Bishop Gumbleton, of Detroit, in his Trinity Sunday homily, managed to work in the opinion that prosecution of war, even the war against Hitler and Nazism, was something contrary to the teaching of Christ. This is what he said:
Today, President Bush is over in Europe celebrating how 60 years ago we invaded the continent of Europe from the British Isles. We think of this as a marvelous thing, something to celebrate, but it meant killing and hatred. That’s not God. That can never be God.
Somehow we’ve come to think that sometimes it is OK to hate and kill. We’ve come to believe that sometimes killing is necessary, but it isn’t. And it can’t be. It cannot be.
Anyone reading this statement without any knowledge of the history of the D-Day Invasion would think that we, the Allies, were aggressors in World War II; that we were there simply to kill and hate. My initial response to this was that the Bishop seemed to believe that there was nothing worth dying for. To clarify, I meant that the Bishop seems to believe that there is nothing worth fighting for, which may involve both killing and dying. What if that had been the response of the Allied leaders in 1939 and 1941? As it was, 6 million Jews died in concentration camps during the years 1939 to 1945. It only stopped in 1945 because of the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. We celebrate this act today, not because it commemorates killing and hatred, rather we celebrate it because it commemorates the triumph of good over evil.
The Church teaches that the taking of innocent life is a mortal sin, it is always and everywhere wrong, an evil. Those in Nazi Germany who came to power in the early 1930’s scorned such ideas. They looked upon themselves and their countrymen as as "supermen", the only real human beings, all others being “inhuman” and “subhuman”, especially Jews. They took it upon themselves, after having come to this conclusion, to begin a systematic program to eradicate all humans who were “inferior” in some way, thus the concentration camps. The lives of the Nazi’s were not “innocent”, rather they dedicated themselves to the taking of the innocent lives of others, they were engaged in the grossest kind of evil. Yet, in Bishop Gumbleton’s world, nothing would be done to stop such men, because, after all, it cannot be right to hate and kill. In Bishop Gumbleton’s world, it’s preferable that 6 million, or more, Jews be exterminated than that any Nazi army be challenged and destroyed.
But the Allied leaders did not respond as Bishop Gumbleton would have them do. Instead, they chose to fight evil, knowing that many Americans would die, so that good might prevail. I believe they made the correct moral, Christian choice. They recognized that to tolerate evil is to, in a sense, cooperate in propagating it; in fact, to allow evil to flourish is to become guilty of that evil. The Bishop might argue that, instead of war, reason should have been resorted to. Surely such men as Hitler and Goebbels would listen to reason. However, even a rudimentary knowledge of the history of the 1930’s would show that reason and negotiation was tried, ad nauseum, with the sole result of encouraging Hitler to become even more aggressive and bloodthirsty. Such men do not listen to reason.
We are faced with a similar situation today; we have been attacked by men who hate us because we are not “like them.” These are men who are also dedicated to the taking of innocent lives and, thus, have themselves surrendered all claims to their own innocence. They are dedicated to killing us solely because we do not share their ethnic and religious background – we are Christians, infidels. If we choose to believe that it is wrong to try to stop them, killing them if necessary, then we shall surely die, along with who knows how many countless thousands, or millions, of others. I believe that the only appropriate response to evil is to try to destroy it, not out of hatred but out of concern for the Good. If we do nothing, we ourselves shall be guilty of allowing their evil to reign over the earth.
