By Msgr. Noel C. Burtenshaw and NC Reports

In Atlanta and across the nation the promulgation of the U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter on peace is being celebrated on its first anniversary. The letter called “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response” was issued by the bishops on May 3, 1983.

A committee of the archdiocesan consultors to Atlanta’s Archbishop Thomas A. Donnellan has formulated eight parish bulletin inserts and sent them to every pastor so that during the Easter season the pastoral can be brought to the attention of the people in north Georgia parishes.

Father John Adamski, pastor of St. Anthony’s Church in West End Atlanta, composed the inserts and sent them to every parish. His letter to the pastors stated that “the inserts are designed to be used starting Easter Sunday and continuing for the eight Sundays of the Easter season concluding on Pentecost.”

As the first year of the pastoral comes to an end, it is clear that it has affected U.S. Catholicism.

No other action by the American hierarchy has been given so much attention or generated so much discussion, not only within the U.S. Catholic community but among other Americans. The debate over the pastoral also has spread around the world, particularly to Europe, considered one of the most likely theaters for a nuclear conflagration.

Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, who chaired the committee that drafted it, received some 8,000 letters on the pastoral shortly after its completion. Groups inside and outside America are still inviting him to discuss the document, he said in an interview.

“It has sensitized the Catholic population, as well as society generally, to the moral dimension of various war and peace issues,” the cardinal said. “That was basically our intent.”

Those “sensitized” to the issue include members of the Reagan administration, he suggested.

“Their rhetoric has moderated,” he told reporters at the White House April 18 following a meeting between the bishops, President Reagan and other administration officials. Nonetheless, he added, the bishops would like to see the administration take firmer steps toward arms control.

The debate still taking place over the pastoral and the bishops’ ability to address such an issue is comparable in recent Catholic history only to that which followed “Humanae Vitae,” the 1968 encyclical by Pope Paul VI in which he reaffirmed church teaching against artificial means of birth control.

In addition, not since the Second Vatican Council has so much attention been devoted to implementing a church document in the United States.

Millions of copies of the pastoral itself were printed – most of them by diocesan newspapers sent directly into Catholic homes. In addition, within the first year combined direct sales of the text by Origins, the NC News Service documentary service, and the Office of Publishing Services of the U.S. Catholic Conference, went over 300,000.

One would have to go back to 1966, when “The Documents of Vatican II” sold some 500,000 copies here and abroad in its first year of publication, to find any church documents that reached a comparable general readership in the United States.

Diverse Catholic organizations have made implementation of the peace pastoral a major part of their agenda. Among these have been the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, numerous individual Religious orders, the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, the National Catholic Educational Association.

In addition, leaders of other major Christian churches have urged their people to study the Catholic document and use it as a resource in forming their own consciences on issues of war and peace. As a focus of interfaith interest, the pastoral is unrivaled among Catholic documents since Vatican II.

“They (other denominations) know about it; they’re concerned about the issues that confront us as a society,” said Cardinal Bernardin.