His God Is Marching On
If you relied on wire service accounts, Catholic commentary, and the few snippets of video on the evening news, you can be forgiven for believing that the White House Welcoming Ceremony held for Pope Benedict XVI on April 16 was entirely "warm," "friendly," and marked by "mutual admiration and respect."
But beneath the surface, the waters weren't so calm, as anyone who watched the entire ceremony, listened closely to President Bush's speech, and paid attention to the symbolism knows.
True, the President praised the Holy Father's commitment to life, his embrace of "a culture of justice and truth," and his proper understanding of liberty as entailing responsibilities as well as freedoms.
The shadow of the Iraq war hung over the festivities, however. President Bush had sought the approval of Pope John Paul II in the run-up to the war in 2002 and 2003, and he had been disappointed when Benedict's predecessor spoke out strongly against the war. Cardinal Ratzinger himself had made it clear after the war had started that "reasons sufficient for unleashing a war against Iraq did not exist," and that a preemptive war could never be a just war.
Five years after the start of the war, President Bush might simply have refrained from any reference to it, but, for whatever reason, he could not bring himself to do so. Ironically, he began his remarks with a reference to Saint Augustine, usually regarded as the first expositor of Christian just-war theory. He quickly moved on, though, to describe America as "a nation of compassion," and his description of what such compassion entails included a veiled reference to the war:
Each day across the world the United States is working to eradicate disease, alleviate poverty, promote peace and bring the light of hope to places still mired in the darkness of tyranny and despair.
The fact that Saddam Hussein's "tyranny" was used to justify "regime change" by force of arms leaves little doubt about what President Bush was referring to, and the smile that Pope Benedict had been sporting disappeared from his face.
Interestingly, the Holy Father's remarks, prepared in advance, read at points as if they were a direct response to President Bush. Stressing the link between freedom and the moral order, which "calls for the cultivation of virtue, self-discipline, sacrifice for the common good, and a sense of responsibility towards the less fortunate," Pope Benedict invoked George Washington's Farewell Address:
Democracy can only flourish, as your founding fathers realized, when political leaders and those whom they represent are guided by truth and bring the wisdom born of firm moral principle to decisions affecting the life and future of the nation.
Those decisions include not only domestic but foreign policy:
For well over a century, the United States of America has played an important role in the international community. . . . I am confident that this concern for the greater human family will continue to find expression in support for the patient efforts of international diplomacy to resolve conflicts and promote progress.
President Bush, however, would have the final word, as the U.S. Army Chorus chimed in in support of his vision that compassion can be spread at the point of a sword. The decision to perform "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" for a religious leader known as a man of peace, one who has stated that he chose the name "Benedict" in part in emulation of Benedict XV, who campaigned unstintingly for peace during World War I, was odd enough. Set aside Julia Ward Howe's Unitarianism, which leads to serious theological errors in the verses; set aside even the role that the Battle Hymn played in stoking the fires of fratricide. Focus, instead, on the symbolism at an event in which the President of the United States has justified an unjust war in the name of "compassion."
And then watch the video of the performance. Observe the arrangement of the song: When the Army Chorus reaches the third verse ("In the beauty of the lilies"), the tempo is slowed, the dynamics soften—all fairly traditional, though exaggerated on this occasion. To what purpose? To heighten the effect when, after the words "As He died to make men holy," the Army Chorus abruptly picks up the pace and drives home, in staccato beats, each word rising to a higher pitch, the final lines of that verse: "LET. US. DIE. TO. MAKE. MEN. FREE."
"While God is marching on," indeed. But the look of bewilderment that had settled on the Holy Father's face at the beginning of the Battle Hymn changes so abruptly at that moment to a look of pain that one wonders whether he was asking himself just who that god might be. And the fact that Pope Benedict rises as quickly as he can—even before President Bush does—to leave the stage and head into the White House speaks volumes.
On occasion, here and elsewhere, I have described President Bush as a nationalist, and I'm almost always taken to task immediately by those who argue that nationalism simply means the defense of the nation-state. President Bush cannot be a nationalist, they argue, because he has no qualms about the destruction of the American, the shipping of U.S. jobs overseas, the tearing down of what remains of our borders, the demographic transformation of the United States.
While it's true that many people who are concerned about these issues identify themselves as nationalists, historically nationalism has signified something else: an abstract commitment to a nation that isn't necessarily concerned with the well-being of a particular people in a particular place (traditionally denoted as patriotism). For a century, American nationalists such as President Bush have been committed to an idea of America that has little or nothing to do with the actual lives of actual Americans (much less the land on which they live), and everything to do with America as a "proposition" or "credal nation," which can accept all people as part of itself, while spreading what is "essential" to the nation (the proposition or creed) to populations abroad.
In President Bush's case, even more strongly than in the case of, say, Woodrow Wilson, this abstract nationalism has been bound up with the conviction that he, like President Lincoln, can discern God's Will. His continued commitment to the war in Iraq is not mere stubbornness; it reflects his sense that "a nation of compassion" does the work of God by "bring[ing] the light of hope to places still mired in the darkness of tyranny and despair." As he sends men to "die to make men free," his god is marching on.
Pope Benedict, who came of age under the rule of a man with a similar conviction of his (to borrow a phrase from Mel Bradford) "prophetic, teleological task," undoubtedly sees parallels between Hitler's national god and Bush's.
What he does not see is the Prince of Peace—the true God Who did not die merely to "make men holy" but died and rose again to offer men the true freedom that comes from taking up their cross and following Him.
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I often think that abstraction is the whole problem with "Yankeedom" (can I use that word?), beginning back with the Puritans. It is a way of not facing real consequences, what things really amount to. Dealing with the suffering of humans remotely is visible in the excessively proscriptive moral codes of some colonial New England communities, in the slave-trade, the predatory economic system that was built on that, the fascination with Socialism to trample on the freedom of everybody, and the eagerness for the super-state which must by definition be remote from the people it rules and the consequences to them. I must also agree that Lincoln's and Bush's remoteness from responsibility is the mark of a sociopath.
#100:
Well, he could have have *believed* that he was on God's side, without claiming to "know" it. Which is about where his words put him, and I don't see anything in his actions inconsistent with that positioning.
What, in the end result, would be the difference between him 'believing' he was on Gods side without claiming to 'know' it, and him actually thinking he 'knew' it? How would it have made any substantial difference in his actions? Either way, he would have been a deluded madman.
His very intention was to imply, without actually being so brazen as to say it, that we was, in fact, on God's side. After all, he didn't want people to think he was a megalomaniac, or religious nutcase, which in fact he was not. You are mincing words here and refusing to see what is right before your eyes, that he was a cold manipulator and demagogue, given to clothing evil deeds with seemingly noble sentiments and ideals, often in pseudo-religious garb. That's one of the marks of a sociopath.
I think that the difference is critical. One ought to behave in a way that one believes to be consistent with the Divine will, if one believes in God. However, one ought not to be too certain of how God would have us deal with our contemporary political issues. (Or so it seems to me.) While I think some revision of the Lincoln hagiographies is in order, particularly to explore the extent to which his goal of preserving the Union could have been advanced without war by a more skillful politician, it overbalances things to cast him as a sociopath. Unless you consider many or most national leaders to be sociopaths (which is a plausible position, but undermines the word's bite), neither Lincoln's goal of preserving the federal union he was handed, nor his tactic of resorting to arms to do so, seems so out of the mainstream as to support that charge.
As Mel Bradford pointed out, Lincoln's rhetoric was in a mode of "speaking for the gods." He was not merely submitting to God but presuming to speak for Him.
After reading most of the previous responses, I've concluded the following:
1. The Catholics who agree with Richert's piece do not give a damn about defending the innocent, unless those innocent happen to be in one of three "politically correct" categories: the unborn, immigrants or sex cells, which happen to reflect the more esoteric aspects of their "moral theology."
2. Those same Catholics are not only fundamentally ignorant of the values on which this nation was founded, but they profoundly resent those values because they have a closer connection to Protestantism than Catholicism (though, on close examination, they're more connected to British Common Law and the ideas of Locke than any Protestant theology).
3. Those same Catholics are so infatuated with esoteric arguments that they refuse to look at the practical consequences of their arguments and their positions. They criticize Lincoln yet fail to realize that Lincoln not only tried to preserve the Union but, in the end, defeated a grotesque moral evil, slavery. Would any of you self-satisfied, self-absorbed Catholics prefer that slavery exist in roughly one-third of this nation?
Moreover, all this talk about JPII and "just war" is nothing but poofery. JPII's attitude toward Islam was one of fundamental appeasement. He did nothing to help Catholics in communion with Rome who are oppressed by Muslims.
Consider the following passages, first from The New Republic upon JPII's death:
Muslim leaders are widely reported to be mourning the death of the Pope...In the midst of all these tributes, however, one thing has been lost: When it came to the Middle East, Pope John Paul II largely failed to promote social justice and religious freedom. His political strategy in the region was in many ways the very opposite of his political strategy in Eastern Europe. The Pope took a hard line against communist governments, but in the Middle East, his strategy was too often one of appeasement--not only toward authoritarian regimes but also toward powerful religious-political movements that preach intolerance toward minorities. Partly as a result, the percentage of Christians in the population of many Middle Eastern countries continued its precipitous decline over the past three decades. Ironically, the Muslim Middle East grew more religiously homogenous and less tolerant at the same time as the Christian West was growing more religiously diverse.
It's impossible to know for sure why so many Islamist leaders and Arab heads of state were so generous in their praise of John Paul this week. But here's one theory: They liked him because he didn't hold them to the same standards to which he held Poland's Wojciech Jaruzelski and the USSR's Mikhail Gorbachev. They liked him because whereas he successfully fought for religious freedom, equality, and social justice in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East he did not.
Dialogue, not the moral stridency with which he so frequently spoke about other issues, was the Pope's modus operandi when it came to the Middle East. And so rather than take Arab and Islamist leaders to task for their shared role in creating a climate that was hostile to Arab Christians, the Church too often placed the lion's share of the blame on Israel. Why have Arab Christians left Palestinian territories? According to the Catholic Near East Welfare Association ("a papal agency for humanitarian and pastoral support"), "The principal reason for the dramatic rise in Christian emigration has been the continuing Israeli military occupation and the denial of the sovereignty of a Palestinian state wherein Christian Arabs could feel at home economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually." And why have Arab Christians left Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon? Under the section heading, "Christian Emigration from Jordan," the group writes that "Students of migratory phenomena have pinpointed a series of factors, which have triggered or accelerated" the trend of Christians leaving Jordan and other Arab countries. The first item: The "Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has continued unabated since 1948." What you won't find in any of these reports is the frankness of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, who retired in late 2003 after serving the Pope as Foreign Minister for 13 years. He told Reuters, "There are too many majority Muslim countries where non-Muslims are second-class citizens"; and he singled out "the extreme case of Saudi Arabia, where freedom of religion is violated absolutely--no Christian churches and a ban on celebrating Mass, even in a private home. Just like Muslims can build their houses of prayer anywhere in the world, the faithful of other religions should be able to do so as well."
Perhaps the best-known example of the Pope's appeasement strategy in the Middle East came in 2001, when he met with Syrian president Bashar Assad and top Muslim clerics in Syria. At the time, an Arab journalist reported on the speech Assad gave in the Pope's presence:
Assad pointed to the atrocities that the Israelis in Palestine are perpetrating and the perpetual aggression that they are carrying out on the Islamic and Christian holy places in an attempt to kill all the principles of the divine religions, with the same mentality by which [they perpetrated] the treachery against Christ, and his torture, and similarly did they attempt to double-cross the prophet Muhammad, peace and blessing be upon him.
The Pope turned the other cheek at Assad's nod to old-fashioned "Christ-killer" rhetoric, and was subsequently treated to another lecture on the Palestinian cause from Syrian Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro during his visit to the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. The fact that the Pope was made to listen to the central message of Arab-Islamist populism was Syria's way of saying, We are in the driver's seat today--not the Pope. When it came to relations between the Catholic Church and Arab and Islamist leaders during the last 25 years, that too often seemed to be the case.
Now from Italy's L'Espresso:
But when, on the ruins of the Soviet empire, the United States asserted itself as the sole worldwide superpower, John Paul II became a realist again. He put up direct opposition against the war of 1990-91 conducted by the United States and its allies against Iraq, in spite of the fact that it had UN approval and was intended to restore legitimate sovereignty to an invaded state, Kuwait. Among the “interests” motivating the pope’s opposition, the first was the defense of the Christian minority in Iraq. Another was the rejection of a new world order under an unbounded American hegemony (see John Paul II’s speech to the diplomatic corps on January 12, 1991). Yet another was the proposition of establishing a relationship, not of conflict, but of dialogue between the Church and the Muslim world, analogous to the one established with the Soviet bloc during the years of Ostpolitik.
In effect, during the years that followed, the Holy See would protect its overtures of dialogue with the Muslim world through a general silence on the aggressions coming from that world, even when these struck Christians. It would not hesitate to make occasional alliances – for example, at the UN conference in Cairo in 1994, against the legitimization and encouragement of abortion – with Muslim governments that are clamorously oppressive of fundamental human liberties and rights. In obedience to realism, the papacy would even undergo humiliations: as at the mosque of Damascus in 2001, when John Paul II had to stand by silently while the Syrian president involved him in an intolerable anti-Jewish invective.
In short, I would rather have a President who takes the risk to protect Americans and defend the innocent than a Pope (even an allegedly "great" Pope) who disguises his appeasement of evil and his geopolitical agenda in flowerly language.
Joseph D'Hippolito (@106):
1. The Catholics who agree with Richert’s piece do not give a damn about defending the innocent, unless those innocent happen to be in one of three “politically correct” categories: the unborn, immigrants or sex cells, which happen to reflect the more esoteric aspects of their “moral theology.”
You forgot the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi Christians who have been forced to leave their homes, their homeland, and, if they have remained, have been threatened with death if they did not apostatize--and, in all too many cases, have seen the threat become reality. All, of course, because the United States has been so devoted to "defending the innocent."
Of course, those who believe that the United States can do no wrong always seem to forget about those Christians.
As for point 2, clearly you're not familiar with anything I've written, including the piece you pretend to respond to.
As for point 3, if you wish to construct a straw man, you might try to create a more convincing one. Seriously--who do you expect to believe that anyone involved in this discussion "fail[s] to realize that Lincoln . . . tried to preserve the Union"? That would seem to be at least one main point of the debate, would it not?
You forgot the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi Christians who have been forced to leave their homes, their homeland, and, if they have remained, have been threatened with death if they did not apostatize–and, in all too many cases, have seen the threat become reality. All, of course, because the United States has been so devoted to “defending the innocent.”
Scott, who is seriously responsible for that situation? The Americans, who are trying to create an ethic in which the rights of religious minorities are protected? Or the Muslims, who intend to enslave everyone they convert and murder those they can't?
Moreover, where were you when Saddam was putting political prisoners into wood-chopping machines and dropping chemical weapons on people? Do you seriously believe that Kurds, Shiites and political prisoners were the only victims? Are you that naive?
You and your fellow "paleo-cons" don't give a damn about the Iraqi Christians, except as a convenient foil for your own philosophical agenda. For that matter, neither did Rome under JPII. What did he ever do for them? Did he ever fight for them? When has Holy Mother (Dominatrix) Church ever fought for them since the Crusades?
I've noticed that you didn't reply to my comments about JPII. That's because they are true.
As far as Points 2 and 3 are concerned, I don't have to be intimately familiar with everything you have written. In reading between the lines of your post, you demonstrate yourself to be one of those types who ignores overall moral success to pick nits. However Lincoln framed the rhetoric of his second inaugural address, his was a foresighted attempt to attempt to reunify a nation ravaged by civil war. If he had not been assassinated, Reconstruction might have gone differently, since Lincoln might well have been the only man with enough political capital to keep the Radical Republicans in check.
Furthermore, I'm not one of those who believes that the United States can do no wrong; history judges otherwise. OTOH, neither am I one of those who believes that the United States can do no right -- unlike you and your ideological fellow traveller, Buchanan.
Finally, your critique of the words "As he died to make men holy" shows blatant ignorance of the fundamental necessity of blood atonement. Throughout Scripture, God has revealed the moral necessity of blood atonement for redemption. Not only do the the Mosaic Law's regulations concerning ritualistic sacrifice make this clear, but so does much of Scripture before the revelations of Sinai. God's clothing of Adam and Eve in animal skins before expelling them from Eden shows that one's sin affects other innocent individuals. Abel's acceptable sacrifice demonstrated that he knew (unlike Cain) the necessity of blood atonement for even approaching God.
If blood atonement were unnecessary, then no Christian could claim that Christ fulfilled the Mosaic Law's regulations on that point. The entire Epistle to the Hebrews would be utter nonsense.
You might criticize me as a blatant fundamentalist but whether the passages in question are literal, allegorical, metaphorical or anything else is irrelevant. What is relevant is the message they portray about God's personality, morals, character and demands for humanity -- and humanity's response to God.