AN OPEN LETTER TO MICHAEL NOVAK

De Thomas Fleming na sua Chronicles Magazine. Escrito em Abril de 2003

Dear Michael,

I read your latest piece in Il Sole, in which you take issue with an Italian priest who had said that democracy could not be established at the point of a gun. (...) I well remember the first time I heard you speak—though it was a speech you had given (and would give) many times. Your basic argument was that the only problem with Latin America was that it had never had a Protestant Reformation. I was an Anglican in those days, but I could not understand how a Catholic could be so disloyal to his Church. I still don’t.

I truly think that you believe what you say, but try to imagine what others will suppose when you compare your own media-images of WWII bombing with the experiences of French and Italian civilians who were bombed to pieces by the allies. (...) There is hardly a city in Normandy that we did not level, and not always with a clear military justification.

Some of the great centers of Catholic Christianity—Ambrose's Milan, for example, Benedict's Monte Cassino—were subjected to destructive bombardments that destroyed Christian antiquities and killed people without achieving a military objective.

(...) I have no answer or for the people of Belgrade whom we bombed at the end of the war and again, just a few years ago, to enable the Christ-hating fanatics of Kosovo to kill and expel Christians and dynamite their churches.

You say that our military actions installed democracy in Italy. Do you know anything of Italian history?

How, for example, the Soviet-backed left supported the overthrow of the royal family in a narrow referendum that was about as strong an expression of the national will as the popular vote that went for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election; how the CIA and the KGB divided Italian politics down the middle for decades and used their money to corrupt Italian politics; how the bribery and corruption of the Italian political process allowed the communist left to achieve a virtual coup d’état, when the judges overthrow Berlusconi’s first administration? On the other hand, do you know anything about the American system we call “democracy”? (...)

Like so many armchair city-bombers today, you believe that the US can install “democracy” (a term which in your vocabulary is utterly devoid of meaning) in a people that has not known responsible self-government in any form since the Akkadian conquest of Sumerian city-states. (...) As the framers of the American constitution understood all too well, republican government is not a gift; it is a hard-won accomplishment that reflects the character of a people. Those who are not heirs to the Hellenic, Roman, Jewish, and Christian heritages have proved themselves completely incapable of establishing or maintaining any of the features of republican (much less democratic) government.

This does not mean that they are our inferiors. Far from it. An Iraqi willing to fight and die for his people and his religion may well be a nobler figure than an American “democratic capitalist” (your phrase) who exults in televised bloodshed and has no higher goal in life than to buy toys and die in his sleep.

We agree with you that pacifism is not a Christian solution to political and moral evil, but you seem to think that wanton destruction, designed to "shock and awe" civilians, is the act of a Christian nation. It is never right to do wrong in a good cause, never right to kill innocent people intentionally. When civilians get caught in the crossfire, we are sorry for their deaths, but when a government targets the civilians of Dresden, Hiroshima, Novi Sad, or Baghdad, it is criminal in the eyes of all believing Christians. To believe otherwise is to ignore 2000 years of Christian teaching and to reject Christ himself. Killing the innocent—whether it is done by Herod, an abortion doctor, or a government authorizing the terror-bombing of cities—is a grave moral evil.

I believe, Michael, that in your heart of hearts you are a kind man who preserves some spark of the Christian training he once received, before it was papered over by Wall Street Journal editorials. I would not like to think that your long association with anti-Christian neoconservatives has entirely blunted your conscience. However, we are not to judge a man by his professions but by his actions: By their fruits you will know them.

Your actions, as a writer and propagandist, in rewriting Catholic moral teachings on war, contradicting the Holy Father in a case where he is speaking in the authentic voice of the Church, your justification of the killing of innocent civilians—these are the fruits by which you must be judged.

There are good pragmatic for opposing or supporting this war, and good men are free to disagree. But on the larger moral question, whether it is right to kill innocent people in order to pave the way for a better government, the answer was given a long time ago, and this is not a question on which good Christian men are free to disagree.