Muddle-Headed Pope on Arms Manufacturers

From the Huffington Post:

TURIN, Italy (Reuters) - People who manufacture weapons or invest in weapons industries are hypocrites if they call themselves Christian, Pope Francis said on Sunday.

Francis issued his toughest condemnation to date of the weapons industry at a rally of thousands of young people at the end of the first day of his trip to the Italian city of Turin.

“If you trust only men you have lost,” he told the young people in a long, rambling talk about war, trust and politics after putting aside his prepared address.

“It makes me think of ... people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit a distrust, doesn’t it?” he said to applause.

He also criticized those who invest in weapons industries, saying “duplicity is the currency of today ... they say one thing and do another.”

Francis also built on comments he has made in the past about events during the first and second world wars. He spoke of the “tragedy of the Shoah,” using the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.

“The great powers had the pictures of the railway lines that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, homosexuals, everybody. Why didn’t they bomb (the railway lines)?”

That’s right. In one and the same speech, he condemned arms manufacturers, and lamented the fact that the Allies did not bomb the railway lines to the death camps.

And with what were the Allies supposed to bomb the rail lines? Bombers. Built by weapons manufacturers. Most likely B-17s (built by Boeing) or B-24s (built by Consolidated).

Has the Pope even noticed the contradiction?

As Marc Livecche has noted:

With what, precisely, did he intend the allies to bomb the rail lines? The 20th Century ought to have convinced us, including us Christians, that those kinds of folks who enjoy genocide cannot usually be talked out of their malevolence with prayers or harsh language – they most often have to be forced out of it. If soft power cannot get those who are murdering the innocent to stand down then hard power is necessary to knock them down. Such business is about more than “hate, fratricide, and violence.” If stopping genocide is a good thing to do then those who have done it – and those who supply the tools to help them do it – have, well, done good. To be sure, the motives of some who sell arms might be mixed. But while this might, in those cases, marble our moral evaluation, we oughtn’t allow the marbling to eclipse the good nor to forget that, just as soldiering can be a Christian vocation, so too can be making the tools of their trade.

Livecche then deals with the notion that Christians can somehow opt out of war and violence:

It will do no good to claim, as some have, that this is the business of the government and not of Christians. To claim that God ordained the sword for the government to maintain just order but that he has called Christians away from such business in order to provide an alternative, peaceable kingdom is, in my judgment, the true hypocrisy – not the notion of Christians providing weapons of war. If the peaceable kingdom were a viable alternative to hard coercion then, surely, God would have ordained such a kingdom instead of, rather than alongside, the government’s sword. Given that God has ordained the sword, I stand among those who infer, therefore, that the sword is necessary. And if the sword is necessary then that makes the peaceable kingdom parasitic – because it cannot remain in a world in which the good do not bear arms. The idea that Christians should allow their neighbors to dirty their hands while keeping their own souls clean is, frankly, morally abhorrent.

Marquette “Peace” Center Profiting From “Merchants of Death:” A Reply

We recently linked to and commented on a post by Daniel Suhr on GOP3.COM.

Suhr noted that the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking, a leftist anti-defense operation, is being funded by a foundation with substantial investments in firms that do defense contracting.

In other words, investments in firms that Simon Harak, Director of the Center, calls “war profiteers.”

We sent a copy of Suhr’s post to Michael Duffy, long-time Marquette faculty member and cohort of Harak, and asked for comment. He responds as follows:

The Members of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking are impressed with the efforts that went into researching this opinion piece.

For all its research, however, the article overlooks the distinctions between having a contract with the Department of Defense, manufacturing weapons, and war profiteering.

First, almost any company can have a contract with the Department of Defense – from selling gasoline to providing health care for veterans. One nonviolent strategy for keeping a moral check on such corporations is called “stockholder engagement.” Stockholders can work from the “inside,” making sure that companies who contract with the Department of Defense conduct their practices ethically, and “whistle blowing” if they “cross the line.” Another is to protest by divesting one’s portfolio of investment in such companies.

Second, the Rynnes had instructed their financial counselors not to invest money in arms manufacturers or in tobacco companies. (In that regard, it is interesting to note that after more than twenty years of vigorous and creative nonviolent protest – including stockholder engagement – Honeywell “spun off” its weapons manufacturing subsidiary in 1990.)

Finally, war profiteering is defined as taking advantage of war to make excessive profits. Historically, Americans have shown resistance to that morally repugnant practice. It is specifically the practice of war profiteering that Fr. Harak has consistently critiqued as well. We hope that the GOP3 also share this opposition.

In the latter two areas, we are most grateful for the work of the authors of this piece, and request that they continue and sharpen their research. If the GOP3 discovers that the financial counselors of the Rynne’s Foundation have invested in corporations that manufacture weapons, we want to be informed so that we can immediately undertake an appropriate nonviolent response. Similarly, we also expect that the GOP3 will alert the Center immediately if their research uncovers solid proof of unethical practices or war profiteering in the companies the Rynne Foundation has stock in. Again, we will then immediately undertake the appropriate nonviolent action to redress the wrongdoing.

We hope that we can also find other ways to work together for justice and peace.

We’ll refrain from commenting on this right now, and let readers draw their own conclusions.