Bishops’ Panel Stands by OK of A-Deterrence

After looking at arms control developments over the last five years, a panel of U.S. Catholic bishops says the church should not back away from its conditional approval of nuclear deterrence.

While saying they are unsatisfied with progress since the bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace,” a committee of five bishops headed by Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin of Chicago said, “We find condemning nuclear deterrence too drastic a solution and embracing it too simple a response.”

The document will go to the full hierarchy for consideration at its June meeting in Collegeville, Minn.

The new report stems from some unhappiness among so-called peace bishops that the Reagan Administration’s arms control policies, especially its pursuit of the Strategic Defense Initiative, failed to meet the bishops’ “strictly conditioned” 1983 endorsement of deterrence.

“We remain convinced that the policy of nuclear deterrence is not a stable long-term method of keeping the peace among sovereign states,” the new statement said.

It said the December, 1987, summit meeting between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev “signals a systematic approach to nuclear diplomacy that was barely evident” at the time of the 1983 pastoral. “An authentically new opportunity for redefining the political relationship of the world’s two major military powers may be at hand.”