Deliver Us from Evil

The 60^th anniversary of D-Day is upon us, complete with parades and speeches and TV specials, the commemoration of the new World War II Memorial in Washington, DC. and the gathering of world leaders in Normandy to honor those who died in the Landing that began the end of World War II.

In Normandy, Jacques Chirac promises that “France will never forget what it owes to America, our oldest friend,” and George Bush declares, “We would do it again for our friends.” For one day at least, current differences do not matter.

Brokaw is once again spotlighted for his book, The Greatest Generation, about the depression kids who came of age in history's most massive military conflict. And Studs Terkel lives on yet again as people pin his pet label on WWII, calling it “The Good War.”

For Catholics, this celebration of national character and patriotic values poses a very practical test of our faith identity. In times past, the Catholic Church proclaimed its belief in “good wars”—wars fought for a cause so worthy, so just, so sacred, it made fighting a virtue no matter what else happened. These wars were, of course, the Crusades, declared against European heretics and Holy Land “Infidels” between the 11^th and 16^th centuries. Even after these official crusades ended, European wars often carried the symbolic mantle of “Holy War” even without the Church's official blessing.

But the carnage of Europe’s wars of religion, especially wars between Catholics and Protestants, altered both the landscape and the thinking of Catholic Europe. The Just War Theory, dating from the 5^th century and still evolving after 1500 years of refinement, overtook Holy War as the norm for Catholic thinking. And the theory of “just war” required more than a good cause: it required meeting several conditions to justify going to war (“ius ad bellum”), and more conditions to be met during the conduct of a war (“ius in bello”).

Behind this shift lay a premise about war that has become basic to Catholic identity: war is never good. It may be justifiable, it may be necessary, it may be unavoidable, it may even be the occasion for acts of great bravery, courage, sacrifice, and heroism, like the Normandy Landings—but war itself is never a good thing.

Americans are easily seduced, I suspect, by the idea of World War II as “The Good War.” Presumably, that is why George Bush’s Memorial Day address compared the Iraq war to WWII—to confer on our recent invasion and occupation a kind of “virtue by association.” After all, WW II mobilized and united the entire country, and 16 million Americans served in the war, and our enemies seemed to embody pure evil and our victory was total and the heroism of our troops was an inspiration to an entire generation. We elected our wartime President four times and then we elected his Vice-President and then we elected the very Commander-in-Chief who oversaw D-Day and then we elected a PT-Boat hero and by the time we finished electing WWII veterans (former combat pilot George H. W. Bush) we’d already been through three more major wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.

Once people compared the 9/11 attacks to Pearl Harbor, the War on Terror became our next “Good War,” our new “Holy War,” where the cause justified anything we might do. But, as tempting as it is to see WW II as the moral standard for all other wars, we should look past the mythmaking and flag waving and consider the darker facts about the moral toll of WWII.

First, consider the scale of combat deaths. The heroic sacrifice of 400,000 Americans was real enough, but paled next to 13 million dead Soviet troops, 3.5 million Chinese soldiers lost, or even the 3.5 million Germans and 1.7 million Japanese who died.

Next, consider the civilian losses. Of the 55 million who died in WWII, more than half –30 million dead—were civilians, mostly women and children. (Note: this does not include the 6+ million, mostly Jews, exterminated in Hitler’s death camps). The number of US civilian losses was negligible.

Think of it: 30 million civilians! Can we really think of this as “collateral damage?” Perhaps we prefer not to think of it at all. It is common among Americans, for example, to depict the French as cowards who did not fight—yet, despite surrender, more than 610,000 French died in WWII. In fact, French civilian deaths (360,000) outnumbered American battle deaths (292,000). Do we call WWII “Good” simply because Americans suffered less than so many others? Certainly, there’s no surprise if the French, forever grateful to America for D-Day, could nonetheless never call this a “Good War.”

Finally, consider the war crimes committed, not only by the enemy, but by the Allies as well. As American citizens, and a Catholics, we cannot be proud that American soldiers summarily shot Japanese prisoners while reclaiming occupied Pacific islands. We cannot be proud of those who killed tens of thousands of women and children, burnt alive in the Allied firebombing of Dresden or the US firebombing of Tokyo. We cannot stand proud before the world as the first nation—and still the only nation—to use nuclear weapons against human beings, killing a quarter of a million civilians (again, mostly women and children) at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For American Catholics, the lessons are quite simple but by no means easy.

First, there is no such thing as a good war. William Tecumseh Sherman had it right: every “War is Hell,” no matter how just.

Second, our church has abandoned the “Holy War” mentality. The most war-like Catholic view now is the Just War approach, and many Catholics are skeptical even about that. Certainly the last four popes have been committed to establishing Catholicism as a “peace church.”

Third, we should not fall for the seductive rhetoric of war as a righteous cause against demonic foes. Too often, that has led to the “innocents” matching the crimes of the guilty. Even if war becomes unavoidable, it should nonetheless remain regrettable. The Church no longer pretends there are “Good Wars,” because Catholics no longer pretend to have a monopoly on truth and goodness. And if our Church has stopped pretending, shouldn’t our country stop too?

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