File:Bulletin from the Los Alamos Study Group - August 2022.png

August 9, 2022

Bulletin 305:Can we make Archbishop Wester's call for nuclear disarmament real, for us?

• https://www.lasg.org/ActionAlerts/2022/Bulletin305.html

Dear friends and colleagues --

Archbishop Wester's pastoral letter ("Living in the Light of Christ's Peace"), on nuclear disarmament, and recent guest editorial ("New Mexico, work for peace and well-being, not nuclear weapons"), together with related statement and events, may help foster peace and disarmament -- but only if they inspire practical actions, here and now.

Perhaps the most important point in the Archbishop's letter is so simple we may not notice or fully appreciate it. It has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, politics, or policy -- yet it has everything to do with them. It is just this: individuals, each of us, are moral agents.

Today's editorial in the New Mexican takes just the opposite approach, speaking of what "the world can do differently in seeking a path of peace," and converting the Archbishop's call to each of us into a "question humanity must answer." These abstractions are not, and will never be, moral agents. They are incapable of human action in the public sphere, the "second birth" as Hannah Arendt called it, through which human beings find freedom and fulfillment.

That maturity and freedom, found only in public conversation, is not contingent on political victories. It is accessible right now to everybody, as the Archbishop is telling us. He is calling us to a mature engagement with the world around us, which in New Mexico happens to involve nuclear weapons in a major way. He asks us to utterly reject them.

How?

"Fine words butter no parsnips" -- especially if they are the words of another. So what about us? The Archbishop's wake-up call faithfully brings Pope Francis's clear nuclear disarmament message into his Archdiocese. But unless his audiences -- that's us -- interpret and act upon these words concretely, they could become a distraction from the work of actually stopping the world's largest new investment in nuclear warhead production, currently underway on the doorstep of the Cathedral in Santa Fe.

That new production mission goes far beyond anything Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has done in 70 years. It is, as the Pope and Archbishop both say, an assault on the core values of the Church, on Christianity -- and we may add, on humanity and all religion... it's dead-opposed to peace.

Read the full August 2022 LASG Bulletin from Greg & Trish Williams-Mello / Los Alamos Study Group

• https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pope-chile-nuclear/pope-warns-world-is-one-step-away-from-nuclear-war-idUSKBN1F41FL

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Pope_Francis_on_the_Environment

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Pope_Francis_Calls_for_Ban_on_Nuclear_Weapons.png

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