousness and the cognitive truths that govern the application of Catholic Just War Theory and Catholic Moral Theology. This booklet is an attempt to open up this failure to consideration, as well as, to give concrete examples from the present and the past of the pastoral and personal tragedies that occur when Catholics are nurtured in utterly inadequate or outright erroneous understandings of Catholic Moral Theology and Just War Theory.