New war -- old church rhetoric

WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- Which war were they discussing at an international ecumenical meeting in Chevy Chase, Md., Monday -- Vietnam of the war on terror?

From the clichés whirling about the Missouri Room of the National 4H Conference Center, you might easily have guessed the former. The ghastly "industrial-military complex" was resuscitated.

"We are literally getting away with murder," sighed Bishop Manu Rumalshah of Pakistan in reference to the U.S.-led campaign.

"Peacemaking is more practical than making war," stated Mary Lord of the American Friends Service Committee at this event sponsored by the World Council of Churches.

Walter Altmann, an eminent Lutheran theologian from Brazil and a former president of the Latin American Council of Churches, could not refrain from reminding his sympathetic audience of "another Sept. 11."

He was referring to that day in 1973, when Chile's President Salvador Allende allegedly shot himself during an attack on his palace. Perhaps a trifle too early for good style, Altmann read a potential benefit into America's Sept. 11 ordeal.

That Americans should now also have experienced their own vulnerability might prove positive, he said not very tactfully, "as long as it is perceived as such."

Dale W. Brown of the Church of the Brethren then mused on how wonderful it would be if one got all the heads of the Arab states together and told them, "Why don't we all work together on peace and justice?"

It seemed as if the assembled theologians had reflected little on the nature of the enemy. Shower Osama bin-Laden with Gospel love while he is scheming to slaughter thousands of civilians?

Embrace him and Saddam Hussein with warmth and charity as they are busy producing chemical, biological and presumably nuclear weapons of mass destruction that might some day kill hundreds of thousands in Tel Aviv, Washington or London?

The conference will formulate a statement before it ends Tuesday evening. The good news was that for all its 1960s rhetoric it was at least exposed to some post-Sept. 11 realities while brooding over America's war on terror.

Bishop Steven P. Bouman of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America spoke of the "re-enchantment" New York experienced at this perhaps most poignant time in its history. In a sense, he said, the New Yorkers' return to faith reversed what Max Weber termed the world's "disenchantment" due to modernity's properties -- secularization, industrialization, urbanization, and the galloping progress in science.

Bouman, revered in New York as one of the passionate chaplains of the post-Sept. 11 rescuers, described how a mob had smashed the windows of an Arab church in his synod (diocese) -- and how the sanctuary then was showered "with a thousand flowers for every broken window."

In an interview, he related to United Press International how he had told a visiting team of WCC representatives, "Don't lecture us. Let us sit down on the side of the road and grieve while we can still smell the bodies of our fallen brothers on the ground."

In the Lutheran congregations he overseas, 51 children have lost parents in the attack, and 14 firemen that belonged to his flock died in the flames. He spoke of the faithful singing hymns and praying loudly at Ground Zero -- and of the rescue crews begging them, "Please don't stop doing this."

When asked if America was doing the right thing in its current war on terror, Bouman reacted faithful to the Lutheran tradition of not messing with the secular rulers' craft: "I do not presume to say more than I know," he told UPI. But then he added a theological answer that might just flow into the WCC's statement:

"Our only ultimate security is in our crucified and risen Lord."