Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
October 31 , 2001
War on terrorism raises thorny moral questions
U.S. must maintain `moral superiority of charity,' journalist says
By Alwen Bledsoe
With the escalation of America's "War on Terrorism" have come an abundance of ethical dilemmas as baffling to top Catholic theologians as to the lay person, said journalist Alejandro Bermudez during a presentation Oct. 24 at the John Paul II Center.
Bermudez is the director of ACI-Prensa in Lima, Peru, the largest religious news agency in Latin America, and the largest Spanish Catholic news agency in the world. His talk "Terror and Counter-Terror: Morality, violence and national security through the lens of Latin American experience" drew over 60, a crowd comprised of Catholics as well as Protestants, agnostics, and Greek Orthodox.
Bermudez's credentials to speak on terrorism extend beyond the professional into the personal, said Chancellor for the Archdiocese of Denver Francis Maier in his introduction. Bermudez, he explained, lived through the Shining Path Revolution in Lima, and his uncle, later returned, was among the "disappeared" in Argentina's Dirty War.
Bermudez began his talk with brief histories of the rise and fall of several 20th century Latin American urban guerrilla groups from the first of such groups, Uruguay's Tupamaros, to the FARC still in operation in Colombia.
Noting that in many cases the governments fighting terrorism won through tactics as morally reprehensible as the terrorists', Bermudez said that America's moral task right now is a thorny one: fighting terrorism without buying into its tactics.
"As we are dragged into the logic of a dirty war, we cannot be but completely polluted by it even when we believe we are doing the right thing," said Bermudez.
Among the questions facing America, he said, are those involving "just war" scenarios: When and how do we fight a just war against terrorism?
Catholic authorities from Thomas Aquinas to the "Catechism of the Catholic Church" clearly support the justice of wars fought in self-defense, said Bermudez.
But, he added, "The hard question becomes when we ask how, not when, we fight a morally acceptable war."
While the catechism says it is a mortal sin to exterminate a people, nation or ethnic minority and states that non-combatants, wounded soldiers and prisoners must be treated humanely, the application of these principles to the war on terrorism is more difficult, explained Bermudez.
"Although this looks like a clear moral principle," he said, "we have to admit that its interpretation and application is severely tested when the concept of war as well as the concept of the elements of war are completely redefined by the enemy."
By way of illustration, he posed what he called "an urban guerrilla scenario, which now we know is not completely impossible to take place in the U.S.
"I have 10 suspects and know that just one of them has the time sensitive information required to prevent a bomb from killing thousands of innocent people, most of them children," he said.
Bermudez continued, asking the question troubling many Americans as government officials have suggested that some civil liberties may take a wartime hiatus.
"What moral criteria to address this situation should I use?" he asked. "The one that tells me that non-combatants should be respected and therefore I cannot apply any kind of violence over mere suspects no matter what would happen later?"
If so, he continued: "Should I let that happen time and again even at the risk of severe damage to our society? Or is there a point in which I should increase the severity of my means to pressure potential terrorists?"
Or, he asked, should he apply an entirely different principle: the one requiring authorities to prevent the murder of innocents?
Though offering no solution, he again commented on the trepidatious nature of the moral situation.
"We are definitely facing a new kind of war which raises new and challenging questions regarding how we can establish a morally acceptable defense without turning into what we claim to reject," said Bermudez. "But before these new questions, we cannot be either simplistic or limit our response to repeating slogans we already know."
Responding to questions after his talk, Bermudez said: "We have to raise the moral question before we engage in any kind of response to violence because we have to make sure that we maintain the moral superiority of charity. Otherwise we will end up being exactly the same as what we reject."
When asked if he thought "love and transmutation and light will ever change the world," Bermudez responded: "We have to get involved in promoting charity, solidarity and moral values in the middle of our society, and we may be time and again defeated by the other forces that do not think like us, but our own action will first make a difference in many situations and for many concrete human beings, and secondly they will elevate like a cry out to heaven that will bring the response of God. So I am in the middle of this situation very hopeful."
In attendance at the talk was Father Luke Uhl, chancellor to Metropolitan Isaiah of the Greek Orthodox Diocese. He came, he said, to further Catholic-Orthodox dialogue and because the issue of terrorism is important to the Orthodox Church just as it is to all Americans.
"In the last 50 years there's been increasingly a lack of moral and ethical education or even thinking or discussion in public institutions," he said. "We are confronting problems now that raise some really serious ethical and moral questions, and I'm not sure that the public world is instructed or enlightened in that. To the degree that they're not, we've got a role to play."
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