Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T08:43:36.902Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Wars and Rumours of Wars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2024

Victor White O.P.
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

It is only right and proper in a world which seems to be going rapidly more and more insane that good Christians should make every effort to sound the recall to Reason. It is only our bare duty to reaffirm the elements and applications of the natural law in a world which seems to be becoming more and more insensible to the natural law. For this reason, it is impossible to over-estimate the debt we owe to those Catholic thinkers who have made it their task in recent years to re-state the natural ethics of war and peace and to apply it to modern conditions of international relationships and methods of warfare. It is salutary that the philosophia perennis of ends and means should be reasserted and applied realistically to new sets of facts such as aerial bombardment and bacteriological warfare, to the impending realities of war waged by the sovereign State conditioned by the exigencies of imperialistic capitalist economy.

Yet we shall be mistaken if, having done all these things, we imagine that we have done anything specifically Christian. We are perhaps too ready to call a Christian doctrine of war what are in fact only dictates of the natural reason. Grace does not destroy Nature; Revelation is not contrary to Reason. But the fact remains that we cannot give a distinctively Christian witness to the events in the world around us in terms solely of natural reason and natural law. Nor can I answer the burning question, ‘What am I as a Christian to do in the event of war?’ solely in terms of a natural ethic, however rigorous.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 20 , Issue 231 , June 1939 , pp. 403 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © 1939 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 The writer has chiefly in mind the attitude adopted at the time by the majority of non‐Catholic representatives of Christianity, for it was this that most affected British public opinion, and he has very little information regarding the attitude adopted towards it in Catholic pulpits and in the Catholic press of the time. Certain it is that Pope Benedict XV set a magnificent lead in recalling a mad world to a sense of sanity and justice; but it must be seriously doubted whether the Catholics of the belligerent countries followed his lead with the zeal and determination which it demanded. In any case, there would seem to be little reason for self‐congratulation: a Catholic, precisely because he is a member of a universal Church, has far less excuse for succumbing to an outlook of bigotted nationalism than has the adherent of a National Church brought up in the traditions of what Canon Storr has called with disarming frankness ‘our National and Imperial Christianity.’

2 In the righteous press of to‐day it would doubtless be denounced as cynical opportunism, as is the Holy See's rapid recognition of de facto conquests. In terms of a purely natural ethic it would be hard to defend; in religious terms which see the Hand of God, punishing and bringing good out of evil, and the purely relative importance of the determination of political forms to the promotion of the Kingdom of God, such conduct is seen to be governed by essentially Christian principles.