Washington D.C., Jul 26, 2005 / 22:00 pm
The Catholic Church in the United States should reexamine the nation’s strategy of nuclear deterrence and directly challenge the current administration’s defense strategy that has integrated nuclear weapons in its “Global Strike” option, says the executive director of the national Catholic peace movement Pax Christi USA.
In an article published July 29 in the National Catholic Reporter, Dave Robinson says the Church in the U.S. should follow the lead that the Vatican set on the issue of nuclear deterrence two months ago.
Robinson reports that the Vatican’s ambassador to the United Nations, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, called into question the morality of nuclear deterrence in his May address to delegates at the Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“When the Holy See expressed its limited acceptance of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War, it was with the clearly stated condition that deterrence was only a step on the way toward progressive nuclear disarmament,” Archbishop Migliore reportedly said.