A bishop who helped to draft a 1983 pastoral letter from the US bishops that dealt with the issue of nuclear weapons has called on them to revise that document’s teachings in the light of comments by Pope Francis.
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton (pictured), a retired auxiliary of Detroit, told the National Catholic Reporter: “The Pope has said something that … has put it back in the court of the local bishops’ conferences. And the United States obviously, since we have the largest capability of nuclear destruction, we should be in the front row of those trying to change things.”
He noted that the original pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response”, offered a “strictly conditioned moral acceptance” of nuclear deterrence, as a permissible step towards total disarmament. “I know when we wrote the peace pastoral, we didn’t expect and didn’t demand that the United States unilaterally, immediately get rid of its nuclear weapons,” Bishop Gumbleton explained. “We said: engage in progressive disarmament. And for a while there was some effort. But that isn’t going on anymore.”
Speaking at a Vatican conference on 10 November, the Pope said: “Nor can we fail to be genuinely concerned by the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices.
“If we also take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of error, the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned.”
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