Washington D.C., Dec 8, 2010 / 14:52 pm
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has come out in favor of the proposed “New START” treaty, which would continue a mutual U.S.-Russian reduction of nuclear arms that began in 1991.
President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev signed the treaty in April 2010, enabling it to take effect if both countries' legislatures agree to its terms. The treaty would commit each country to reduce its stockpile of nuclear warheads by around 10 percent, relative to previous levels that Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush agreed on in 2002.
The Second Vatican Council condemned nuclear war, along with many other forms of modern warfare that “inflict massive and indiscriminate destruction,” as a “crime against God and man.” Pius XII had previously condemned nuclear warfare in similar terms.
The late Archbishop Fulton Sheen, now a candidate for beatification, speculated during the 1970s that America's use of nuclear weapons in 1945 had degraded the nation's moral conscience, inaugurating an era of “no limits and no boundaries.”