Rather More Than Just Chaplains To The Right

That last of the great Anglo-Papalist clerical scholar-popularisers, the Reverend John Hunwicke, writes:

That nasty excrescence of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, the Times of London, has published a vicious and contemptuous attack on Archbishop Rowan Williams' view that the doctrine and practice of nuclear deterrence are immoral.

Traditionalists easily sneer at Rowan. The Damian Thompson mentality finds it easy to deride him as a soppy liberal. Needless to say, I do not agree with many of Rowan Williams' views. But I urge traditionalist Catholics to think twice before jumping onto this particular bandwagon.

More than two decades ago, Germaine Grisez, John Finnis, and Joseph Boyle wrote their definitive treatment of the ethics of nuclear deterrence. The important thing to remember about this trio is that they are the ethical thinkers who, in our time, most consistently, coherently, and vigorously have defended the traditional Catholic teaching on sexual matters, 'Life' matters, and every aspect of traditional teaching which has been attacked by the modern secular establishment. These writers not only subscribe to the whole gamut of Catholic teaching, but delve deep into philosophy, law, and every kind of moral discourse, to sustain it in the fora of modern discussion. They are not just yet another trio of wet modern lefty liberals masquerading as Catholics.

These writers concluded that the concept of Nuclear deterrence is indissolubly linked with a real intention, in certain contingencies, actually to use nuclear weapons. And they demonstrated, in my view conclusively, that such a contingent intention stands condemned by the traditional doctrine of the Catholic tradition with regard to the Just War.

I do not suggest that these three writers are infallible; or that the infallible magisterium of the Church has formally uttered such a judgement.

But I do suggest that, before joining the bought, chattering, exponents of the Establishment view (neatly expressed in this contemptuously unargued Times leading article), traditionalists should first have read the Grisez/Finnis/Boyle book, and be able to explain to themselves ... and hoffentlich to others ... exactly where (in their view) its logical faults lie.

Traditional Catholic morality often finds more common cause with political views of the 'Right' than it does with those of the 'Left'. But I hope that we are rather more than just chaplains to the 'Right'.

It was the hero of liturgical traditionalism, Cardinal Ottaviani, who wanted Vatican II to condemn nuclear weapons. Well, of course. And that condemnation is already implicit: the Church’s defined doctrine of the just war, one of two positions that Catholics are now explicitly free to hold (of which the other is a pacifism never formally condemned), is wholly irreconcilable to the manufacture, acquisition, maintenance or use of nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons.

Moreover, numerous Tories with relevant experience – Anthony Head, Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch, Aubrey Jones – were sceptical about, or downright hostile towards, British nuclear weapons in the Fifties and Sixties. In March 1964, while First Lord of the Admiralty and thus responsible for Polaris, George Jellicoe suggested that Britain might pool her nuclear deterrent with the rest of NATO. Enoch Powell denounced the whole thing as not just anything but independent in practice, but also immoral in principle.

The rural populist John G Diefenbaker, who opposed official bilingualism in Canada’s English-speaking provinces, and who campaigned for his flag to remain the Canadian Red Ensign with the Union Flag in its corner, also kept JFK’s nukes off Canadian soil.

Gaitskell’s Campaign for Democratic Socialism explicitly supported the unilateral renunciation of Britain’s nuclear weapons, and the document Policy for Peace, on which Gaitskell eventually won his battle at the 1961 Labour Conference, stated: “Britain should cease the attempt to remain an independent nuclear power, since that neither strengthens the alliance, nor is it now a sensible use of our limited resources.”

There could not be bigger and more unwise spending, or a more ineffective example of the “Big State”, than nuclear weapons in general and Trident in particular. Diverting enormous sums of money towards public services, towards the relief of poverty at home and abroad, and towards paying off our national debt, precisely by reasserting control over our own defence capability, would represent a most significant step towards One Nation politics, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation. It is what Disraeli would have done.