editorial" "
“Christians faced by the problem of peace”(or “Pacifists or Warmongers?”), published in 1939, is the title of the book by the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, father of “personalism” and founder of the “Esprit” movement and of its “international review of the new generation”. Over sixty years have gone by, and the relevance of Mounier’s reflections on peace today are “unfortunately” plain for everyone to see. The response to the question “pacifists or warmongers?” can only be found by Christians today in the constant and fruitful encounter between faith and reason, Gospel and life. Otherwise, said Mounier with deep concern, we face “the abdication of this Christianity”. We will leave the space of our editorial this week to some thoughts taken from the book of the great French intellectual, in whose school generations of European Catholics active in the cultural and political spheres grew up. “Are we perhaps in favour of reinforcing a Christian reflection on the old justification of war as struggle for life”? Man is a predator towards his fellowmen: all the tyrannies profess this basic pessimism about the human condition. This pessimism is not Catholic. According to Catholicism, original sin deprived man of a regime of superabundant grace and injured a nature which had been organically incorporated in the life of grace. It was uprooted from it and shocked to the depth of its being. But it was neither destroyed nor lacerated, and this nature, which remains substantially good, is capable at all times of reconciliation, if it submits to the grace that is continuously offered to it. To warmongering, which considers war as an unavoidable fatality of nature and consequently as a normal political means, we oppose the rejection motivated by Christian theology and hope. But the Christian anthropology is no less antithetical to a seraphic vision of humanity which paints the world in puerile colours and preaches a certain kind of pacifism. War is a scourge in every period. Modern war is at once a cataclysm disproportionate to any possible cause and a total spiritual catastrophe. All the juridical considerations on the right of war and its limits, on the extension of the ruins accumulated by the modern techniques of warfare, do not come anywhere near capturing its essential significance: the laceration of the body of Christ. The bullet I fire does not only destroy the life of an individual, or break someone’s heart; it is lodged in the very body of mystic Christianity, it sears it with a burning wound of hatred and lies. Anyone who, by explicit intention, by imprudence or by abstention, assumes any direct responsibility in the preparation of war, becomes an accomplice of one of the gravest collective sins of his time. And complicity in war does not begin with those who want war but with those who remain silent about the reality of war; who minimise its just evaluation in the public conscience. It’s inconceivable that the Christian today could lightly joke about the eventuality of a conflict that would be the confession of the defeat of Western Christianity. It would be intolerable for the Christian to think of it as an extreme remedy, or accept it as a necessary fatality. War, on the contrary, is nothing but wreckage, a wall of despair. A new war would consecrate the abdication of this Christianity”.
