A Layman's Dissent

"This is not the faith that nourished me," protests Michael Novak. A former seminarian and now resident scholar at the Conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Novak is a leading lay thinker in the U.S. Catholic Church. He is the author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, which posits that a free economy is the natural embodiment of Western religious ideals, and of the forthcoming Confessions of a Catholic, a reflection on the Nicene Creed. As a student of both strategic and theological questions, Novak finds the argument made in the draft pastoral letter of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to be seriously flawed both as a political document and as a religious one. "They are overreaching," he says. "The desire to speak like prophets is sometimes only hubris."

"I admire the bishops for trying to make faith relevant to every aspect of life," he says. "But they go too far when they get into specific judgments about military strategy and weapons systems such as the MX." By addressing matters outside their expertise, Novak suggests, the church's spiritual leaders are also inviting challenge to their moral authority on matters of faith as well as politics. "It makes everything else they say subject to questioning." The church's authority, he says, "is a treasure not to be squandered, or to be wasted like water spilled upon the sands."

Novak, who defends nuclear deterrence as a way of preserving peace, primarily challenges the bishops on strategic grounds. "Their position would make war much more likely," he says. He feels the underlying political flaw is blindness to the Soviet threat. "What is amazing is the profound anti-Americanism of the document," he insists. "You cannot face this moral question without facing the reality of the Soviet Union. The bishops are holding Europe hostage to abstract thinking, because the absence of an American deterrent would raise the probability of a Soviet invasion. You don't qualify as a peacemaker just because you speak words of peace."

On theological grounds, Novak faults the bishops for adopting "a sentimental view of the Bible" that he feels has proliferated since the 1965 Vatican II convocation of the Roman Catholic Church, when there was a turn away from Catholic intellectual traditions in philosophy and theology in favor of a greater devotional reliance on scripture. Says he: "The passages they quote and the visions they take represent a soft and romantic reading of Christian theology, a Utopian view. I think it is an outrage to identify this sentimentality with faith in Jesus Christ. I don't think Jesus promises us that we are going to live in political peace. The Bible gives a much harder vision of reality. True Christianity is a religion made for hard times as well as shining dreams."

"This is not the first time a well-intentioned cry for peace has made war more likely," Novak says, referring to the religious pacifist movement in the 1930s. In response to that earlier crisis, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of Novak's mentors, started the magazine Christianity and Crisis, which, beginning in 1941, argued that American Christians must fight to resist totalitarianism. Novak and other lay intellectuals plan to launch this month a similar magazine, Catholicism in Crisis. Sums up Novak: "The laity is supposed to lead in Christian reflection on this-worldly matters. And, I may add, the work several lay writers have been doing on strategic issues has been much more balanced and intellectually satisfying than that of the bishops."

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