By Gretchen Keiser

The third draft of the proposed U.S. bishops’ pastoral on war and peace represents a significant advance in the way that it presents Catholic thinking on the topic and the way that it incorporates Scripture, Archbishop Thomas Donnellan said April 14.

“My own reaction to the document is exceedingly favorable,” Archbishop Donnellan said in opening comments at a daylong session by diocesan priests reviewing the third draft. The proposed pastoral has been underway for more than a year and is scheduled to be reviewed and voted upon by the U.S. bishops at a meeting in Chicago in early May. The draft has been put together by a committee headed by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.

Archbishop Donnellan said that he had been “unhappy” with a second draft, faulting it for slighting the complexity of the Catholic tradition on war and peace and for a tendency to use Scripture selectively to buttress already chosen points.

In contrast, he said, the third draft points out clearly the long and complex Catholic tradition on the topic of war and peace and is “much more scholarly” in its use of Scripture. “The use of Scripture in this document is exceedingly well done,” he said. He also praised an introductory precis, which explains the contents of the whole document.

The archbishop also defended the right of the bishops’ committee and of the bishops as a whole to speak out on the topic of nuclear war, saying that he never thought that he forfeited the rights of a citizen when he became a priest.

The question of nuclear weapons, disarmament and war and peace “is far too important to be left to elected representatives and professional warriors,” he said.

Some seventy diocesan priests came together at the Hyland Center at the Cathedral of Christ the King April 14 to review the third draft of the pastoral and to hear the views of Father John Langan, a Jesuit theologian who was among those consulted during the drawing up of the document.

One of the points raised several times during the day was that the pastoral, and the process which has taken place as it was formed, is, in Father Langan’s words, “an example of the Church learning as well as the Church teaching.”