Debra,
Thank you for your very brilliant, incisive and thoughtful post.
You wrote:
>It is an ethical guide, part of the tradition of the church >and, like all
ethical guides, is meant to help a person or a >group decide what the
appropriate action is so that their >decisions have some grounding in
thought and are not >based only on the feelings of the moment. And it, like
>everything else in the Catholic Church, is argued about >passionately among
Catholics themselves.
For all the questions and sometimes misgivings at some of the archaic ways
of the Catholic church I've had most of my life, this is what keeps me
connected to it. It is a paradox, seemingly medieval on one hand and then
positively open-ended on another. The long tradition of questioning and
examining and the freedom to do that within the modern church without
reprisal or condemnation and with, in many sectors, active encouragement is
one of the things I find the greatest about it. (Before someone else jumps
on me, this has been MY experience and it is the only experience I know,
despite having heard some horror stories from my father of the "old days"
and having been half-jokingly threatened by my non-Catholic mother at times
with being sent to a particularly frightening convent school).
So as to "just wars" - Vietnam - not even in the same realm, not "on point"
as they would say in the legal world in realtionship to the current
situation. But I never thought (or maybe wished) in my life I would have to
make this real decision from the basis of everything that I had been taught.
The question and decision has made me absolutely reel, but the answer is
immediate and there was never a moment of doubt. May it all resolve in the
way we pray for.
Kakki
