In times of turmoil: Have faith in Christ

		Notes from the  Vicar General  Msgr. Paul J. Swain

We live in a time of constant movement and communication.

People seem always to being doing something, saying something or planning to do or say something. Quiet time is low on the list.

We constantly flip through the channels on television. We glimpse only flashes of programs and bits of the news banners that drift along the bottom at such a crisp pace they can barely be read. We talk into cell phones while driving, while eating, while waiting as well as while working.

We receive e-mail from strangers who offer gratuitous advice or invite us into their lives, or at least to buy their products. Often we answer back or pass them along. It is no wonder that sometimes we find maintaining our prayer life difficult and the seeming lack of immediate response from God troubling. God's pace is just too slow and too imprecise.

Pray for patience

We also live in a time of constant turmoil and anxiety. Terror and violence are daily visitors, both locally and around the world. Last week another young American was beheaded in the name of God and every day young Americans live in fear of suicide bombers or the scourge of drugs.

For many, family has become distant and relationships have become remote or addictive, often through the Internet. Our institutions of government and church are viewed with skepticism and the demand for immediate change is loud and often uncivil. It is no wonder that sometimes we question where God is in all this.

What we may need to pray for is greater patience and perspective. Patience comes when we recognize our human limits and open our hearts to God's providence.

In one of the most moving moments in Scripture Jesus said to his disciples: Do not let your hearts be troubled, have faith in God, have faith also in me. (Jn 14:1) He spoke these words as he was preparing to face his passion and death knowing that the lives of the disciples would become filled with uncertainty.

I suspect those words were recalled by the Apostles when their lives were turned upside down for a time. They are comforting and reassuring words for us when we face times of trouble, doubt, confusion, fear, loneliness or anxiety.

To have such faith in God and in Christ is to reach the point where we believe what we cannot prove, and accept what we cannot fully understand. When we believe in our heart and soul that he truly is the Christ and accept that his promises are true, patience is possible because we trust in God's way and God's time. The disciples he spoke to waited in the Upper Room, and according to God's plan, received the Holy Spirit, which changed them forever.

And perspective

Perspective comes from recognizing that the love of Christ is so powerful and pervasive that we are confident that there is sense even when we wonder why things happen the way they do. We know that there is more to the story.

Another moving point in Scripture is when Jesus is on the cross dying for our sins and sees his mother and the Apostle John. He tells John, there is your mother, giving to us the Blessed Mother as our mother as well.

While she sorrowed at the foot of the cross, she patiently waited and persevered in faith. And she saw her son risen. Her model of discipleship and her role as intercessor can help us gain the patience and perspective we need to live in this busy and turbulent world with hope.

While there is sin and tragedy around us, there also are blessings and examples that can encourage us. Last week in addition to the harshness of war, a four-year-old Iraqi girl was brought to the United States and underwent precarious heart surgery that saved her life. A caring woman gave up a kidney to a stranger so that he might live. Perhaps we might consider how we can be examples of hope for others whose lives we touch.

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Have faith in God; have faith also in me. Nothing in this world, especially the electronic gadgets that dominate our day, can bring the peace and hope, the patience and perspective that comes with living faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Prison abuse scandals: Just war theory includes advancing cause of justice, security, freedom

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

The virtually universal American revulsion at photographs showing abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops tells us something important about this country - something that can't be reduced to the old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words.

The revulsion tells us that, despite the moral confusions of our culture, most Americans are not moral cynics. Americans demand a national engagement with the world that expresses our own moral commitments to justice, to decency in our treatment of others, to respect for the dignity of other human beings regardless of their religious, ethnic, or racial "location."

If anything proves that America is not a Realpolitik country in which it's simply assumed that might makes right, it's the reaction to Abu Ghraib.

Advance just peace

This instinctive revulsion also reminds us that the American people intuitively understand that a just war is measured, not only by the justice of the cause that led to war or the care with which military operations are conducted, but also by its capacity to build a just peace.

Twenty years ago, I had the opportunity to spend a year at the Smithsonian-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, thinking about Catholics, war, and peace.

In the course of that year, it occurred to me that there was more to the just war way of thinking than the two traditional clusters of moral ideas that most of us associate with the just war tradition: the ius ad bellum (the criteria determining whether the resort to armed force is morally justifiable) and the ius in bello (the moral rules governing the conduct of war).

There was also, it seemed to me, a ius ad pacem, a "rule of peace," deeply embedded in the moral logic of just war thinking. The purpose of any just war - its "right intention," to use the classic criterion first enunciated by St. Augustine - must be to advance the cause of the peace of order: the "order" that is composed of justice, security, and freedom.

Involves soldiers and statesmen

This ius ad pacem involves both soldiers and statesmen. Thus it's worth remembering, in this context, that the first reckoning with what went desperately wrong at Abu Ghraib prison came, not because of 60 Minutes or other organs of investigative journalism, but from within the U.S. Army itself, which launched a criminal investigation of the situation on Jan. 14, the day after Spc. Joseph Darby reported the abuse to military investigators.

This empirically confirms an impression that I've been forming for years: that the just war tradition is taken far more seriously in the U.S. armed forces than in other sectors of our society, including many of our religious institutions.

Reform ongoing

Why? In no small part because of the Vietnam debacle. As the last helicopters lifted off from the Saigon embassy roof in 1975, many middle-level officers in the armed forces knew that something had gone desperately wrong during the war - not just politically, but in terms of the institutional integrity of the armed forces.

A systematic and often heroic effort to reverse this institutional corruption began, and the services were reformed with impressive results. That the reform remains incomplete is self-evident. But that hard truth doesn't negate the basic fact that significant reform, shaped by a serious grappling with the just war criteria, was achieved.

Thus, today, no one knows the stain on military honor that Abu Ghraib represents better than the officers and enlisted personnel who believe they came to Iraq to liberate its people from a vicious dictatorship in which murder, rape, and torture were normal instruments of state policy, not aberrations.

Swift, sure justice

Some have been using Abu Ghraib to turn the Iraq debate into another round in the increasingly ugly American culture war; others have been trying to turn this sordid business to partisan advantage.

But Abu Ghraib cannot be addressed as if it were primarily a domestic political problem. The ius ad pacem - the right intention - that was a significant part of the just war case for deposing the Saddam Hussein regime demands that swift and sure justice be meted out to those who have disgraced the uniform of the United States.

That, in turn, will advance the cause of a free, stable, pluralistic, and self-governing Iraq.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.