The new auxiliary bishop of San Francisco is Robert McElroy. Why is he a great choice? Because he has taken on (i) the distortion of just war teaching by George Weigel and Michael Novak; and (ii) the call for “eucharistic sanctions” on abortion-supporting politicians by a small-but-noisy wing of the American Catholic Church.
Here is the essay on the Iraq war. He argues strongly that the just war conditions did not – and still do not – apply. In addressing the Weigel-Novak distortion, he makes the following point: “The primary background against which the church has interpreted the just-war tradition for the past 50 years is not the limited destructiveness of medieval warfare, but the enormous destructive potential of contemporary warfare. Against this background, the leadership of the church has been unswerving in its presumption against war.” His take on proportionality is particularly interesting. He notes that the war party called for “epistemic modesty” when evaluating whether the evils unleashed by war would outweigh any good that might come of it. But later, that same war party put aside all modesty and asserted that the American occupation must continue.
You should also read his essay on eucharistic sanctions. He hits the nail on the head: “The use of eucharistic sanctions for political action will inevitably breed a reductionist outlook in defining the church’s social agenda….Yet the sanctions movement has already made clear that it advances a two-tier notion of political imperatives for Catholics, one that centers upon life issues and another for all other political and social questions. The life issues will be deemed essential to the fullness of Catholic faith and thus to participation in the Eucharist; all other issues–including war and issues of economic justice, over which the United States exercises unparalleled influence because of its political and economic power—will be relegated to secondary status.” Furthermore, “The imposition of eucharistic sanctions solely on candidates who support abortion legislation will inevitably transform the church in the United States, in the minds of many, into a partisan, Republican-oriented institution and thus sacrifice the role that the church has played almost alone in American society in advocating a moral agenda that transcends the political divide.”
We need more bishops like this. (Hat tip: Michael Sean Winters).
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