Every once in a while I get the impression that the Catholic homily of the day has strayed from what the Catholic Church actually teaches into the realm of the well known antipathy of some Catholic organizations toward science and the military. Such was one I heard some time ago. It started out as a denunciation of the then current motion picture, "The Golden Compass," and degenerated into a condemnation of stem cell research and chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The preacher claimed that "you can't touch them" because they're intrinsically evil!

I had already heard a lot of discussion about the supposed evils of "The Golden Compass" on CNN. Mike Galanos, the self-styled expert on all things religious, moral, ethical and politically correct, interviewed Bill Donohue of the Catholic League and somebody supposedly representing atheism about this. It was replayed several times. The Catholic League guy proved once again that the Catholic League represents Catholicism the way the Ku Klux Klan represents Protestantism. It pains me to think that my opinions as a loyal Catholic are judged by others by what comes out of the mouths of "Catholic" Leaguers. They have a right to their opinions, of course, but I wish they wouldn't call themselves "Catholic." It makes real Catholics look bad!

I find it interesting that no mention was made from the pulpit about "3:10 to Yuma," "16 Blocks," "A History of Violence," "AEon Flux," "American Gangster," "Apocalypto," "Assassination of Jesse James," "Beerfest," "Bewitched," "Blades of Glory," "Blood Diamond," "BloodRayne," "Borat," "Brokeback Mountain," "Capote," "Casino Royale," "Cinderella Man," "Click," "Condemned," "Corpse Bride," "Crank," "Descent," "Devil's Rejects," "Disturbia," "Dreamgirls," "Epic Movie," "Evan Almighty," "Exorcism of Emily Rose," "Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift," "Final Destination 3," "Fun with Dick and Jane," "Georgia Rule," "Ghost Rider," "Grindhouse," "Hairspray," "Halloween," "Hannibal Rising," "High School Musical 2," "High School Musical," "Hitcher," "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," "Hostel," "Hostel: Part II," "Hot Fuzz," "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry," "Island," "Jackass Number Two," "Just Friends," "Just Like Heaven," "Kingdom of Heaven," "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," "Knocked Up," "License to Wed," "Live Free or Die Hard," "Lord of War," "Marie Antoinette," "Matador," "Memoirs of a Geisha," "Miami Vice," "Mission: Impossible III," "Monster House," "Notes on a Scandal," "Omen," "Perfect Stranger," "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer," "Premonition," "Reaping," "Reno 911!: Miami," "Resident Evil: Extinction," "Ring Two," "Rise of the Silver Surfer," "Rush Hour 3," "Saw II," "Saw III," "Saw IV," "Scary Movie 4," "Sentinel," "Shoot 'Em Up," "Shooter," "Sicko," "Silent Hill," "Sin City," "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," "Syriana," "The 40 Year Old Virgin," "Underworld: Evolution," "V for Vendetta," "War," "Wicker Man," or "Zodiac," among others. Someone can make a motion picture about people having illicit sex, and nobody says a word! He can make a movie about torturing people to death, and the Catholic Church doesn't utter a single peep! Not one word is raised in protest against the glorification of worshipping false gods, blasphemy, profaning the Sabbath, dishonoring parents, murdering, fornicating, lying, stealing, messing with other people's spouses or desiring things you can't have. But make a movie that even suggests that there's something wrong with the administration of the Catholic Church, and suddenly every self-styled "Catholic representative" is up in arms!

I think there's a very real unresolved question here of to what these "Catholics" are really objecting! What did Jesus say about hypocrites?!

Several years before, our parish priest castigated "The Thorn Birds" in one of his homilies. He claimed it "made the Catholic Church look bad!" He admitted to me privately that he hadn't seen it, but then Catholic clergy have a history, in the United States, at least, of condemning things they don't know anything about. This reverend gentleman deprived himself of the opportunity of seeing one of the most powerful motion pictures ever made, the tragic tale of a very devout man mortally torn between his love of a woman and his dedication to the priesthood. My opinion is that it ought to be required viewing for every seminarian, but what do I know?

I don't recall any criticism of "The Monsignor," about a young priest chaplain who seduces a novice nun and gets the Vatican involved in post-WWII black marketing. I wonder why?

When I was a teenager, my mother wouldn't let me see any movie not approved by the Legion of Decency. This supposedly "Catholic" organization consisted at the time of a bunch of puritanical deviants who found Walt Disney's "Bambi" "objectionable in part." Imagine - Bambi! "objectionable in part!" What is wrong with these people? They condemned "The Moon is Blue" because David Niven asked the female lead if she was a virgin. Seems like a reasonable question to me. It's something I'd want to know about a potential love interest.

I don't know anything about "The Golden Compass." I saw part of it on TV later on, and the only relationship to the Catholic Church I noticed was it's use of the term "magisterium," which I didn't think made the Church look any worse than Phil Donohue did. What I saw of the film itself did not inspire me to watch more than a few minutes of it. It received a lot of publicity, possibly thanks to the Catholic League, and others. I wonder what the effect of all that free publicity will be.

As a physicist and registered professional engineer, though, I do know a little something about science and technology. As a graduate of both the Army and Air Force Command and Staff Colleges, I think I know a thing or two about war, too, and from what I hear from the pulpit and seditious editorials in "The Gulf Pine Catholic," most Catholic clergy don't.

As a result of his heroic, if unpopular, stance on Government funding (or, more accurately, not funding) of embryonic stem cell research using previously unharvested cells, President Bush required the scientists to look elsewhere for this promising technology. CNN recently announced that scientists have found that they can make common, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, garden variety skin cells mimic embryonic stem cells, effectively making the immorality of using embryonic stem cells moot. Some scientific articles criticized President Bush for "delaying this new technology for five years by not promoting embryonic stem cell research," but that's like claiming that Jonas Salk delayed the production of polio vaccine by not deliberately infecting human subjects with polio. President Bush didn't just stick his head in the sand and claim "You can't touch stem cell research!" Maybe now that the ethical objections to (skin-derived) stem cell research have been resolved, the technology can proceed with the Church's blessing.

I submit that it's OK to "touch" stem cell research if you do it responsibly.

Chemical and bacteriological weapons have been banned by the Geneva conventions because the signatory nations, most of whom don't have the technology to produce anything but the most basic of weapons, all agreed that their tactical advantages were at best questionable and their strategic effects were undesirable, given their current level of technology. They're just too unpredictable. Last I heard, the United States did not sign the convention regarding chemical and bacteriological weapons. I could be wrong, but I believe the present position is that the US will not use chemical weapons against anyone who does not use them against us, and we won't use bacteriological weapons at all. As I understand it, we have destroyed our stockpiles of lethal blood and nerve agents, but we've got some pretty potent non-lethal incapacitating chemicals that are currently used only by domestic police forces, and we retain the option of using them against any foreign belligerent that we can reasonably accuse of using any CB weapons, against us. One argument is that anybody who smears punji stakes with human feces is using a bacteriological weapon, so it's OK to retaliate by dusting him with harmless, but incapacitating, unbearably stinky "maggot gagger."

LSD was considered as a weapon, but it's long-term effects are just too bizarre. It makes the target population unable to fight, but nobody wants to have to take care of a whole nation of chronically spaced out war-ravaged civilians. We don't want our own troops to be exposed to it in any case.

Be honest: What do you suppose would be the Church's reaction to the use of a chemical or biological weapon that has no other effect than a short-term allergy to the smell of gunpowder. Enemy soldiers are otherwise unaffected, but they can't fire a rifle, or an artillery piece, or a tank, or a mortar, more than once. Do you suppose the Church (as opposed to some of its self-appointed spokesmen) would be opposed to the use of a weapon that makes it impossible to shoot other people?

What about a bacteriological weapon that converts petroleum products into sugar? The enemy's trucks and tanks grind to a halt, his aircraft don't take off, and the only power he can generate depends on sunlight, wind, coal and falling water. His starving civilians can raid the gas tanks for Kool-aid. Do you really suppose the Church would condemn that?

Would the Church condemn a disease that only attacks opium poppies or marijuana plants? Would it actually have a problem with that?

I submit that it's OK to "touch" chemical and bacteriological weapons if you do it responsibly.

Regarding nuclear weapons, since most people don't seem to read very much of what I put on the Internet, specifically, "The Moral Implications of War," I'll quote from it:

Because of the destructive potential of nuclear weapons, their use has always been regarded with serious misgivings by both the Church and the National Command Authority. Ethicists often see nuclear weapons as having no other purpose except the destruction of whole cities with their populations, which is always immoral (CCC, paragraph 2314) and which, of course, they have the potential to do. This potential is why their release is specifically reserved to the Commander in Chief. But nuclear weapons can be morally justified (or not) just as other weapons can, by considering their capabilities, limitations and potential intended and unintended effects. If an otherwise legitimate target can be attacked most efficiently by a nuclear weapon, and if the adverse unintended effect is less evil than that resulting from other means of attack, then the "nuke" is the weapon of choice, morally as well as militarily. Nuclear weapons are indicated in the destruction of massive constructions such as dams, hardened military installations and extended targets such as aircraft carrier battle groups and large-scale troop deployments.

The Historical Example

The Japanese Second Army headquarters in Hiroshima and the Mitsubishi machine works in Nagasaki were legitimate military targets. While US public sentiment at the time favored insuring that the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell, the futile resistance and mass suicides of the Japanese in the battle of Okinawa indicated (correctly, as it turned out) that Japan would not stop fighting until the country was totally destroyed and a large proportion of her people had starved to death. The atomic bombs used by the United States served as much to save the Japanese people from their leaders as they did to save the lives of US service personnel. Secretary of State James Burns asked President Truman what his defense would be at his impeachment trial if he had this fearsome weapon that could have saved American lives and ended the war and failed to use it. Truman's response was to authorize the use of the weapon on June 1, 1945. As Major General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, stated, "People who talk of outlawing the atomic bomb are mistaken. What needs to be outlawed is war!"

The Horner Doctrine

USAF General Charles A. Horner, the senior Air Force officer in Desert Storm, enunciated a thought-provoking principle of modern tactics. Basically, he maintained that modern war is so horrible in its execution, and so terrible in its effects, that the most humane military tactic in modern warfare is to apply maximum violence to the enemy forces to end the conflict and stop the suffering as soon as possible. Under this consideration, the use of a large strategic nuclear weapon as the opening shot would be morally advisable (and, perhaps, necessary) to force an immediate end to the conflict, notwithstanding the fearsome destruction that would result.

A Unique Capability

It is estimated today, with the benefit of hindsight, that the use of nuclear weapons against Japan saved the lives of a quarter million American POW's, a million US military, a million Japanese military, and five million starving Japanese civilians. It also caused the Emperor, the only effective authority left in Japan, to decide to intervene to end the war two days before Japan planned to contaminate San Francisco with its own radiological bomb. These facts suggest that one appropriate use of nuclear weapons would be to reduce suffering and death by bringing a quick end to a conflict, as suggested by the Horner Doctrine. For example, where hundreds or thousands of fanatics have sworn to continue fighting until the last man has fallen, a nuclear weapon can bring peace by quickly bringing that about. Modern Catholic clergy (and those of other faiths) would do well to work out reasonable rules of engagement, in conjunction with military experts, to provide guidelines for future employment of nuclear weapons. Otherwise, such decisions are left exclusively to those whose expertise is oriented toward violence and destruction.

What is not OK is to criticize, castigate, insult, condemn, denounce, censure, rebuke, reprimand, reproach, scold, and chastise the military and government leaders for conscientiously doing their jobs to protect the citizens for whom they have a sacred responsibility. This is especially so since the Catholic Church is not doing its job effectively to promote peace so we don't need to go to war. Every military action is a de facto indictment of the failure of the peacemakers, and the Catholic Church, as the Great Peacemaker, deserves some of the blame in each case. Res ipse dixit! When so-called "peacemakers" leave a mess, it's up to military people like me to clean it up. We have to get rid of your garbage, we shouldn't have to take your crap! If the members of the American Catholic clergy who spent their time in their walnut rectories sexually molesting little children had been out in the field avoiding temptation by serving as chaplains in the military instead, we'd have had a lot more Catholic chaplains in Vietnam and a lot less child molestation, to say no more. Maybe one of them could have prevented the mess we're in now by suggesting workable solutions to international tension instead of piously preaching that war is not good for children and other living things and we should all pray for it to stop!

The fact is, the idea that there is anything accessible to mankind that we are not allowed to "touch" is incompatible with true Christian understanding of the nature of God. Pagan gods create obstacles and traps for humanity, but the loving Christian God who became man and died to show His love for his fellow human creatures is nowhere near that petty or mean. Christians, Jews and Muslims, and probably a lot of other Monotheists, believe that God creates only good things, and the logical conclusion is that anything that man can "touch," anything at all, has been given to us for our benefit, to be used for our salvation or misused to our destruction. Our God simply doesn't make "bad" things.

In the United States, Catholic clergy are free to hold and express any damned fool idea they want, but when they speak from the pulpit, they speak with the mouth of the Church, and they have a moral obligation to get it right. Catholics who are children today are going to have to make decisions regarding the moral use of modern marvels such as stem cell research and new weapons technology, including chemical, bacteriological and nuclear weapons, in the not too distant future. Telling them that they "can't touch" them is contrary to the teaching of the Church.

Besides, nobody's interests will be served if decisions about them are made only by people who are ignorant and cruel.

John Lindorfer