Tonight's meeting, however, gives me a special opportunity to thank the Protestant and Jewish communities for the overwhelming support which they have given to the letter, and to illustrate the ecumenical roots and implications of this letter written by Roman Catholic bishops. Accordingly, I shall divide my presentation into three parts: the ecumenical foundations of the pastoral letter, a summary of its contents, and an examination of its ecumenical implications.

I. The Ecumenical Foundations of the Pastoral

      Many observers have noted the extraordinary response of the Protestant and Jewish communities to the pastoral letter. I shall return to that theme. But I wish to begin by focusing on an ecumenical dimension of the letter which is too little noticed: the contribution of Protestant theologians and ethicists to the content of the document.

      The letter's use of the work of Protestant theologians, which is documented in the footnotes, is not an accidental development. While the decisive and primary intellectual framework for the bishops was recent papal teaching on war and peace, the theological argument in the letter has been enriched by work done by both Catholic and Protestant theologians in the past twenty years. Two major dimensions of the theology of the pastoral have been influenced by this recent work.

      The first is the basic moral perspective -- the moral theory -- used to assess the question of warfare. The letter's dominant moral theory is the "just-war ethic" which has provided the principal perspective for addressing the use of force in the Catholic tradition since St. Augustine. Precisely because of the central position the just-war ethic has held and continues to hold in Catholic theology, it is significant that the pastoral letter also acknowledges that the other major perspective in the Christian tradition, the nonviolent or pacifist option, is a legitimate choice for an individual, even though it is clearly not the public policy position of our document.

      The relationship between the just-war ethic and the nonviolent perspective in the pastoral has received substantial attention from commentators. Both moral positions have benefitted from the work of Protestant theologians in the last two decades. Historically, the nonviolent themes have been developed within the "peace churches" of the Protestant tradition. Today one finds Christians across the spectrum of our churches, Catholic and Protestant, who draw inspiration and direction from this nonviolent perspective. The theological writing of Professors John Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas of Notre Dame (both Protestants) and the work of Jim Wallis and his associates at Sojourners magazine, as well as the cooperation among Catholics and Quakers in various aspects of the peace movement, are all ways in which the theology of non-violence and peacemaking have influenced parts of the Catholic community.

      From an historical perspective, it may be more surprising that the just-war theology of the pastoral also is indebted to recent Protestant research. While it has been cultivated most extensively by Catholic authors, the just-war ethic is not a doctrinal preserve of Catholics. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing to the present, there has been a renewed interest in the just-war theory among Protestants, who have produced some landmark studies cited in the pastoral letter. The analytical work of Professors Ralph B. Potter of Harvard, Paul Ramsey of Princeton, and James Childress of the University of Virginia, as well as the superbly documented historical work of Professor LeRoy B. Walters of Georgetown and James Johnson of Rutgers, has greatly contributed to our understanding of the content and capacity of just-war ethics to evaluate public policy.

      Indeed, the second contribution of Protestant theology to just-war thought is precisely in the area of applying the principles to specific policy choices. Here the work of Professor Ramsey of Princeton in his two books, War and the Christian Conscience (1961) and The Just War (1968), holds a unique place. Our letter does not follow Ramsey's conclusions, but like many others we have immensely benefitted from his research. The same debt can be acknowledged to the work of Dr. Alan Geyer of Washington, D.C., whose extensive writings on war and peace are used in the Catholic and Protestant communities and whose testimony to our drafting committee was particularly helpful.

      It goes without saying that a list of contemporary Catholic authors could be developed to whom the bishops turned for guidance in writing the pastoral. I have specified these Protestant theologians in order to show that the ecumenical roots of the pastoral letter are very specific and very contemporary. Among other things, the pastoral demonstrates how the ecumenical dialogue has developed to the point where real theological exchange shapes our views on key issues across ecclesial lines.

      Having discussed the foundations of the letter, let me now examine its content.

II. The Challenge of Peace: A summary

      The pastoral letter devotes over thirty pages to the challenge of constructing peace in an increasingly interdependent world. The political and moral challenge it poses for world politics may be its most significant long-term teaching. This positive section on peace shows why the nuclear issue does not exhaust the challenges of the moment. Issues of human rights, economic justice and respect for rights of all nations, great and small, are unfinished tasks in the daily business of world affairs today.

      The urgent need to build peace does not, however, dispense with the constant effort required to prevent any use of nuclear weapons and to limit other uses of force in international relations. It is this section of the letter which has attracted the most attention -- the policy section containing an analysis of the moral problems related to the use of nuclear weapons and the strategy of nuclear deterrence.

      The argument of the pastoral must be understood in the context of the just-war teaching which is clear about the duty of the state to defend society, the right of the state to use force as a last resort, and the need to assess state action by moral criteria whenever force is used. It is those moral criteria that the pastoral addresses. The argument moves in three steps: first a basic premise is established, then this premise is related to three cases of use, and, finally, to an assessment of deterrence.

      The premise of the letter is that nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy constitute a qualitatively new moral problem. The nuclear age is not simply an extension of the moral questions on warfare addressed by our ancestors. Albert Einstein, one of the fathers of the nuclear age, said that everything is changed except the way we think. We have experienced the meaning of this statement as we have struggled with nuclear issues in the development of the pastoral.

      From a moral tradition like ours, which judges some but not all uses of force to be morally legitimate, the nuclear era poses a profound -- indeed a revolutionary -- challenge. The extreme skepticism of the pastoral regarding our ability to control any use of nuclear weapons is a pervasive influence throughout the policy analysis of use and deterrence.

      The first case is "counter-population" warfare. Directly intended attacks on civilian centers qualifies as murder in Catholic moral theology. It is not justified even in realiation for an attack on our cities, and no exceptions of the principle are admitted.

      The second case is the "initiation of nuclear war." This requires a different moral judgment. The pastoral opposes the first use of nuclear weapons and supports a "no first use" pledge in these words: "We do not perceive any situation in which the deliberate initiation of nuclear warfare, on however restricted a scale, can be morally justified. Non-nuclear attacks by another state must be resisted by other than nuclear means." The letter explicitly acknowledges that it will take time to implement such a policy. It also acknowledges certain objections to a "no first use" pledge. Hence this assessment does not have the same absolute character as the "counter-population" section; we have made prudential judgments, and we are aware that people can and will draw other conclusions based on a different reading of the factual data.

      The third case, that of "limited nuclear war," involves an assessment of what the real meaning of "limited" is, as opposed to its theoretical meaning. Taking into account the long debate -- both strategic and moral -- which surrounds this question, the pastoral argues that the entire burden of proof rests on those who would hold that limited nuclear exchange can indeed be contained within moral limits. The skepticism of the letter about the possibility of control shows through clearly in this section.

      On the question of deterrence, the judgment of the pastoral is based on Pope John Paul's statement to the United Nations in june, 1982. We have taken the Holy Father's judgment and applied it to the specific details of U.S. strategic policy. Such an application, of course, is done in our name. The judgment of the pastoral is "strictly conditioned moral acceptance" of deterrence. Devoid of all modifiers, the judgment is acceptance, not condemnation. But we have used the term "strictly conditioned" to stress that deterrence must be seen as a transitional strategy.

      The pastoral highlights the meaning of transitional by attaching a series of conditions to the content of deterrence policy. The letter seeks to keep deterrence limited to a very specific function; it resists extending it to war-fighting strategies, and it calls for keeping a clear fire-break between conventional and nuclear weapons. Finally, we have called for an aggressive pursuit of arms control and disarmament objectives, including a halt to the testing, production and deployment of nuclear systems.

III. The Ecumenical Implications of the Pastoral

      The reception accorded the pastoral letter in the Protestant and Jewish communities was truly a remarkable sign of ecumenical support. As you know, the National Council of Churches commended the pastoral to its membership; several national church bodies passed resolutions about the pastoral, and the religious press generally gave us very generous support and coverage.

      In light of this response, for which the Catholic bishops are extremely grateful, I wish in this final section of my remarks to reflect upon the future of the Church's witness to peace. Specifically, I wish to comment on the lessons of the pastoral concerning the role of the Church in the development of public policy, and then the relationship between ecumenical dialogue and our public role.

      Most of the public commentary about the pastoral letter focused on the specific moral conclusions we drew about deterrence and the use of nuclear weapons. My concern is to step back from the specific conclusions of the pastoral and assess how the Church has influenced the public debate.

      There are lessons here, I believe, which go beyond the questions of war and peace. The premise of our analysis was that every major policy decision has a moral dimension. There is no such thing as a "non-moral policy;" it may take a certain degree of analysis or probing to uncover the moral choices made in what is described as a "purely technical" decision, but the moral choices are always there, often embedded in the way political, strategic or technological choices are made. I should also add that our premise is based on the idea that there is no "purely moral analysis;" this means that moral conclusions on complex policy issues cannot be drawn in isolation from the technical data of the problem.

      The style of analysis in the pastoral letter, therefore, was to construct a dialogue between the empirical dimensions of the nuclear question and the moral principles of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The impact of the pastoral on the policy debate has been due, I believe, to this style of moral analysis. The major consequence has been to open space in the national debate on nuclear policy for the moral dimensions of the question. By doing this, we have helped set a framework for others to join the moral scrutiny. In the long-run this may be the most significant contribution of the pastoral letter. We made very specific policy judgments and we want those to be considered, but we also are aware that no single document has the answer to all the policy issues of the nuclear age.

      By opening space in the public debate for the moral dimension, we have tried to establish the principle that in every forum where the nuclear question is addressed, where decisions are made and policies shaped, there should be explicit public consideration of the moral issues. This means that a number of groups and individuals should participate in the analysis of the ethical and empirical issues. The explicit appeal to moral justification for policies which came from representatives of the U.S. government in their dialogues with the bishops, and the increased attention to moral factors which one finds in the secular journals, are indications of either the pressure or the incentive participants in the debate feel to cast their policy conclusions in a moral framework. When this is done, either in government or ourside, it is the beginning of moral analysis, an important and indeed necessary exercise, for everyone's views (the bishops included) should be subjected to scrutiny.

      The broader significance of our experience with the war and peace issue is the potential afforded religious communities in opening space for the moral analysis of other public policy issues. Today we face a series of questions ranging from medical care to international relations, from equity and employment to budget priorities and national purpose, where the moral aspects of the issues are as important to our future as the technical calculations which absorb most of our public debates.

      Religious groups should not expect or be given special treatment in this regard. We should earn a hearing in the public debate by the quality of our analysis. I am convinced that the moral dimension of our public life is a topic which people inside and outside the religious communities are concerned about; if we can demonstrate how a moral vision enriches the choices and the challenges which confront us as a nation, then consideration will be given to the moral factor in every policy debate.

      Such participation in the public arena will require a more extensive ecumenical exchange among the churches and synagogues. On the war and peace question we share a common vision on a whole range of topics. This is not the case on every moral issue on the political and social spectrum. Nonetheless, we are sufficiently well grounded in our ecumenical relationships that we need not fear facing our differences as well as our shared concerns.

      I recently gave an address at Fordham University in which I set forth an argument linking the war and peace question with a series of other issues: capital punishment, abortion, and human rights in our domestic and foreign policy. It is not my intention to repeat the main lines of that address here. I think it useful to say, however, that I realize it poses a delicate, indeed a difficult, set of questions for our ecumenical dialogue. I believe there are more issues on which we agree than disagree, but our differences on issues like abortion can be painful.

      I purposely linked the various issues for two reasons. First, I am convinced that certain key moral principles in the pastoral letter, such as the prohibition of the direct killing of the innocent, relate to other issues as well. Second, I know that within the Catholic community these issues are sometimes treated selectively, with different groups appealing to the same principles, but not following the logic of the principles when it moves beyond one issue; I wanted to promote an explicit, conscious dialogue within the Catholic community about the need for consistency in our public policy positions.

      I also believe the consistency question has relevance to the wider public debate. I am not saying the issues are either simple or identical. I don not believe consistency means that one must have a single answer to several complex policy questions. I do believe, however, that consistency requires that within the religious communities and in our public debate, we should test our position and reasoning on one issue against our conclusions and reasoning on similar issues. Precisely because we do not agree within the churches and synagogues on some of these public questions, we could demonstrate in our own ecumenical debate how the wider public could work toward the resolution of questions which cannot be ignored and about which there is considerable disagreement. The quality of our ecumenical dialogue, in other words, can enhance the quality of our public debate.

      In conclusion, let me express again to you, the members of the Protestant and Jewish communities here present and, to the wider Protestant and Jewish communities, by personal gratitude and that of my brother bishops for the support we have received. Let me pledge our continued involvement with you in the struggle to reverse the arms race and to move toward real peace and security in the world. And let me urge further consideration of how a disciplined moral debate in our ecumenical life might enhance the common good of our society.