Cardinal's Column 6/20/04

The vocation of a warrior

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, dean of the College of Cardinals and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, told me that President Reagan had died. We were standing together at noon on June 6 in the City Hall of Caens, Normandy, waiting with about 130 other guests for the heads of state to arrive so that we could begin to eat. Cardinal Ratzinger was the representative of the Pope to the celebration marking the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of France and of Europe, and I was the guest of the president of the Normandy Regional Council and of the Bishop of Bayeux and Lisieux, the local bishop.

The visit had begun two days earlier, on June 4, in Lisieux. I met a group of Americans, mostly from Chicago, who began with me our visit to Normandy by celebrating Mass together at the Carmelite convent where St. Therese of Lisieux lived for nine years and died in great pain in 1897. Allowed into the Carmel enclosure, I visited the room where she died. I left there, under the pillow on her death bed, a list of intentions for the Archdiocese which I asked her to pray for, especially for our priests. Sister Therese of the Infant Jesus and the Holy Face, in her brief and quite hidden life, waged a spiritual contest as arduous as any human warfare. “I feel within me,” Sister Therese had said, “the vocation of a warrior. A soldier does not fear battle. … I will die, weapons in hand.” In that spirit, yet full of the common sense characteristic of the people of Normandy, St. Therese of Lisieux lived to an extraordinary degree the paradox of Christ, who entered death and the depths of hell in order to raise humanity to life. Her “little way” of constant self-sacrifice in small things created a love so great that she could say: “In the Church, I will be love.” She promised, before she died, to spend her heaven doing good on earth. She gives strength to all who come to know her.

On June 6, 1944, while Europe was in the grip of the Nazi conquerors, a combined force of American, British, Canadian and French troops invaded Normandy, with great loss of life, and made their way to the little city of Caen, which had been ravaged by Allied bombs. There, at the end of the war, outside the great monastic church of St.-Etienne, built by William the Conqueror 900 years earlier and still containing his tomb, leaders of the Allied countries stood in the square to celebrate the liberation of Europe. There their successors stood on June 6, 2004.

The morning of June 6, I celebrated Mass and preached in the church of St.-Etienne. I spoke with some of the French civilians who had taken refuge there when their homes were destroyed. Aware of our own troops and their sacrifices, it was good to speak as well to those who were grateful to their liberators but whose belongings and homes were destroyed and who had to reconstitute their lives in a ruined country. In 1944, they had come to the church for safety, and they were in the same church 60 years later to thank God for their deliverance. Besides those who remembered the events of 60 years earlier, there were many young parents with their children there for Mass. Some children showed me pictures of their sick friends and asked me to pray for them. Some asked for a blessing and a kiss. Some served the Mass with a sense of self-discipline and self-satisfaction. The world has changed a lot in 60 years, but the faith and its practice remain the same.

Our faith had brought us to the American cemetery just above Omaha beach the day before, on June 5. Mr. Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and some other members of Congress joined the Chicago group to celebrate the Mass for the dead. Concelebrating with me were Cardinal Ratzinger, Bishop Pierre Pican of Bayeux, and the Apostolic Nuncio to France: an American, a German, a Frenchman, an Italian. The faith is not only the same; it is universal. We came together around the altar, to make Christ’s self-sacrifice present in the context of the sacrifice of the thousands of soldiers buried where they had fallen. During the homily, I spoke of charity; after the Mass, Mr. Hastert spoke of liberty. Both are reasons for living that are, in moments of crisis for the human race, more important than life itself.

We prayed for the dead on June 5 but, in the afternoon of June 6, the major commemoration brought the living together at Arromanches, where an artificial harbor had been constructed in 24 hours so that the beachheads won with so much blood could be reinforced with troops, tanks and all that was necessary for a full-scale invasion of Europe. Most touching during the three-hour ceremony was the parade of the now elderly veterans who had actually participated in the invasion in 1944. I had met some of them in April in Chicago, at a luncheon sponsored by the McCormick Tribune Foundation, whose president, retired Brigadier General of the U.S. Army Richard Behrenhausen, was with us again in Normandy. Talking to them, unassuming and straightforward as they were, it seemed the battle was fought just yesterday. Honoring these warriors was what had brought so many to Normandy for this anniversary.

The anniversary celebrations reawakened memories of a dark time in the history of Europe and the world, a time when the forces of totalitarian barbarism assailed civilization in the name of a social order which claimed to be the wave of the future. In no way did this D-Day celebration glorify war or seek to obscure its brutal horror. Rather, the participants expressed the will to do everything possible so that armed conflict would be excluded from the family of nations. The United States and her allies created the United Nations at the end of the Second World War to be the normal instrument for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. At the same time, the anniversary reminded all of the need then and now to reject whatever degrades humanity and destroys the freedom necessary to human dignity. There are circumstances in which it is morally allowable, even necessary, to use military force to protect those we love. That was the case in the face of Nazi aggression, when peaceful means of stopping aggression had failed and the threat Hitler presented to human dignity and freedom was clear. The Nazis created a form of government that had no relation to the order of moral law. Careful always to conform their actions to the civil laws of the Nazi state, they were the supreme protagonists of the dictum: “You can’t legislate morality.”

The D-Day commemoration puts questions to us. Have we in any way betrayed the sacrifice of those who died in Normandy 60 years ago? Would they recognize our country today? Would they be at home here now? Do our civil laws betray the moral code of our Creator? Are our reasons for living the same as their reasons for dying?

The vocation of a warrior calls him or her to recognize who is the enemy and then to make war intelligently and morally. War is never just a military affair, nor a matter of politics and economics. In every war, as in every human action, moral judgments are made about what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil. In its greatest manifestations, especially in the conquest of sin and death by Christ, warfare reaches beyond the merely human, and God battles against Satan. It was at this level that St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, spent her days and nights as a warrior. It is at this level that each of us works out his or her salvation until Christ returns in glory.

The liberation begun on D-Day, the sixth of June, 1944, brought religious as well as political freedom to a Europe enslaved by an ideology that put race and the state in the place of God. Certainly American soldiers believed that the freedom they were fighting and dying for included religious freedom. The successful Cold Warrior who died on June 5, 2004, President Ronald Reagan, believed that religious freedom was the foundation of other freedoms. Talking to the Pope in Rome two weeks ago, I pointed out that religious freedom is in some danger in the United States today because large numbers of people have come to believe that religion itself is a threat to their personal freedom, especially to their sexual freedom. Catholics are called to be warriors against sin and evil in ourselves and others, as always, and called in a special way at this time to defend religious freedom against those who want the Catholic Church to change or to be crushed. Their names are multiple. Some are outside the Church and some inside.

A good warrior knows the enemy, recognizes the difference between good and evil, fights intelligently and is able to see through ruses and dismiss propaganda. But that is not enough. In the perspective of Christ’s self-sacrifice for us, war comes to an end in forgiveness. Christ is our guarantee that God’s forgiveness is always available for us; the harder battle we have to fight is the struggle to cooperate with God’s grace in order to forgive our enemies. That battle can also be won, but we have to pray for the victory. God bless you.