[Petronski]

Dresden. Hiroshima.

Not just no but hell no.

This is the kind of soft thinking from the Catholic Church on these issues that went in for the nuclear freeze in the mid-80s. Sophomoric equivocation that, thankfully, bears the tag "ecumenical" rather than "infallible."

[Mrs. Don-o]

Petronius, you don't know what you're talking about here. This solemn judgment against "target = city bombing" was not cooked up by some lefty American Bishops in the 1980's. This was an Ecumenical Council making an authoritative moral declaration in agreement with Popes and Doctors of the Church going back at least to Aquinas. It is parallel to the statement in the same document that "Abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes."

Ironically, it was most strongly supported by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, who was was an ultraconservative even by pre-council standards. He addressed the 200 bishops and theologians hammering out the working document, Schema XIII, which came to be known as Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.

Ottaviani, said to have been the least popular bishop among the council fathers because of his traditionalist views, rose to defend Schema XIII and to urge its acceptance against the efforts of some French and American bishops to weaken the text. Ottaviani was given the longest and loudest ovation of the council, and Gaudium et Spes was accepted resoundingly.

If the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World has no moral authority, the Catholic Church has no moral authority.

There are any number of FReepers we run into in the Religion Forum who would gleefully agree with that, but I wouldn't have thought to hear it from a Catholic.