Suchergebnisse

Easter, 1982, marked the nineteenth anniversary of Pope John XXIII's greatest encyclical, Pacem in Terris ("Peace on Earth"), a document whose impact, rather than diminishing, shows every indication of growing in the years to come. The encyclical, I should explain, has had a special meaning for me. As one of a ridiculously small band of self-styled Catholic "pacificists," who had experienced during World War II the unwillingness of our fellow communicants to accept us as anything more than a "lunatic fringe," u was always necessary for us to scratch for whatever support might be found in respectable sources—a reference to Scripture here, an episcopal or papal utterence there. Imagine my joy, then, when suddenly we had a whole encyclical we could call our own!

The last thing the peace movement needs at this moment of diminished strength and influence is dissension in its dwindling ranks. The long-awaited end of the Indochina hostilities has left most of the most active opponents of that war in a state of nearly total exhaustion. Many have turned to the more routine pursuits necessarily neglected in those years of personal trial and disruption.

Wilfred Owen, one of the poetic voices stilled by World War I, chose as his subject "war and the pity of war," finding his poetry in the pity. It can be argued that even then the pity had gone out of war. It is certain that the events of subsequent wars—large and small, local as well as worldwide—have been so pitiless in character and conduct that little or no "poetry" remains.We are three-quarters through a century of unprecedented violence, with the grim prospect of even greater evils tying ahead. In his Twentieth Century Book of the Dead Gil Eliot offers what he considers a reasonable estimate of 100,000,000 "man-made" deaths since 1900. That figure alone is enough to give us pause. But it is not merely the number of deaths that should concern us here, but who is killed and the manner in which the victims are killed. In World War I, of the ten million or so victims, 90 per cent were soldiers. The carnage of World War II was so great and so indiscriminate that an equally simple estimate is almost impossible to contrive.

Granted, there is a touch of the absurd in speaking of the present as the "aftermath" of the war in Vietnam. As the battered populations of Cambodia and Laos have discovered, American "peace with honor" in one part of Indochina has meant little more than a change in bombing targets. Nevertheless, presidential proclamations assure us that peace has been made and honor preserved, and during the first two months following the agreement ceremonially concluded in Paris these assurances fell upon our ears with almost the same regularity as the 110,000 tons of bombs dropped on Indochina. As the remnants of a once mighty peace movement can testify, the warwearied public has been only too willing to accept these assurances and close its eyes to the ugly realities that would threaten the welcome illusion.