Vietnam as a Bullring

I must accept the strongly worded rebuke of your correspondent ‘T.K.’ – for if my article on ‘Our Lady in the Bullring’ led even one reader to suppose that I considered a Catholic might legitimately seek out occasions of sin, then my argument was too unclear.

I must also thank your correspondent for extending the analogy of the bullring to include the innocent horses. One can indeed refuse to enter a conflict because too many people will be hurt. I remember sitting recently on a bench in front of the Parliament Buildings between an old Methodist minister and a union man; and then speaking against the Government’s decision to send troops to Vietnam. I felt (as a number of people do) that too many innocent horses were being gored in the American matador’s conflict with the Communist bull. And I felt a strong grief that no other memberpage 713 of the Catholic laity was beside me to share my dread – dread of Our Lord’s anger against any well-fed Christian who concurred in a campaign that included public disembowelments, the use of torture, and the daily incineration of semi-destitute villagers. I was in the bullring too – with Pope John’s Pacem in Terris as my guide, and some personal experience of the terrible slums of the East, fighting against the popular anti-Communist and anti-Asian obsession.

Yet I knew I could be wrong. A deep commitment to any temporal action leads to problems of moral uncertainty. Only a bigot or a quietist can be wholly free of them. That is the essential atmosphere of the bullring necessary action combined with moral uncertainties. How did the early Christian martyrs feel, when they knew that by burning a pinch of incense in front of Caesar’s statue, they could save their wives and children from slavery, destitution, perhaps enforced prostitution? Some of the apostles, torn in half by uncertainties, may have earned a less evident martyr’s crown. The wives and children would be, in your correspondent’s terms, the innocent horses.

These are public issues. The uncertainties of private life are more frequent; though by discussing them in the forum one may run the risk of scandal. But there is one area blessedly free of uncertainty. Regarding the immense power of Our Lady’s intercession, for quietist or bigot or the spiritually careless or even downright rascals, I have no doubts at all.

1965 (345)