Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 (UPI) -- What a joy it is not to have to pay German church taxes anymore! If you feel taken aback by this outburst, consider this: The German government collects taxes on behalf of the territorial churches in its realm. These semi-official denominations fund fully one-third of the annual $33.4-million budget of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland. And that organization has just financed a very annoying event in Chevy Chase, Md. Advertisement It was labeled an "International ecumenical meeting on the U.S.-declared war on terrorism" and reached its pinnacle when an American cleric compared President George W. Bush with Hitler. The man who painted -- figuratively speaking -- a moustache on Bush's face was Dale Brown of the Church of the Brethren. He also called for a new Confessing Church, presumably to emulate that brave German institution by that name, which resisted the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. Advertisement Janice Love of the United Methodist Church tried to refute this coquettishly, confessing that she worked hard "not to allow myself to think that way." In other words, the thought did cross her mind, too, didn't it? What crossed this writer's mind was the question why anybody would wish to be U.S. president, especially as the job description can entail having to lead the nation in a war that might cost tens of thousands of casualties. The last thing you need under these circumstances is Vietnam-era clericalism the stale odor of which wafted through the National 4H Conference Center in Chevy Chase Monday and Tuesday. This is not to say that Christians -- as indeed all others -- should not reflect prayerfully on the current war preparations against Iraq and the pursuit of the campaign against Osama bin Laden & Co. But placing the elected leader of this country -- a fellow Christian -- in the same category with one of history's greatest villains lowers the ethical and practical discourse on a very wrenching issue to a level well below the storage space for coals and potatoes. You might have thought that these folks who were forever invoking Holy Scripture accorded Bush at least the benefit of some charitable doubt: How must the leader of the Western world respond to terrorists bent on slaughtering as many Americans and, for that matter, "Jews and Crusaders" (Christians) as possible -- and this with increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction? Advertisement How do you answer the challenge of a Saddam Hussein, whose evil designs have been known for years -- especially in Geneva, where only a short taxi ride from the WCC administrative center panic-stricken United Nations diplomats, functionaries and experts wrestle furiously with this issue? Must a Christian in the White House, if he wishes to go to heaven, sit idly and self-righteously by as a faraway tyrant prepares to wipe out the populations of perhaps Tel Aviv, perhaps London, perhaps Washington with homemade nuclear, biological or chemical weapons? All these facts have long been available to these clerics stuck in the mindset of the 1960s. But evidently it has not penetrated their skulls, as far as one can discern from a statement they labored on, allowing themselves to be sidetracked copiously by peripheral concerns. One senior United Methodist lady related -- superfluously in this context -- the great perils her denomination has to endure from the growth of its confessional movement, called "conservative," meaning bad, in circles like these. Another woman from the United Church of Christ objected to the use of "Jesus language" in the evolving document. She felt the term, Son of God, was "too exclusionary, too gender-specific," for such an ecumenical paper. Advertisement And there you thought ecumenism had something to do with believing in Christ! Well back to the paper's contents. The Lutheran bishop of New York, Steven P. Bouman, tried valiantly to guide this round of clergymen and women in the direction of some solid theology. A Greek Orthodox participant attempted vainly the same. But reading through the draft version, one finds nothing about Luther's comparison of the soldier's craft with the art of a surgeon, cutting off a body's rotten part in order to keep the body itself alive. There is not even a hint at compassion for Bush and his advisers as they wrestle with daunting moral issues. There is no reflection on the just war criteria laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas and articulated with magnificent concision in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. These criteria are: 1. "Legitima potestas," legitimate authority: Only a legally established government may go to war. 2. "Causa iusta," just cause: "Governments cannot be denied the right of self-defense, once all peace offers have failed." 3. "Recta intentio," just intent: War must not be conducted out of vengeance because that is God's domain (Deuteronomy 32:35). On the other hand, protecting innocents would qualify as just cause. Advertisement 4. "Ultima ratio," last resort: All other attempts to settle a conflict have failed. 5. "Debitus modus," just means. Of course, in two days the Chevy Chase conference, which was dominated by representatives of the pacifist wing of Protestantism -- a tiny minority in Christendom -- did not manage to complete its task. The redactors are still at work. But what emerged so far was full of presuppositions that bear not resemblance to reality. The draft claims, for example, that the United States felt "uniquely entitled, to retaliate globally and preemptively" after Sept. 11 -- never mind that allied actions in Afghanistan fit exactly Luther's analogy between a Christian soldier and a surgeon. "The United States policy internationally, particularly in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iraq and also domestically has eroded the good will born of the tragedy of Sept. 11," the WCC delegates wrote, without offering alternative suggestions of how to deal with bin Laden's gang. The 1960s term, "military-industrial complex," was resuscitated and an idolatrous worship of the nation -- rather than God -- implied. The bad news is that not just Germans are funding this kind of stuff. The Americans do too. They pay 17 percent of the WCC's budget. Advertisement The good news is that except for the present writer and two scandalized staffers of the Washington-based Institute on Religion and Democracy, no outsider seemed to pay any attention to this museum piece of a clerical confab. As Steve Rempe, one of the two IRD observers, so aptly noted: "This must have been the most irrelevant conference in Washington in weeks."
