Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
Recent E-Letters have been filled with upbeat news about Church leadership. I don't know what's come over me, printing stuff like that when there are so many unhappy things to write about. At this rate I'll be expelled from the Curmudgeon's Club.
The next story is likely to make my expulsion all but certain, because it is about a kind of priest you will be seeing more of, perhaps even in your own parish.
I balance things out a bit with the second story, which has to do with the "good guys" (which is to say our side) forgetting a basic moral principle during wartime.
MEET YOUR FUTURE PRIEST
The "Los Angeles Times" carried an article titled "A New Breed of Priest." It looked chiefly at Fr. Marcos Gonzalez, who "wears hip wraparound sunglasses with an old-fashioned cassock." Last year, at an assembly of priests of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, some priests spoke in favor of optional celibacy. Gonzalez's response: He booed!
"In premarital counseling, he tells couples to remain chaste until marriage, plunging into delicate territory some priests prefer to avoid. Gonzalez also believes artificial birth control and gay sex are always a sin and opposes women's ordination."
An old fogey priest? Not hardly. Gonzalez, the associate pastor at St. Andrew Church in Pasadena, is 41. Recently he spoke to three classes of St. Andrew students, holding them "spellbound during a pitch promoting the virtues of religious life. With candor and humor, he chronicled dramatic days of literally dealing with the lives and deaths of parishioners, answered questions about sex with aplomb, and proclaimed that his was the best job in the world. 'If I had ten different lifetimes, I would choose every one to be a priest,' he told the students."
Wanna bet that some of those students will enter the religious life?
Gonzalez attended St. John's Seminary in Camarillo, entering after high school. "The experience, he said, was filled with conflict." I can imagine it was. "His class of about four dozen men, mostly conservative, challenged the more liberal faculty. The young seminarians asked for uniforms [I think the writer means they wanted to wear cassocks or at least clerical blacks instead of just regular street clothes], more discipline, and more group devotions such as the rosary."
Gonzalez said, "The faculty gave the perception that they were suspicious of this Pope and that somehow he was turning the clock back. We were perceived to be in line with the Pope, so we were also viewed with suspicion." Eventually the tension became too much for Gonzalez. He left the seminary for a few years, returning in 1991. He found the instruction more balanced by that time. He was ordained in 1994.
[I spoke at St. John's in 1997, as one of four speakers in a lecture series on apologetics. (My talk appears as a chapter in my book "Nothing But the Truth.") It was clear to me that nearly all of the faculty members still were liberal, though there were a few exceptions, and that the students were almost uniformly not liberal. I was not surprised that the faculty was not especially pleased with my presentation, but the students seemed to lap it up.]
Msgr. Tobias English is of a different generation. He was ordained in 1963 and also resides at St. Andrew Church. When he gives premarital counseling, he mentions the Church's teaching on premarital sexual relations and on birth control, but, unlike Gonzalez, he does not ask the couples whether they are living chastely. "No way. I think that's an invasion of privacy of the highest level. Their conscience is their guide." The result, I'm sure, is that couples he counsels are not as well prepared, intellectually and spiritually, as those counseled by Gonzalez.
The younger priest doesn't hesitate to speak plainly about the Church's teaching. He thinks it is his task to help guide his flock morally, and that means asking questions, not unlike what he would do in the confessional, and he is not afraid to bring up controversial topics in his homilies.
"Ann Durrel, a St. Andrew parishioner since 1955, says she was 'startled and very gratified' when Gonzalez gave a passionate homily against abortion and artificial birth control several months ago. 'The older priests seem to slip aside and not mention these things in their homilies,' Duffel said, 'but Fr. Gonzalez is not afraid to speak out.'"
Marcos Gonzalez is at ease with his priesthood and with the Church he serves. He is not the only one of his kind. Far from it--he is representative of the younger generation of priests. You can expect to be seeing priests like him soon in your own neighborhood.
AN UNHAPPY ANNIVERSAY
Unless you are a World War II history buff, you probably do not recall the name of Charles W. Sweeney, who died on July 16 at the age of 84. He had finished his Army career as a major general, but he became famous while a major for piloting the plane the dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. That was on August 9, 1945.
Sweeney's obituary explained that "At 11:01 a.m., the pumpkin-shaped bomb called Fat Man was dropped on the industrial city of Nagasaki, killing and wounding tens of thousands, heavily damaging a steelworks and arms plant, and demolishing an estimated 14,000 residential buildings."
In a ghostwritten autobiography published in 1997, Sweeney said, "I took no pride or pleasure then, nor do I take any now, in the brutality of war, whether suffered by my people or those of another nation. Every life is precious. But I felt no remorse or guilt that I had bombed the city." Those who should have felt remorse and guilt, said Sweeney, were the Japanese leaders who brought the war upon their own people.
Many justify the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by saying the abrupt end to the war saved as many as a million American lives that would have been lost had Japan been invaded. I don't know where the figure of one million came from. My understanding is that the War Department estimated a maximum of 46,000 casualties in an invasion. That was a worst-case scenario, meaning the likely number of casualties would have been far lower.
Some commentators have argued that no invasion was needed at all, since Japan no longer had an air force or navy and had no domestic source of oil for its industries. A blockade would have resulted in the Japanese war machine and economy grinding to a halt. The war thus could have ended without an invasion, though the end probably would have come long after the summer of 1945.
Be that as it may, what concerns me is the attitude, so prevalent among political conservatives (most of whom are religious conservatives), that there are no limits in defensive warfare: If the other guys started the fight, they deserve whatever they get. In a defensive war it is not a matter of "My country right or wrong" but of "My country can do no wrong," which is an odd thing coming from conservatives who, on domestic matters, can be highly critical of their government's moral failings (as regards abortion or homosexuality, say).
Catholic moral principles are easy to apply to other people, difficult to apply to ourselves. This is as true in public life as in private life. During World War II our enemies did atrocious things on the battlefield, to conquered nations, and even to their own people. Many of these evils we knew about during the war; others came to light only after the cessation of hostilities.
Even those evils we knew about during the war were so prevalent and so gross that, to many, it seemed permissible, for the duration, to lay aside a principle that we insisted be followed by our enemies: The end does not justify the means.
Rephrase that in Catholic terms: To achieve a good, you may not perform a sin. To provide your family financial security, you may not rob a bank. To protect your wife's health, you may not abort the child she is carrying. And to defeat an enemy in war, you may not violate just war principles. But we did--and more than once, sad to say.
The atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, like the fire bombings of Dresden and other German cities, cannot be squared with Catholic moral principles because the bombings deliberately targeted non-combatants. The evil done by our enemies did not exonerate us from the moral law. Their evils did not provide us justification for evils of our own. Being a Christian in peacetime is difficult; it is more difficult, but even more necessary, in wartime.
Fat Man exploded directly above the Catholic cathedral in Nagasaki. The city was the historical center of Catholicism in Japan and contained about a tenth of the entire Catholic population. The cathedral was filled with worshipers who had gathered to pray for a speedy and just end to the war. It is said their prayers included a petition to offer themselves, if God so willed it, in reparation for the evils perpetrated by their country.
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