Here is a news story that is 6 years old, reporting on events 55 years old. So why share it now?
During one of the discussion periods at our Bridgefolk conference in July, there was a question about the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and a comment about “liberals” and “conservatives.” I offered a further comment reminding the group that those standard labels can be surprisingly unreliable. To illustrate I mentioned the example of an influential cardinal and Vatican official who has a reputation as an ultraconservative. After all, he led a group of bishops at the Second Vatican Council that tried hardest to put a brake on the reforms we associate with the council. I could not remember his name, but I recalled that his support for the section of the Pastoral Constitution (Gaudium et spes) concerning war played a key role in garnering support for the council’s harsh judgment on modern war and groundbreaking support for pacifism as a legitimate option for Catholics.
The cardinal was Alfredo Ottaviani, and an account of his role and his reasons appeared in the magazine Salt of the Earth, published by the Claretians, who also publish U.S. Catholic. The article, by Tom Cornell, is entitled “How Catholics Began to Speak Their Peace.” It is available online at http://salt.claretianpubs.org/issues/chistory/peace.html. Opening paragraphs appear below.
How Catholics began
to speak their peace
Tom Cornell
Until the final session of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic peace movement faced two daunting, if not intractable, problems. First was the question of conscientious objection. Before the council, almost any priest, bishop, or theologian, asked whether a good Catholic could be a conscientious objector, would have answered no. If pressed about the fact that there were Catholic conscientious objectors, they would have said: “These men are mistaken. Catholics may not be conscientious objectors except by reason of invincible ignorance. As such they may be tolerated.”
However, a vigorous peace movement was impossible to envision without the idea of personal responsibility, especially in regard to one’s own participation in war.
The other major stumbling block to the growth of a Catholic peace movement was the question of disarmament as a moral imperative and, specifically, the question of the Bomb. Catholic moral theology had never denied a people the right to defend themselves or the means to do so. But the church had yet to come to terms with weapons of mass destruction. …
http://salt.claretianpubs.org/issues/chistory/peace.html to continue…