Bishop Gumbleton warns
The global arms race and nuclear threat are markedly more dangerous today than they were 25 years ago when he helped author the United States bishops’ pastoral letter “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response,” said Bishop Thomas Gumbleton during a wide-ranging interview Dec. 2 during which he also: • Charged that too often “the Church is not listening to our own people” and that there is a “growing segment of Catholic people whom I bump into who are saying, ‘What the bishops are saying has no impact on my life’”; • Said he would “like to see the bishops’ conference go back to a stance toward the homosexual community that is much more understanding and much more aware of who these people are.”
“We really have to awaken our people to the danger” of nuclear weapons realities facing the world today, said the founding president (1972) of Pax Christi, USA. “We should be putting this out there in front of our people on a regular basis.”
The now-retired auxiliary bishop of Detroit was one of five bishops in 1980 appointed to a bishops’ conference committee to draft a document addressing the escalating arms race and the policy of deterrence – a precarious balancing act primarily between the United States and the then Soviet Union in which nuclear arsenals were at a level that would assure mutual total destruction if a nuclear conflict began.
That almost happened during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Bishop Gumbleton noted, adding that in a recent documentary on the event, Robert McNamara, U.S. secretary of defense in 1962, nearly touches his index finger to his thumb to indicate “that it was that close.”
“If we were that close then, and with all the tumult in the world now, and with other nations possessing these weapons, at any instance we are going to be that close,” the 78-year-old prelate continued. “I don’t think that you can get people to act just on the basis of fear, but there has to be an awareness, an acceptance of what is really happening, and then a determination that we have to change that.”
“We are living now under what President (John F.) Kennedy called a Sword of Damocles where either because someone chooses to do it or an accident happens, the planet could be made uninhabitable,” said the internationally known human rights activist.
In the Bay Area to initiate an Advent lecture series at St. Rita Parish in Fairfax at which he spoke on the peace pastoral’s 25th anniversary and other issues Dec. 1 to an audience of about 125, Bishop Gumbleton faulted “moral leaders, not just Catholic moral leaders, but religious leaders across the board” for not more prophetically “guiding the world’s people in morally acceptable ways, toward making moral choices that are good, not for evil.”
“We are acting in an immoral way, and on a huge scale, a scale that threatens the very existence of the planet,” he said. “We cannot ignore that moral situation. In a sense we are in a state of sin because we are not moving toward progressive disarmament. We have these weapons in place. We have strategies to use them. And, in fact, we are even making plans to place such weapons in outer space.”
Referring to a United States Space Command document called “Vision for 2020,” the bishop said, “Our military leaders state very explicitly that we will begin to move such weapons into space so that we can dominate the earth from outer space. Well, that seems to me to push beyond all the bounds of rationality and morality. There ought to be an outrage felt on the part of people that this is happening. And there ought to be a strong reaction that we say we have to stop before it is too late.”
The nuclear weapons threat as well as potential environmental tragedy are “overriding moral issues” and affronts to God, he said. “In effect we are saying we can destroy everything you have made. It is sort of a total opposition to God. God out of love has drawn us and all of creation into being, and we are able to say now, like we were never able to say before, “We can destroy everything you have made.’”
While “there are still a few Catholic bishops who bring it forward as a major issue,” he said, “ we just have not had any engagement on the part of the conference as a whole in regard to the issue” of nuclear disarmament. “I would think the Catholic bishops and other religious leaders should be in the forefront of saying we have to stop, because it is not only a physical evil, it is a moral evil,” the former leader of Bread for the World told Catholic San Francisco.
The bishop also indicated he thinks Church leadership has shifted in attitude toward the gay community in the years since publication of the 1997 U.S. episcopal pastoral letter “Always Our Children,” which he helped instigate.
“Recent statements,” he said, seem to indicate “we have reverted” to viewing “deep-seated homosexuality” as “something chosen and that if you work hard enough you can change.”
“That doesn’t seem to be the reality for the genuinely homosexual community, people who know they are homosexual,” he said. “They know it from the time they are very young. And the struggle is to accept it and to accept themselves and to believe that God loves them as they are.
“And what it comes down to, I think, is truly listening to them and their stories and to their experience. When you try to make judgments about them without that kind of listening and without that kind of understanding of their experience, you are going to miss the reality. You are going to misjudge them. So that’s what I would like to see happen, but at the moment it does not seem likely that it will.”
He was similarly concerned about a disconnect between “the hierarchical Church” and parishioners. Many Catholics “tell me that they don’t go to church anymore” and that “the Church is not in touch with the realities of their lives,” he said, adding, “And a lot of bishops don’t seem to realize that a significant segment of the Church population is now seeing their kids dropping away from the Church.”
He singled out “the Liturgy of the Word,” particularly homilies. “We need to make sure that the word of God becomes a vibrant force in people’s lives,” he said. “People need spiritual nourishment. They need to hear homilies that apply the Scriptures to the real world.”
By Dan Morris-Young
