The history of our nation and our allies over that same century is marked by a willingness, even a commitment to liberating people of other nations from these murderous ideologies and the tyrants who wield them. This has meant the twentieth was a century characterized by wars.
Looking back on the devastation and horror left by these wars, it is easy to imagine that an absence of war would have been preferable. However, that false and facile assertion would overlook the virtue of justice, which is rooted and revealed in human dignity, and ordered toward human thriving. A person, program, or practice that degrades or destroys human life is vicious, and people are bound to oppose it by the moral purpose that undergirds their dignity and ratifies their freedom. This opposition can take the form of war.
This is not to go so far as to embrace unqualified the nostalgic distinction applied to World War II as “the (last) good war.” Everybody can agree National Socialism was evil, though we lack a similar catchphrase to explain the fight against Japan. But the United States and her allies in that mortal struggle were fighting a true just war. Sadly, even this did not excuse the men and women who served and sacrificed from the moral peril of all who fight even, and especially, for a good and just cause.
Some of the best literature of the second half of the century deals with the moral damage done to good people who did horrible things to other people for very good reasons. In fact, their very goodness, that is, their strong moral character, made it harder for them to accept not only what they did that hurt or killed other people, but also what they intended or even desired while they did it.
To oversimplify the conundrum, we can use a handier, domestic scenario. A young man with a gun prepares to kill a person in the store he is robbing; a responding police officer shoots and kills the young man to prevent the murder. The officer’s goal was to save the life of the bystander; the consequence, not the goal, was the death of the robber. That intention justifies the act, and makes the officer’s action not merely excusable, but in fact laudable – that is necessary, and good. Despite this, it takes a toll on the officer, who does not desire death for any other living being.
The danger of war, indeed greater in a war for a just cause, is that those prosecuting the fight be moved not only by the desire to prevent evil – murderous, aggrandizing tyranny – but by desire for the death of the enemy and individual people in its service. To desire the death of another person is more than a step beyond desiring to stop an evil action; it is a grave sin. While in wartime it is understandable how a good man give in to such bad intentions, nonetheless the grave sin damages the soul of that man to lasting effect. That moral damage is a common, even social phenomenon in post-war America.
The gravest danger of righteous combat, a danger greater than injury or even death, is that it can lead a virtuous person to desire the elimination of another person.
And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. (Matthew 10:28)
Look at a photo of Nagasaki or Hiroshima after the bomb, and realize the damage was more grievous in the soul of a plumber from Pittsburgh, devoted husband and father, who desired the annihilation of not even all, but any of those Japanese people. It is hard to picture, isn’t it, that with all those corpses, all those destroyed homes and cities, all the wounded and widowed and orphaned, all those resources poured into death and destruction rather than life and prosperity, the greatest devastation can occur invisibly in the conscience and soul of a human being?
That war, and those events, are eighty long years ago, and precious few who were engaged in it walk among us this day. Yet the selfsame danger remains and stalks every citizen of this prosperous nation.
Possibly because of our prosperity, perhaps because our enemies are so distant as to be abstract, we are vulnerable to the grave danger of the sin that can kill our souls: to persuade ourselves, or be persuaded, that things would be better, our lives would be better, the world would be better, if another person would cease to exist.
The language of our public discourse and the terminology of our political speech has veered dangerously and almost entirely into these categories and characterizations. Words from the mouths of persons we once looked to for insight, sobriety, and sense – newscasters, legislators, leaders, and candidates – has degenerated into vitriol and accusation, and not merely suggestion but assertion that the very existence of a person or group is a mortal threat.
Casual conversation among people who consider themselves responsible and reasonable has degraded to include expressing desire for the death of a detested person as blithely as the desire for another glass of water. That desire itself, for the elimination of an inconvenient or interfering human life, brings the hand of death to the soul of the one who freely holds it.
Rallies and jingoism, shouting and salutes are not the only stimulants of this willing embrace of death as a solution. Doctors and scientists, professors and pundits can make it seem as reasonable to desire the destruction of another person or group as if they were invaders or attackers.
Beware, my people, what attitudes you allow yourself to embrace and make your own from voices speaking calmly and invoking sweet reason. They are the most deadly poison.
Today war is neither concept nor abstraction in several places and many human lives, and in those places, the combatants cause death and destruction while risking it and incurring it for themselves and their dear ones, in the pursuit of causes that can be sternly and correctly judged for rightness and justice. In our land, there is a different kind of combat among ideas and identities, waged with words and assertions that will have real consequences in the material reality of our nation. The enthusiasms we embrace, the desires we form, and the actions that follow from them, also will be sternly and correctly judged for rightness and justice, and their consequences will be just as real, and more lasting.
The demands, the offers, the expectations, and the actions thrust upon us or demanded of us in our country in these very days are drastic and divisive. They divide us not only from one another, but also from our own human dignity. In how you and I respond and act, the twenty-first century’s defining dynamic will be revealed, along with the course of our immortal souls. Lord have mercy.
Monsignor Smith
