Deliver Us from Evil

The Pope’s Christmas message for 2003 contained the following prayer to Jesus, whose birth brought the great promise, “Peace on earth”:

Save us from the great evils which rend humanity
in these first years of the third millennium.
Save us from the wars and armed conflicts
which lay waste whole areas of the world,
from the scourge of terrorism
and from the many forms of violence
which assail the weak and the vulnerable.
Save us from discouragement
as we face the paths to peace,
difficult paths indeed, yet possible and therefore necessary;
paths which are always and everywhere urgent,
especially in the Land where You were born,
the Prince of Peace

The pope’s prayer is both poignant and practical: poignant in noting the irony that, even in the place of Jesus birth, the promise of that birth remains unfulfilled; practical in acknowledging at once the difficulty and the necessity of the “paths to peace.”

Last week’s CrossCurrents ended with a list of “peace lessons” drawn from 2003, which help spell out those difficult necessary paths. I included my own reflections on the first two lessons (“We must get real: do we really want ‘Peace on Earth’?” and “Destroying evil is not the way to peace.”). This week I offer the rest of my thoughts, to aid your own New Year’s reflections on peace.

3. Victory does not bring Peace. The “post-victory” scene in Iraq is proof positive that the US Bishops were right when they said (in their 1983 document “The Challenge of Peace”) that peace is not merely the absence of conflict. Any married couple knows the difference between an armed truce and real peace. US victory can instill fear in our enemies, but it cannot stop the hate that made them our enemies in the first place. Until the underlying causes of conflict are addressed, we will be free to argue whether to call the aftermath insurgency or resistance or terrorism or something else—but we will not be able to call it peace. So our true banner cannot be “To get Peace, make War”; it must be the words of Paul VI: “if you want peace, defend life.”

4. To understand peace, we must understand conflict. This is actually an older lesson from the Vietnam era. My grade-school teachers peddled the notion that America’s goodness was proven by the fact that we had never lost a war. Then Vietnam came along. Although many Americans resisted the truth, the lesson of Vietnam was obvious: some conflicts cannot be solved by military means. The conflict in Vietnam was about nationalism and self-determination in a postcolonial world, and those were cultural and political problems that no amount of military intervention could solve. The conflict now is a clash of cultural traditions in a world where Moslems and Christians and Jews must learn to cooperate. Our armies can occupy territories, and our weapons can and do achieve mass destruction, and we can even eliminate leaders who oppose us. But bombing and invasion and occupation cannot dissolve the hatred we face. Using war to solve these conflicts is like bleeding patients to cure their illness—it is an outmoded tool rooted in ignorance and fear, and unworthy of modern civilized life. Modern conflicts demand modern solutions, and fortunately the tools of international relations—organizations like the UN, systems like international law, institutions like the World Court and the International Criminal Court, even modern diplomatic techniques and communications—offer us peaceful options better suited to the conflicts we face.

5. Might does not make Right—or Peace. The US has arrived at the kind of total military dominance that Hitler once had over Europe and Rome once had over the ancient world (that dominance accounts, of course, for the capture and execution of Jesus). So we can impose our will almost anywhere, coddling tyrants like Saddam when they please us, and eliminating them once their usefulness ends. Even bad polices can have some good results, of course (like Saddam's capture), but the solid rock of Catholic moral teaching is “the ends do not justify the means.” To paraphrase the proverb, all our good intentions merely pave the road to hell. Only our best moral practices can pave the road to peace—for however mighty our weapons makes us, they do not make us any better.

6. Even when you win, war means “failure.” The Catholic “Just War” theory (repeatedly invoked by our government about the invasion of Iraq) says war can only be justified as a last resort. So any decision to go to war is a public declaration that all peaceful resolutions have failed. And even a “justified” war can fail morally, if its damage outweighs its intended good. Iraq is a perfect case in point: US soldiers dying to destroy weapons that don’t exist; up to 10,000 civilians killed (mostly women and children), a country in chaos and near-anarchy, most of our allies alienated and distrustful, the entire Middle-East destabilized as Iraq becomes a magnet for new terror attacks. All these bad results come with victory. So this war, like so many before, began and ends in failures.

7. The only real victory is defeating war. Evil men like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Suharto, Milosovic come and go. But weapons of mass destruction remain—not in Iraq, to be sure, but in the US, Britain, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, France, India, North and South Korea. Empires rise and fall. “Isms” like fascism and communism appear and disappear on the world stage. Evil wears many and varied masks, but the one constant is war itself, which is as old as history and more durable than any country, empire, system, or culture. As the man says in the film Usual Suspects, “The devil’s greatest trick is to make people believe he doesn’t exist.” When Saddam was caught, millions were pleased to see the end of their enemy. But how many don’t even believe in the real enemy—an enemy still on the loose? The real enemy, of course, is war itself. Thomas Merton was right: as long as war exists we will never feel safe:

Unless war is abolished the world will remain constantly in a state of madness and desperation in which, because of the immense destructive power of modern weapons, the danger of catastrophe will be imminent and probable at every moment everywhere.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whom we defeat. It doesn’t even matter who wins. Every time war breaks out, peace loses and war wins. So far in human history, war is our undefeated enemy. Our real victory will be ending war itself.

8. To get peace, our faith must pass the test. St. John tells us “God is Love,” and we believe no power is greater than God’s, that nothing is impossible for God. The whole message of the gospels rests on the rock-solid conviction that love is the strongest force in creation—that, in fact, love can conquer all. But this implies, as an article of our faith, that love is stronger than violence—that love can conquer violence. Do we really believe that? We know that history is full of war because history is a long record of humans failing to love. But Jesus promised “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” Not some serene eternity in heaven, but a concrete, historical “Pacem in Terris”—Peace on Earth! This means our faith calls us to believe that humans can harness love as the “weapon” of reconciliation even for conflicts among nations. The idea that “sometimes war is necessary” means either that we have failed God’s love once again, or that we don’t really believe Jesus’ promise. Until our faith in love is strong enough, we will never conquer war. And until we conquer war, “Peace on Earth” will remain the unfulfilled promise of Christmas.

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com